Chapter 1: The Testament of Regina Diceman
Summary:
‘The novelist never usually differentiates between intelligence and counter-intelligence.
Intelligence covers the work of our own spies who are trying to get information from an enemy.
Counter-intelligence deals with the prevention of spies from an enemy country attempting to get information from us.’
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Notes found in a case bought at a church jumble sale, c. 2020
It is an old spymasters’ dictum that no-one who volunteers to be a double agent can be thoroughly sane.
This is because in general, what you need to do to become a double agent is to fail at being an ordinary agent (to be fair, you can also have the bad luck to be compromised before you arrive in enemy territory). You then get captured and handed over to counter-intelligence, choose co-operation over death, and transmit misinformation back to your former handlers, omitting any pre-arranged signals that would let them know your situation. Double agents of this type are unhappy and scared, and have every reason to be. They live in safe-houses for months or years with no-one but minders and handlers for company, and sooner or later they realise that nothing is waiting for them once peace breaks out but a lifetime of looking over their shoulder. Those are the main run of double agents, and working with them is no fun at all.
And then, there are what the trade calls ‘walk-ins’. Walk-ins agree to train as spies for one side, but plan to defect to the other at the first opportunity, classically by going of their own accord to a police station as the least-worst way of making initial contact. Those people — the absolute lunatics who reckon they can lie to professional liars and win — are always one-offs, and they can be a great deal of fun, except for when they get themselves killed, which is frequently.
Forgive me. I’m starting to sound facetious and maudlin, a dire combination, but what can you expect of a clapped-out spymaster? My name is Regina Morley Diceman, I am eighty-three years old, and the year is 1998. I’m writing this after a variegated career as a wrangler of the Counter-Intelligence Beast (as hairy a creature as you might expect, and not nearly as clever as you might hope). I am writing it because when I die, I do not want my last thought to be ‘Through no merit of my own, I lived through one of the tallest tales of World War II, and I never told a soul’.
So I am telling the Twenty-First Century, as the Twentieth one peters out, and those of us who’ve lived through most of it eye its successor thoughtfully. I am telling you, pecking out words with my withered fingers on a temperamental typewriter. I give you fair warning that the tale contains elements of the supernatural, and even if you don your strongest Suspenders of Disbelief, I fear you’ll never believe me.
I fear? I know. You can’t believe me, dear reader, however hard you try. It would take a miracle for you to believe this story, so don’t feel bad about it. It’s enough, truly, that it gets read at all.
Since this is a story of spies, it’ll involve the nuisance of codenames, but I’ll try to stick to five. The first of these, Heaven help us, was Nevermore. The second, God bless him, was hastily dubbed Guardian for security purposes, though he never officially worked for either side. Then there was the opposing team, among which we number Harmony of the Abwehr, and the beautiful and ruthless Amulett. Since I’ve left one codename for last, you’ve anticipated that the final spy was me, so well done you. If trained my acolytes as strictly as my old boss Bunny Hopkins, I’d reward you with a ration biscuit — though it might be hard on the teeth, since if I manage to hide this report properly, no-one will read it until my ashes have been scattered on a beach in Devon, and I’m beyond the reach of the Official Secrets Act.
My nom de guerre was Tyche. That’s two syllables: tie-key, the Greek goddess who presides over matters of fortune. Awfully pretentious, but in my defence, I didn’t choose it. My higher-ups in the Special Operations Executive hoped the spies I worked with would think the name lucky. They needed all the luck they could get, for Station XX — my branch of the SOE — ran nothing but double agents, and Nevermore was one of my own.
But I’m running ahead of myself. Let’s talk about this case of junk of which you’re now the proud owner. Did you buy it? Or find it tucked away somewhere? At any rate, you picked it over, which makes you a first-rate nosy parker and a person after my own heart.
Its leather is so battered that it’s tricky to make out the initials on it: R.M.D. It’s obviously older than the Second World War, and if you guessed it dated back to the First, you’d be right. It constitutes the first of my exhibits that bind a tale of sorcerous happenings to the warp and weft of WWII, so I’d appreciate it if you treated it gently. It’s a family heirloom, you see. The initials are my own, but they’re also my father’s.
The second exhibit is the sheaf of notes you’re now reading.
The third is a gilt-metal case about the size of an Eccles cake, with a dent in it.
The fourth is a hatpin with an ebony head.
Finally, there is an American 30’s comic with a menacing cover, titled ‘Diabolical: Hot Off The Press!’.
Let us next peruse the comic, since that’s where my story begins. Its central tale — a rehash of the legend of Faust — isn’t highly original, but it may pique your interest that as far as I know, ‘Diabolical: Hot Off The Press!’ does not exist. Not in Britain, and not in America, not in the British Library, nor the Library of Congress. When collecting such stuff became trendy in the 60’s, I offered several dealers here and in the States a tidy sum for any edition of ‘Diabolical’ they could turn up. No luck.
Future reader, you are welcome to search for this work yourself. But I predict you’ll fail to find it, and if you take that as a sign that what you’ve come across is a prank by an eccentric forger, committed enough to go to elaborate lengths to sell their tale to an unknown stranger, you won’t be too far off the mark.
VON SCHALL OF THE REICH
{Panel 1: A lonely forest glade. Moonlight skims the dome of an ivy-clad building. A man in dark robes stoops before it, chalking a circle on the ground. The scene has the monochrome severity of a woodcut.}
Caption:
Germany, 1936. Midnight in the Black Forest, in the grounds of an old estate.
The great house is long gone, but its folly remains, fronted by doors of bronze.
Nobody dares come here after sunset. Nobody but one.
- - -
{Panel 2: The robed man finishes his Summoning Circle. The hood conceals his face.}
Caption:
The exception is this man — von Schall, Diabolist of the Reich.
Von Schall doesn’t fear a dark power lurks in this place. He knows it.
And now, he is paying it a house call.
SCHALL: Aba! Zaba! Zowathim! Creature of Hell, I command thee!
- - -
{Panel 3: Lightning lacerates the sky, framing von Schall in a jagged ‘BOOM!’. He doesn’t flinch.}
SCHALL: Serpent of the Elamites, come forth!
- - -
{Panel 4: The gates open with a ‘CREEEAAK’, and smoke emerges from the folly. It clears to reveal a Demon sporting a dressing-gown, and not a great deal else. His posture conveys irritation.}
SCHALL: Infamous spirit! I command that thou remain within my Circle of Summoning, and make rational answers unto my questions. Mephor! Zalor! Be bound!
DEMON: [Yawning] Rational answers? I hope you brought coffee. So, it’s Amateur Summoner week. And what godforsaken year might this be?
- - -
{Panel 5: The Demon surreptitiously tries to snap his fingers, and fails.}
SCHALL: It is nineteen thirty-six, time is short, I did not bring coffee, and — why are you in a dressing-gown?
DEMON: I was napping. If you wanted a dinner date, you should’ve specified. Also…binding sigils? Honestly. Where are your manners?
- - -
{Panel 6: From within his own robes, von Schall pulls out a leather flask marked with a cross. It goes ‘SLOSH’ as he lifts it.}
SCHALL: They are in here, my fiend. They are all in here. You will obey me.
- - -
{Panel 7: The Demon tries to retreat, but is trapped in the Circle. von Schall grins, and does not notice that behind the Demon, in the darkness, beady eyes are watching.}
DEMON: Holy water. Very well, I’ll grovel — for tradition’s sake. Who the Devil are you, and what the Hell d’you want?
SCHALL: My name, my good fiend, is von Schall, and what I want is time. Not for myself, but for the Thousand-Year Reich, which according to my calculations will shortly be at war. It involves a contract.
DEMON: Argh! Anything but this. If you want to sell your soul, try Malphas or Dagon. I’m a broad-brush operator. Not in the contracts business.
- - -
{Panel 8: A beady-eyed rat scampers from the door of the vault, between the Demon’s feet. He studiously ignores it.}
SCHALL: I already have a Contract, and it has served me well. In five years’ time, however, it will run out. I risk being dragged to Hell at the very moment the Reich needs me most. But I was informed at the time of signing that the Contract had a postponement clause —
- - -
{Panel 9: The Demon laughs uproariously, in sarcastic, spiked HA HA’s.}
SCHALL: I’m no fool. My damnation is inevitable; the timing is unfortunate. But you fallen angels love your pranks, and I believe that there is indeed a postponement ritual…in the small print.
DEMON: Huh. What’s the catch? Can’t you read it?
SCHALL: The small print is in Linear Elamite, which none alive can now decipher.
DEMON: Tragic.
SCHALL: That is where you come in. I have done research, and I know you lived as a god among the Elamites. Nak-Hayauda, Serpent of the Forsaken, deny your old name if you can!
- - -
{Panel 10: The Demon gives a theatrical ‘HISSSSS!’. Three more rats take the opportunity to scamper through the Summoning Circle, smudging part of it away.}
DEMON: That was a long time ago.
SCHALL: Indeed. Now we have better weapons against your kind. [He is holding the contract in one hand, and the holy-water flask in the other.] Make your decision quickly.
- - -
{Panel 11: Von Schall has handed the scroll over with tongs, and the the Demon is making a performance of studying it.}
DEMON: Hang on. You got signed up for a hundred years? I don’t know why you’re moaning, this is a better deal than Faust got. And you don’t look bad for someone who’s pushing a hundred and thirty.
SCHALL: One hundred and thirty-three. I’ve not spent my time idly. Now, is there a method of renewal? Speak.
DEMON: The thing is, if I tell you the method, and you manage to meet the conditions, the Contract transfers itself to me. Like I said, I’m not in the Contracts business — and you really do not want me as your personal demon. I can be scarier than this.
- - -
{Panel 12: The Demon peers closer at the small print. More rats cross the border of the Summoning Circle, now much the worse for wear.}
SCHALL: You are trying to bluff a man who has nothing to lose. Stop wasting my time.
- - -
{Panel 13: The Demon glares defiantly. Smoke rises from beneath his feet.}
SCHALL: Enough. Remember where you stand, Nak-Hayauda, and speak truth. Swear it!
DEMON: I ssswear it.
SCHALL: Very good. Now tell me the method, or die.
- - -
{Panel 14: Von Schall has uncorked his holy-water flask. He holds it meaningfully.}
DEMON: Fine, fine. I’ll translate. Not that it makes much difference. First, you must offer the blood of a traitor—
SCHALL: And this simple act will postpone my damnation? What marvellous news!
DEMON: I’ve not finished. This is a three-course operation. Second, you must offer the blood of — oh dear — someone who loves you.
SCHALL: Even I have my charms. Proceed.
DEMON: Third, you must offer the blood of an innocent. All in one night, and on an altar. The innocent can’t be a child, by the way. You must kill an adult of genuinely pure heart, and how many of those are out there, hmmm?
- - -
{Panel 15: The stream of rats has now all but erased the chalk circle, but von Schall is too intent to notice.}
SCHALL: That is a tough one. Perhaps I should start a charity newsletter.
DEMON: Your contract will catch up with you sooner or later. Release me, and I’ll do my best for you when the time comes. You won’t get a better offer.
SCHALL: Tempting, dear demon, but implausible. And now…perish!
- - -
{Panel 16: Von Schall flings his flask into the circle at the same moment the Demon SNAPS his fingers. The flask splits with a SPLASH! where the Demon was standing, but the chalk circle has been erased by the rats, giving the Demon a fraction of a second to escape. It is not entirely clear if he managed it.}
- - -
{Panel 17: Von Schall turns around slowly. Out of the darkness, beady eyes are watching him, and the moonlight picks out whiskered snouts.}
SCHALL: Rats! [He snatches up his Contract, and runs for his horrible life.]
Now we’ve got that out of the way (but I hope you’ve committed it to memory, for I’ll be testing you on it later), I resume the burden of my tale.
In the late summer of 1940, I wasn’t a clapped-out spymaster, but an ambitious one in my mid-twenties. You may well wonder how one gets into this line of work. In my case, it was by two somewhat shameful accomplishments. The first was speaking German (the last letter that my pa, the late Reverend Diceman, had sent to my mother in 1915 expressed a wish that his unborn child should learn the language ‘in the hope that no such war ever happens again’). The second was by taking myself out of the Women’s Forestry Corps just as it was getting started, by falling ignominiously off a ladder.
There was no use cursing one’s luck, and I wasn’t given time to do so. No sooner had the medics done all they could for my hip, and some observant soul discovered I had spoken and written knowledge of German, than I was whisked off to join the FANY (the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, and whoever thought that was a good acronym should probably be shot). I protested that I hadn’t a nurturing bone in my body, until it became clear that the FANY contained very few actual Nursing Yeowomen.
The FANY was, among other things, a cover organisation for female intelligence officers of the Special Operations Executive — the ‘Special Operations’ in question being espionage. It was under the SOE’s aegis that I was trained to serve in Station XX (that’s Station 20, if you’re not Julius Caesar) which organised Britain’s crew of double agents, and was otherwise known as Operation Double-Cross.
It didn’t get that name by accident. The fact that Operation Double-Cross was run by Station XX was an in-joke. Of course, in-jokes were a security hazard, something I was rapped over the knuckles for pointing out, for while I wasn’t the rock bottom of Station XX’s byzantine hierarchy, I was in the sedimentary layer of the middle third. At the summit was Lt. Col. Thomas Argyll Robertson, whose tartan trousers had earned the codename ‘Passion Pants’ from a host of lovestruck FANYs. Below him were a bunch of misfits he’d recruited from the Old Boys’ Network, and below them were men with military experience. Somewhere in that lot was my boss, ‘Bunny’ Hopkins — nicknamed not for any physical resemblance, but for his ability to extract valuable intelligence from shit — and dangling precariously from his good graces was Regina Diceman, whose name had been mud ever since she’d suggested it might not be the best plan to give a double agent called Kurt Goose the codename ‘Gander’.
Girl Guide’s Honour, it’s true. One day the Official Secrets Act will back me up on this.
Imagine the sort of folk who can’t resist wordplay when sending someone the Nazis sent to spy on you back to spy on them, and you’ll have an idea of what Station XX was like. I wasn’t much better, though when I was given a socialite who was less concerned with being captured by Nazis than in rehoming her Pekingese, you can bet I didn’t name her ‘Bourjois’ or ‘Martini’. My job consisted of trying to persuade impossible people to do improbable things for peculiar reasons — but luckily, the Diceman family had produced vicars and vicars’ wives for centuries. Although I was the sceptical black sheep of this holy flock, I discovered I was good at persuasion, and when occasion called for it, I wasn’t too bad at being a martinet.
After I’d been at it for six months, I decided that every double agent who freely offered their services, rather than being a fresh-caught German joe who chose Operation Double-Cross over being hanged, was certain to be mad. But even amongst this odd squad, Agent Nevermore stood out.
He’d seen fit to volunteer himself by sauntering into a police station on Albany Street in the spring of 1940, sporting a pinstripe suit, a black eye, and a pair of cracked dark glasses. He then claimed he’d parachuted into the fens of Cambridgeshire, and had ‘the bloodiest possible time’ trekking to a railway station. As the tea of the chief constable sat going cold and grey, Nevermore proclaimed himself to have been recruited by Berlin’s finest, in the hope of being sent back to Britain and sticking it to Hitler. In short, a standard-issue fantasist, but at least Operation Double-Cross, discreetly installed in St. James’ Street half a mile away, didn’t have to go far to make sure Nevermore was a loony.
That was when Nevermore produced ‘gifts from my friends in the Abwehr’: a wireless and a Morse key, a British passport in the name of Nigel Twiner, a cyanide capsule, and £1,000 in British currency. Except it wasn’t British currency. Like the passport, every note was counterfeit, and when the Bank of England saw them they went into a blue funk, for the copies were frighteningly good. When a retrieval team went to Cambridgeshire in search of Nevermore’s parachute, they found it where he said he’d left it, wrapped around a rock and sunk in a land drain. In short, Nevermore was the real thing, a British crook sent by the Germans to scout out distribution rings for their dangerous cash. This prize beyond rubies came with a shady past, no living family, and an avowed wish to thwart the scheme by rounding up fake money as it fell from the skies.
There was an even less conventional aspect to Nevermore. In the thirties, by his own account he’d spent a year wowing the clubs of Berlin as Lady Jay, renowned for an act in which her hair would turn into snakes by overhead puppetry, while she swayed like Medusa to macabre jazz. The Special Operations Executive got into an internecine tizzy, for walk-ins were as rare as hens’ teeth, but even by those standards, Nevermore was a catch. Station XV — responsible for gimmicks and disguises — was smitten, and bid hard against us Double-Crossers to snag him for themselves, as did Station XIV, which dealt with forged paperwork. But Operation Double-Cross was Winston Churchill’s baby, and so the SOE, it its infinite wisdom, awarded Nevermore to Station XX.
Of course, most of us didn’t know about Nevermore at that time. But it wasn’t long before odd things began to happen in Station XX’s base in 58, St. James’ Street, and that was how The Prize Beyond Rubies became such awkward goods that I, The Woman Whose Name Was Mud, got to be his handler.
One week, doors would unaccountably jam in their frames, trapping people in their offices until they had to bang on them to be let out; the next, all the lino was waxed so shiny that you were in danger of skating on it. The typing pool radio tuned itself to Charlie and His Orchestra (deprecated, even if Churchill was rumoured to tune in sometimes) and once to Germany Calling, and after that, some unknown wit rearranged the key-caps on the typewriters to spell the names of their owner’s boyfriends. What finally tore it was a rumour among the the FANY that Lt. Col. Robertson, our master and commander, was not only aware that his nickname was Passion Pants, but that he found it diverting to be addressed as such.
That intelligence turned out to be false.
The source of it turned out, definitively, to be Nevermore.
As if by some weird magnetism, all the Phoney-War jitters caused by those other incidents — things he couldn’t possibly have been involved in, since he wasn’t in the building at the time — focused themselves on him. The man was on the brink of being sent to Inverlair Lodge, a draughty Scottish heap used as a polite prison for double agents who turned out to be unusable, but too in-the-know for public release. Faced with spending the duration of the war in Inverlair, Nevermore pleaded for another bite at the espionage cherry, and to be assigned to the strictest possible handler. A no-nonsense type, to keep him on the straight and narrow. A termagant.
That person, apparently, was Regina Diceman.
I had a reputation in Station XX for stubbornness, and I suspect it was also thought I would be…how to put this with tact? That I would be immune to Nevermore’s charms. The man flirted indiscriminately with both sexes, but my employers assumed I batted strictly for the other team (reader in the sainted future, that does not mean that Station XX thought I might be in league with the Nazis. It means they thought I might be in league with the lesbians). And so, one late Summer day in 1940, while London kept a weather eye on ominously cloudless skies, I was summoned to a sticky back-office in St. James' Street to meet my boss, Bunny Hopkins.
“Top Brass call him ‘The most annoying man in Europe’,” he observed, pushing Nevermore’s dossier across his desk. “Personally, I reckon that’s Herr Hitler. But there’s no doubt he’s a handful.” Bunny was smoking (as always) a pipe, and wearing (as always) the sort of tweed suit that laughs at both thorns and fashion. As always, he saw no need to open the window, the panes of which were cross-taped in anticipation of daylight bombings.
The dossier painted a curious picture. A good agent should blend into the crowd, but Nevermore had scarlet hair, an odd way of walking, and an amazing ability to piss off nearly everyone he met. Despite this he was skilled at evading anyone sent to follow him, and had talked himself out of trouble many times.
So far, so good. And unlike folk who fell into the clutches of the Abwehr for pay, this man wasn’t short of funds. A rolling stone, he’d lived in a handful of cities since the end of the Great War, backing a flamboyant lifestyle with shrewd investments, but never putting down roots. It had been a surprise to Station XX when, informed that he’d be living in a safe house in Putney, he’d made a face like a man condemned to an oubliette, and asked if he couldn’t use his own flat. Amazingly, he had one, sandwiched between poorest toffs in Mayfair, and poshest call girls in Shepherd Market.
Would he object to some discreet gentlemen rooming with him on a rotational basis? He’d bridled at the thought of Special Operations minders — ‘People will think we’re doing something else on a rotational basis’ — but conceded that a new double agent couldn’t be left alone — ‘I suppose it’s an occupational hazard’. Nevermore had dubbed his minders Gog and Magog 1. They reported the flat was plain to the verge of monastic, Nevermore’s only creature comforts being a gramophone, a king’s ransom in jazz records, and ‘the fastest girl in Mayfair’ who turned out to be an expensively-garaged Bentley (petrol was rationed in 1940, but civilians were not yet forbidden to drive). Nevermore loved to drive, and Gog and Magog had taken to drawing straws to decide who got stuck in the passenger seat.
Despite this quite decent start, Station XX thought the agent for whom they’d bid so hotly had turned out to be a dud. Nevermore was rude and vain. Nevermore had moods where he’d either sleep an entire day, or go out on the tiles every night for a week. Worse still, Nevermore’s reputation in London’s underworld verged on notoriety, and although significant drops of counterfeit notes had been intercepted due to his efforts, others were getting through. It was unlikely he could (as had once been hoped) be sent back to Germany with any serious false intelligence. He should be kept for basic misinformation work via strictly-supervised wireless transmissions.
The thing that stood out in the dossier was that nothing stood out. There was no glaring reason to consider the man a dud, and it seemed rash to expect the Germans would tell him about every snide fiver they dropped on Britain. The main strikes against Nevermore seemed to be that he was irritating, a ferocious drinker, and forever trying to make his minders complicit in either petty mischief, or vehicular mayhem. But worse material had been coaxed into usable agents, and a vicar’s termagant daughter could surely cope with mischief.
The last page bore Nevermore’s photograph — a fine-drawn clever face, and the sort of grin that betrays practice with a mirror. Beneath it, his previous handler (a grizzled Major who’d been a field agent in WWI, and not prone to fancies) had pencilled the words ‘May the Lord have mercy on your soul’. The writing looked shaky. Did I take that seriously? Dear reader, as I sat at a government-issued desk in stripped-out mansion in St. James’ Street, all concentration and diligent notes, I considered myself the most rational woman in England.
“Think you’re up to this?” asked Bunny, who’d spent ten minutes watching me read, smoking his pipe and passing no comments, like the sort of wizard who prefers to be underestimated.
I closed the page on Nevermore’s smile.
“Let’s find out, Sir.”
- - -
1. Gog and Magog being statues of a pair of legendary giants used in street processions, and kept at London's Guildhall. return to text
Notes:
In a completely unprecedented development, this fic has generated a shedload of notes.
1. Crowley as a WWII double agent.
The escapades of Eddie Chapman, aka ‘Agent Zigzag’ (one of the few humans to arguably out-flash the Flash Bastard himself) are very loosely the basis for this, at least until the plot gets weirder. There’s an entry on Chapman on the MI5 website here, and he’s the subject of several books, The one I’ve read is Ben MacIntyre’s ‘Agent Zigzag’.
Crowley’s stated reason for coming to Britain and volunteering his services to the SOE is different to that of Chapman: it’s based on Operation Bernhard, Reinhard Heydrich's project to flood the British economy with counterfeit notes. The Operation Bernhard forgeries really were dangerous; a team of top engraving and printing talent was assembled from prisoners in concentration camps, and from studying available UK banknotes, the Germans managed to partly reverse-engineer the algorithm used to generate the serial numbers.
2. The comic where von Schall offers A Nameless Demon a deal he can’t refuse.
This is inspired by the black-and-white woodcuts of ‘God’s Man’ by Lynd Ward, a Faustian tale of a doomed artist. The whole book isn’t online, but there are example pages here.
3. The Special Operations Executive and Station XX.
A complicated topic, especially Station XX (aka 'The Twenty Committee'), which specialised in double agents, and thus was super-secretive even in a secretive world. Geographically, the SOE was widely distributed, partly because it started as a somewhat ramshackle outfit, partly for secrecy, and partly to avoid large numbers of personnel being in the same building. Research, spyrunning and counter-intelligence Stations were numbered with Roman numerals, and clustered around London and the South-East; training Stations for field agents had Arabic numerals, and were usually in remote countryside.
Eventually there were so many Stations of both types that the joke was that SOE stood for ‘Stately ‘Omes of England’. Famous SOE Stations included a wing of Wormword Scrubs prison (until they were bombed out of the place in September 1940), Baker Street (hence the ‘Baker Street Irregulars’), and later on, Blenheim Palace. Station XX was based at 58 St. James’ Street (rather swish on the outside, but spartan within.)
If Crowley was going to offer himself as a double agent, there’d be no way of avoiding intense supervision by Station XX. In the interests of OC economy, I've cut down on the number of people who'd be breathing down his neck. Things would have to be serious for a demon to suffer human intrusion into his lair, but I’m sure he could do it if the stakes were high.
Chapter 2: The Most Annoying Man in Europe
Summary:
'The counter-espionage agent must try to strip away the outer layers and get right down to the man beneath, to discover, if they can, what really makes the double-agent tick.'
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
My new agent turned out to have aliases in a smorgasbord of languages. The first one in his Special Operations Executive dossier was Nigel Twiner, the name the Abwehr had put on his faked-up passport. In the 30’s, however, he’d done business as Duncan Cruikshank (mother deceased, father unknown), which the SOE considered his birthname on the basis of records recovered from a Home for Unwed Mothers in Aberdeen, but sometimes he'd been Anthony Crowley, and at other times, Keir Hughes. In Italy, he was Sergio Corvi; in Austria, Felix Appelbaum, and he was Arkady Tugarin in Russia, where he had a formidable reputation for holding his vodka. It also transpired that he dressed like a spiv because he was one, famed among racketeers for cornering the last shipment of American stockings back in ‘39, just before the war outbid the fashion industry for nylon.
His German handlers had codenamed him ‘Zugzwang’. As far as I was concerned, his name was Nevermore. Because of his corvine ingenuity? Or because he drove his previous SOE handler to distraction?
I soon came to the conclusion that the answer to that was ‘both’.
When I first clapped eyes on him, this versatile gent was absorbed in a back issue of a comic book, shoulders propped against the door-frame of a briefing-room in St. James’ Street. A discreet distance down the corridor, one of his minders had installed himself in a basket-chair, radiating an air of tireless but put-upon patience. Nevermore could have stepped out of a comic himself, a nervy charcoal sketch with a cigarette dangling negligently from his lips, topped off with a shock of red hair. As I’d been warned, he wore dark spectacles, apparently even for reading. He heard my approach, tucked the cigarette behind one ear, and said nothing at all until he’d got to the end of the page, which took an awkward half-minute.
“Well, whodunnit?” I said at last. It was aggravating to be sized up by someone in dark glasses, but every double agent is aggravating in their own way.
“I did, by signing up for this circus,” he observed, in a voice with no hint of Scots. “And so did you — whoever you might be. Where’s this Reggie Diceman I was told to wait for? He’s late.”
“You should get used to calling me Tyche — ”
“Lucky for some?” he quipped, which was rude, but mythologically precise.
“ — or if we’re being formal, Miss Diceman. And I should probably get used to calling you Nevermore. Depends on how long you’re planning to live.”
I’d got several more zingers lined up, but I wasn’t prepared for his response; he looked pleased as Punch, and held out a hand. It seemed that when it suited him, Nevermore could manage politeness.
“R for Regina! You’re Reggie Diceman!” he exclaimed. He had bony fingers and a snappy handshake. “So, your high-ups thought that that putting a girl in charge of me might knock me off my stride. Shows how much they know.”
For reference, dear reader, the shortlist of people permitted to call me ‘girl’ in 1940 ran to: hypothetical romantic interests, my own mother, and people over threescore and ten. I instantly regretted shaking this awful man’s hand.
“For obvious reasons, I don’t know all the facts my superiors know. If you can work them out from first principles, you must be cleverer than you look.”
“Even cleverer, you mean.” His smile was like saccharine instead of sugar in your tea. “And they can’t know everything, ‘cos they gave a livewire like you a museum-piece codename. Mind if I call you Titch?”
Age has stolen a couple of inches from me, but in 1940 I stood five foot ten in my stocking feet, and even when I framed my face in Victory Curls (how did other women manage it? Witchcraft? Glue?), people had, on more than one occasion, described the effect as ‘bold’. I was more sensitive about this, perhaps, than I should have been. You tricksy bastard, I thought — but I swallowed my pride, and ushered my new agent into the briefing-room.
Outwardly, the Station XX building on St. James’ Street was still a gracious townhouse, ideally suited for the hero of a Georgette Heyer novel, and less ideally suited for spyrunners living off cigarettes, Bovril and their nerves. Stripped of its gilt sconces, and with lino down where there’d once been Persian rugs, the inside was a warren of skulduggery where space was tight. For briefings, I used the same room where Bunny Hopkins and I had gone over Nevermore’s dossier, but I loved it after the fashion of a small, proud, time-share dragon. It contained a school desk and two chairs, a wall clock, and a filing cabinet to fiddle about in if we needed to buy more interrogation time. The walls were adorned with a map of Europe in case we forgot where Germany was; next to it, someone had pasted a mimeographed copy of the Case Officer’s Prayer:
Blessed are those whose sunny smile
Beams alike on good and vile,
Blessed are those who never say,
‘I’ve heard that story twice today’.
Nevermore stood studying it, head on one side. “I’d prefer it if you don’t take that literally. The last man I met who smiled too much tried to kill me. Twice.”
“Then either he was a terrible assassin, or you’re a deeply uncooperative victim.”
It turned out to be the right sort of oblique praise. My new agent straightened his back, with the pride of someone who’s come up from the gutter and doesn’t care who knows it.
“Oh, I wouldn’t call him terrible. He just had no flair.” His smile was the real thing this time, like a conspiratorial schoolboy’s. “I’ve been rude to you, Reggie Diceman, and you’ve stood there and taken it. Have a peace-offering?”
He held out his comic, which proved to be (and I realise I’ve lost the element of surprise) a publication called ‘Diabolical! Hot off the Press’, a bargain to any discerning reader in search of the startling, the eerie, and the downright weird.
Reader in the warless future, you must enjoy entertainments the likes of which I can’t imagine, but in my formative years, we had the flicks, the radio, books, and magazines from the highbrow to the pulp. Gently-nurtured vicar’s daughters were not meant to like either pulp fiction or comic books, but I’d pretty much brought myself up while mother spent her time doing Good Works in memory of the sainted Reginald Diceman, who’d prayed so hard for others that sometime in 1915, he forgot to pray for himself. Unlike my father, the heroes of cheap fiction had a useful faith: they knew they were the heroes, and so they survived. I liked that. The punchiest pulp — the inky, thrilling motherlode — came from the States, but by 1940, the stuff was hard to get. I’d not seen anything of the sort since my mother, whose talents were now employed wrangling child evacuees out of London, had requisitioned my collection to distribute to boys being sent to darkest Shropshire. She was a thorough sort of woman.
So I dithered, and then I confess I took the magazine, and told myself it would provide insight into Nevermore’s character. Underneath the pinstripes, I thought, how old are you really?
“I knew it! Not so stuffy after all. We’re going to get on like a house on fire.” He perched on a bentwood chair with an ankle crossed on one knee, revealing a flash of red sock. “You, my girl, are Going Places, and you deserve sooo much better than a shared office.”
My girl? Again?
As I shut the briefing-room door, I reminded myself that if Nevermore hadn’t riled up everyone who had to interact with him, he’d never have been assigned to me. I got out my jotter and pencil and looked polite and attentive.
“Would you mind telling me how you worked that out?” I said. “About the shared office?”
“This can’t be your room.” He gave the air an authoritative sniff. “It smells wrong.”
“I’m surprised you can smell anything in here but the ghost of Old Navy Shag.”
“Exactly! But you don’t wear scent, Titch, and you don’t smoke. The man who uses this room smokes like a chimney, splashes on some Extract of Limes, and hopes for the best.”
Bunny Hopkins did indeed wear Extract of Limes, and the foulness of his briar was legendary. I was startled, but it couldn’t hurt to lay on a bit more flattery.
“You’re pulling my leg. What are you, a human bloodhound?”
“Look, to even get to London and serve myself on a platter to you ungrateful buggers, I had to hoodwink a bunch of Nazis for months while they watched my every move. I had to act like them, dress like them, and read and drink and joke like them. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t notice everything.”
Fair enough. But if you boast to your handler that you notice everything, they may take you up on it.
“How many windows are there on the street-facing side of this building?”
He made a thinking face. “Fifteen. It would be sixteen, but left-hand one on the ground floor is bricked up.”
“How many doors did you pass to reach this room?”
“Two on the left, three on the right. I can count, you know.”
“So it seems. And the man who travelled here with you — ”
“Magog?”
“I’d prefer it if you’d call him Mr. Curtis. What colour is his tie?”
Nevermore gave me a world-weary look. “Magog favours hard-wearing togs, maybe in case he needs to beat someone up in a hurry. Magog takes, I reckon, a 17-inch collar, and a size 8 in hats. Magog’s tie would definitely be brown, Titch — if he ever wore one. Do better next time.”
Ha! Despite the suit and the haircut and the dark glasses he swore were a medical necessity, after twenty minutes I began to suspect The Most Annoying Man in Europe had the makings of a half-decent agent. I wasn’t until we were working out how often he should Morse his German ‘allies’, and if and when we should report some forged notes were being detected and sow paranoia among the counterfeiters, that I thought: Before you tucked that cigarette behind your ear, Nevermore, did I actually see you put it out?
For the next couple of months, I couldn’t believe my luck. Nevermore, the agent who’d driven his previous handler to distraction, was in my opinion a first-grade irritating bastard, but also a first-grade find. True, he was childish and arrogant, but he was also inventive and determined — in short, he was counter-intelligence to his devious core. Earnest, bogus reports on the counterfeit notes were Morsed to the Abwehr: the fakes were circulating undetected, but it was unsustainable to keep releasing them all in South-East England. If alternative routes for importation could be found, Nevermore had criminal contacts further North (in reality, Station XX agents with the right sort of accents) who would take them, no questions asked.
Berlin liked the suggestion considerably. If we played our cards right, the Abwehr might even send notes via a clandestine sea-smuggling route. Enemy smuggling routes were gold dust and were never, ever to be officially blown. Instead, they were to be watched with hawkish vigilance by Counter-Intelligence, and the agents working on them painstakingly traced.
“Well, rock me slowly,” observed Nevermore, when I gave him the news at Station XX’s base in St. James’ Street. When I looked nonplussed, he elaborated. “I mean — gorblimey, strike a light, God save the King, and wahoo.”
“Wahoo? Isn’t that a sort of fish?”
A long-suffering sigh. “Popular slang in the States. For Heaven’s sake, can’t you at least try to be hip?”
“If I knew what that meant, Nevermore, the answer would still be no.”
That’s how it often went. Vain as the man was, you couldn’t give him a compliment direct; you had to trade the right sort of rudeness. As he blossomed as an agent, Station XX began to rethink their policy on his suitability for disinformation, and Bunny Hopkins sent me a couple of test fibs we’d like the Germans to believe. I would then brainstorm with Nevermore to concoct plausible ways he could have discovered them. A night or two later, he’d be escorted to some lonely field by a couple of SOE’s beefy boys to set up his wireless and Morse his ‘intelligence’ to Berlin (Station XX’s policy being that as far as possible, double agents should transmit from isolated places, in case their positions could be traced).
If I was lucky, I might at some point be allowed to go with him.
My greatest peeve with Nevermore was his interest in my personal life. He would always greet me by asking if I’d met a special someone…and I’d have to admit that I hadn’t. My second-greatest peeve was that his unpredictability seemed to be infectious. Granted, the fortunes of war are erratic, but even a soupçon of Nevermore guaranteed odd results. The results weren’t necessarily bad, but each tended to be what Bunny Hopkins was fond of calling ‘a lozenge-shaped affair’.
The first of these was Project Saveloy.
In order to maintain the illusion of loyalty to their former cause, every double agent needs a supply of ‘chickenfeed’ — information that’s roughly true, but not important — to send to their old handlers. Station XX economised on chickenfeed by faking acts of sabotage (the SOE had stage magicians on its books for this purpose), but since Nevermore’s supposed acts of sabotage were financial, and thus less visible, I was always scrounging for information tidbits for my agent. Expendable truths were rare, and Project Saveloy, in spite of being a bizarre scheme, was ultra secret. I had no idea of its existence until it imploded in spectacular style.
Saveloy was a plan to disable the railway engines of Occupied France by packing explosives into taxidermised rats. The idea was that the French Resistance would salt the coal-yards with booby-trapped rodents, which stokers would fling into their boilers in disgust. Alas, the first shipment of rats was intercepted at Calais, and there was great lamentation amongst the murder-boffins of Station XV (Camouflage and Disguise). It caused such a stink that every handler who ran a double was summoned for a one-to-one briefing, and instructed to give their agent extra scrutiny.
The thing was, Station XV had recruited several furriers to prepare the rats — and Nevermore had connections in London’s world of fashion. Could he still be a Nazi Vertrauungsmann after all? I did mention the topic of rats to him, but all he did was peer at me knowingly over his specs, and suggest (damn the man!) that lurid reading matter must be affecting my dreams.
Morale among those in the know in the SOE was poor, until it became clear that our German opponents were morbidly fascinated by exploding rodents. They sent photographs of them to every major coal-yard in Occupied Europe, and the disruption outstripped what the rats could have achieved by going off. As happens when victory is snatched from the jaws of defeat, it was generally agreed that the loaded rats had been discovered by luck, not compromised intelligence.
But even so, I wondered.
Then came the chain-letter business. Hard times are superstitious times, and every country had trouble with these things during the War. The French had the Souvenir de Lourdes, the Brits had the Luck of London, the Germans had the Himmelsbriefen. But it was Nevermore who pointed out to me, just in passing, that the circulation of thousands of similar letters provided juicy opportunities for concealing code by tweaks to the wording.
“A bit obvious, perhaps?” I’d suggested, as we schemed away in the stuffy little room on St. James’ Street. By this time, I’d learned to occasionally play dumb with him, so he could show how very clever he was.
“Obvious?” He lit a Craven A from a case with an built-in lighter, and assumed the air of a con-artist about to explain the shell game to a neophyte. “It would be, if we went and did it. But if it doesn’t put the Germans in a snit to spend ages looking for things that aren’t there, then I’ve lost my touch.”
“A wild-goose chase?”
“Endlich ein Licht auf.” He tapped his forehead in a frankly condescending fashion.
“No need for cheek. I’ll suggest it to Top Brass.” I went through my dutiful-jotting routine. “Done properly, it could waste a lot of the enemy’s time.”
Nevermore blew a single curl of practiced smoke. “Titch. I have not yet begun to waste their time.”
And so it proved. People higher up than either me or Bunny Hopkins nicked the credit for it, but when I told Nevermore, he just said there was more where that came from, and laughed like a drain. Not bitterly, but in unguarded delight at being robbed. Strange man.
Finally, there was Nevermore’s belief in the occult.
It was known to British Intelligence that Heinrich Himmler dabbled in esoterica, and reigning opinion was that the more time the Nazis wasted on this, the better. Nevermore, on the other hand, veered between his bread-and-butter work on forged currency, cunning plans to weaponise superstitions, and real fear that the Allies might lag the Reich in some magical arms race. He assured me that not only did an outfit called the Überprüfung der Geheime Wissenschaften — the Survey of the Occult Sciences, otherwise known as the UGW — exist, he named alleged members. Some were published authors like Karl Wiligut and Franz Altheim, but others were people I’d never heard of: Otto Rahn, Heinz von Schall, Edmund Kiss.
Where had Nevermore encountered these fascinating folk? He gave one of his shrugs. All right, so he hadn’t met all of them personally. But more than a few had frequented the jazz dives of Berlin, where they’d soaked up the soon-to-be-forbidden delights of syncopation — and in some of these places, a red-haired Kabarettsängerin called Lady Jay had smiled knowingly at the people ogling her, and watched them right back.
It sounded like a textbook case of self-aggrandising fantasy. But I toddled off to Bunny Hopkins with the names, and two weeks later, Bunny summoned me with the news that amazingly, the UGW claim appeared to have legs. In 1936, some German scholars with a special interest in occult artifacts had tried to spirit the Codex Aesinas out of a palazzo in Italy; later, the Yumbulagang Palace in Tibet had been ransacked for a stupa lettered in gold; in New York, a book-dealer was rumoured to have been offered a fortune, not to sell an actual text, but just to name the person who currently owned it. Whoever the would-be buyer of this info had been, the dealer’s response had been to flee to the Catskill Mountains — but she’d never reached her hotel, and was still missing.
Our stock with Top Brass rose considerably.
So, Nevermore was not only serious about hocus-pocus, but he knew some Nazis who were too. The man was baffling, but at the time, I was fairly sure (all right, two-thirds sure) that he was on our side, and when you’re running double agents, that’s all you can ask for. Had our operatives been normal people, they’d never have been doubles in the first place; had we been normal people, we wouldn’t have been their case officers.
That wasn’t the first thing that bothered me.
The first thing that bothered me was one of the names on Nevermore’s list of occultists: Heinz von Schall. There might be hundreds of von Schalls in Germany, but I sincerely doubted there were thousands. Why would some hack writer in the States choose that particular surname for their comic-book Satanist? I wondered about whether or not to mention this coincidence either to my double agent, or to Bunny, but I kept my counsel. Throwaway though it was, I couldn’t get over the feeling that accepting Nevermore's comic had been a tactical error.
The second thing that bothered me was that when I got back to my lodgings in Islington after a hard day’s scheming, and pulled out the comic to double-check the name, there were details I didn’t recall. I wasn’t quite sure if the demon had had hooves or bare feet before, but surely, he hadn’t been wearing louche little Turkish slippers? Also, the moon was higher in the sky than I recalled, for where there had only been darkness under von Schall’s hood, I could now see a high, intellectual forehead. And in the last panel, as the Nazi diabolist grabbed his Contract and exited stage left, pursued by rats…one of the rats was winking.
The third thing that bothered me was the weird effect Nevermore had on my emotions.
No, not like that. I use the word weird advisedly. He was definitely not my type, and I doubted I was his (astute reader, I was not exactly in league with the lesbians back then, but opportunities to sororitise had been few). I suppose that in the olden days, I’d have wondered if my mercurial agent was a jinx. It was probably down to his on-and-off obsession with the occult, but even so, it made me uncomfortable. I considered myself a rational person, but after our briefings, I sometimes found myself touching wood for luck. At other times, I felt as if we’d been talking for longer than could be possible, about topics that were abstruse even for an SOE briefing, but when I looked at the wall clock, nothing was amiss. And though I usually slept like a log, I began to have nightmares.
On the face of it, that wasn’t surprising, since the expectation of air raids had made the whole of London jumpy as hell. Barrage balloons had been brooding overhead for more than a year, and from the window of the house where I rented a second-floor room, I could see the Anderson shelter my landlord had built in the back garden. Evacuation had made children an increasingly-rare sight, no-one went anywhere without a gas-mask satchel, and you were confronted on the Underground with posters advising you how to identify five different sorts of gas by smell.
My nightmares were about something else.
All had the same plot: hunting people down at night. Initially, it would feel like a justified pursuit for women and men who’d done monstrous things. I pursued them without pity, flaming torch in hand, and when they begged for quarter I gave none. But at last the sun would rise, and I’d be forced to look at my human quarry. I’d brace for visions of depravity, but instead, I’d find myself in a circle of ordinary people, poorly-clad and terrified. And the thing they were so afraid of was…me. Those dreams gave me the heebie-jeebies, and you can’t afford the heebie-jeebies in intelligence work. The parting line of Nevermore’s old handler came back to haunt me: ‘May the Lord have mercy on your soul’.
I could confide in no-one. If I went to my boss and explained that working with Nevermore gave me bad dreams, Bunny would just pull on his pipe, then fix me with that vague, baggy stare behind which a formidable mind was going full-pelt. Result: Nevermore, now a house-trained double agent, would be transferred to a new handler. I would never again get such a hot property, nor would the SOE forget my foibles. And if I wrote to my mother (now out in the provinces, wrangling placements for child evacuees), she would write back punctiliously, ask if I had any remaining ‘juvenile literature’ for her charges, and recommend a course of prayer.
Perhaps she wasn’t entirely wrong. At this low ebb, I began to reconsider the benefits of belief. Not that I had any; this was the sort of feeling that led folk to furtively make seven copies of the Luck of London, then post them to people they knew vaguely. But to my infinite dismay, doubt-clobbering symbolism began to have a shameful allure. Like my French agent who’d convinced herself she’d come through if only her dog was waiting for her, I didn’t have to strictly believe. I just needed something to fend off the heebie-jeebies.
Meanwhile, the pace of work at St. James’ Street became frenetic, while the summer slowed to a sticky crawl. Mentally, it was like trying to sprint across flypaper. By July 1940, everyone knew the Phoney War was drawing to a close, but no-one wanted to say so, and even when no sirens went off — for we were already being bombed, in a patchy fashion — I couldn’t sleep at night. One morning I snapped awake after yet another hunting nightmare, scrabbled for my electric torch, then realised that outside my blackout curtains, dawn was breaking over a city that had made it through one more night without anyone really newsworthy being killed.
To Hell with Hitler, I thought, lying in my nightmare-tangled sheets. To Hell with the war, to Hell with the raids that could only get worse, but most especially, to Hell with these awful dreams. I got up blearily to let in the blessed sun, then rooted about under my bed for the sole thing I possessed that had spiritual significance: my father’s old Communion kit.
The Reverend Diceman had succumbed to blood poisoning in France two months before I’d been born. At the suggestion of his colleagues, I’d been christened in his honour, and I’d been kicking against religion ever since. I’d been an inquisitive child, prone to bouts of demanding to know where Daddy had gone. At those times, Mama would tell me he was in Heaven, because he’d been the next best thing to a saint. But at other times, when money was tight, she’d bemoan the fact that she’d married beneath her, and when I’d ask how a nearly-saint could be beneath her, she’d just thin her lips and go quiet.
The earthly belongings of Reginald Morley Diceman fitted into a leather suitcase initialed in gilt, divided inside into cloth-lined compartments. There were stoppered cruets for wine and Holy water, both of them long since dry. There was a Book of Common Prayer, its cover blotched with candle-wax (he’d been one of those people who’d actually used the blank pages at the back headed ‘Notes’, but only to make sketches — fellow officers, enlisted men, and the occasional doctor or nurse). There was a even a dented Communion tin with the remains of a wafer rattling inside.
The only curiosities were a little brass handbell and a hatpin, strange accessories for a vicar. The bell had some sort of inscription that started off ‘Anoint’, but was so tarnished that the rest was illegible. The pin was was of formidable length and quality, its ebony head inlaid with silver bands. I wondered if it had been a sweetheart’s keepsake from my mother (never the sock-knitting type), for what possible use could an army chaplain have for a hatpin? On the other hand, I could certainly wear it — and if it didn’t work as a talisman against the heebie-jeebies, it had some potential as a weapon. I stuck the thing in the brim of my hat, and wondered if Nevermore, a man whose idea of casual dress was chalk-stripes and a fedora, and who seemed to have a monopoly on London’s red socks, would comment on it favourably.
Curiously, he didn’t say a thing about it. But not so long afterwards, somebody else did.
Notes:
This fic is no beta (we fall like a tech stock Crowley has recently shorted), so feel free to point out any typos. Once again I thank anyone reading this for their patience.
Notes! Argh! Notes!
1. ‘Diabolical: Hot Off the Press!’
The Completely Unsuspicious Literature that Reggie accepts from Crowley went through several reworks. A German mannerist play? Too highbrow. A Dennis Wheatley-style occult thriller? Too wordy. But I bet 1930’s Crowley adored both pulp fiction and comics — though people with more knowledge in this area than me will note that 1940 is a bit too early for the most florid, colour-printed pre-Comics Code horror offerings, which were mainly a 50’s treat.
2. Crowley’s adventures in rounding up counterfeit notes.
In reality, no fake cash was being dropped on the UK at this time, though it was sometimes used to bribe the unwary, or (amazingly) used in lieu of real notes to equip luckless German agents being sent to Britain. Ironically, Operation Bernhard caused its biggest problems for Britain after the war had ended, when the fake notes started coming out of Germany in some quantity, pummeling confidence in the pound. For anyone interested in the story, here's a fun link.
3. 1940’s Crowley just has to smoke…
…and I reckon he’d own a trendy lighter/case combo like the Ronson Mastercase.
4. The Rev. Diceman’s Communion kit.
I knew zilch about army chaplains of any era/denomination before starting this fic. The description of the Rev. Diceman’s WWI field kit is entirely thanks to the Chaplain Kit site, where you can see a WWI example.
Chapter 3: Operation Parsifal
Summary:
‘The professional spy is really on the fringe of the international criminal set and is usually not above a little mundane crime…when the spying market itself is a bit dull.’
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
One of the more interesting facts about Adolf Hitler is that the man was a frustrated Anglophile. He was unconvinced about the Fascist potential of the Scots, the Irish, and the Welsh, but in any case, they were far outnumbered by the English, who in his opinion had das richtige Zeug. It saddened him that Anglo-German relations during the 30’s hadn’t ripened into alliance, and after Dunkirk, he took his time planning how to hamstring his unreliable, stroppy old mate via the destruction of its airfields and factories. He wasn’t going to be unduly nasty: the curriculum at Oxford might change, but its dreaming spires would be preserved. It would be the most civilised subjugation in the history of aerial warfare.
It didn’t go as planned. They called it the Battle of Britain.
On July 19, 1940, one day after a rolling eight-hour dogfight that tore both the Luftwaffe and the RAF to pieces in the sky, and left everyone on the ground with a crick in their neck, Hitler took to the airwaves for his Last Appeal to Reason. It took him two solid hours. He pleaded with the British to oppose this unnatural conflict between sister nations; he urged (even at this stage!) compromise; he hinted that in anticipation of a rout, Churchill was planning a new life in Canada. It was an impressive bit of showmanship, and would shortly be followed by a printed English translation scattered from bombers over the South-East of the country, so we could all appreciate its brilliance.
The pamphlets still descended, but in propaganda terms, the Führer was beaten to the punch.
A BBC man called Sefton Delmer, a cub so journalistically unlicked that he was not even English, but an Australian born in Berlin, was about to make his radio debut when the Last Appeal to Reason was broadcast live from the Reichstag. The bilingual Mr. Delmer had tuned in to Hitler’s Last Appeal (I’d done the same myself), and understood the speech perfectly. And as soon as the tirade wound up, he switched on his own microphone, and instead of launching into his scheduled programme, told the Hitler to shove it with such gusto that the Reichskanzler assumed the response was authorised by Downing Street, Whitehall had a twitching fit, and the SOE immediately set about recruiting this chaos agent for its propaganda department.
We Londoners had a laugh about it, and were brisk and defiant, and stiffened our upper lips until you could rest teaspoons on them, but we were also bloody scared. Everyone knew that the dogfights overhead, gripping and brutal as they were, were just the start of what we had coming, but Sefton Delmer had actually gone and said it.
For all its faults, London was my dirty, marvelous, infinitely varied home. I took to getting off my bus several stops early, and walking through the streets before clocking in at Station XX, then doing the same in reverse in the evening, looking at the buildings and the people. At the time, I’d have explained this as my desk job playing merry Hell with my hip; a daily walk was becoming a medical necessity. What I was really trying to do, I think, was to commit London to memory, like an agent about to be sent into hostile territory of the future.
“Met a special someone?” asked the XX Committee’s most irritating recruit, as he skimmed a cellophane packet over my desk in 58 St. James’ Street. “You look radiant.”
Reader, I did not look radiant. I looked like a woman who recently learned that her agent persuaded his minders to take him out to a jazz club on Beak Street, and attempted to teach them the St. Louis Shag. At times I wondered what would give out first — their livers, Nevermore’s antics, or my nerves.
His offering was about the size and shape of a cigarette packet, but far more glamorous and very much harder to get. The label showed a leggy glamour-puss kicking her legs up in a giant, old-fashioned champagne glass, a black-tie party in full swing behind her. American nylon stockings of 1939, an impossibly generous gift to any woman alive.
“Nevermore, you never learn. I will not be a party to the black market.”
“Black market?” he said, looking hurt. “Look, these were a legitimate bulk purchase made before the war, in the future service of His Majesty. If you want the Abwehr to think you’re an Nazi sympathiser with a shady past, Titch, you need something resembling a shady past. Stocking-smuggler was the least wicked thing I could come up with. This is the last of the batch — more or less. Keep’em for a night on the tiles.”
I pushed the stockings away with one fingertip. “Absolutely not.”
“Your loss.” My annoying agent sprawled, as far as he was able, on a chair that had been built to discourage sprawling. “But don’t play high and mighty with me, ‘cos you’re easy enough to sweeten up with a bit of light reading.”
Damn the man. Taking that comic had been a mistake, I thought, but it was too late to regret it now.
“I accepted that as a gesture of good faith, and to demonstrate I wasn’t quite as stuffy people like you might believe. Now, if you’ve finished trying to get a rise out of me, we need to talk about the latest transmission from Berlin.”
“I knew that would get to you.” He shuffled his chair opposite me and grinned like a Cheshire cat. “It’s worth spending a night crouched in some godforsaken hedge in Bedfordshire, just to see you eat humble pie about Hitler’s occult business.”
“All messages the Abwehr send you are invaluable, but — ”
“But you don’t fancy this one, ‘cos you’re a sceptic. Obstinate rationalist, I know your sort.”
I squared up my briefing notes, the top sheet of which bore a photograph of a wooden cup. Below it was the most recent instructions Nevermore had received from Germany, first in five-letter columns of gibberish, and then type out in plain text. Dealing with a field agent’s multiplication code did wonders for one’s mental agility.
“I admit, I wasn’t expecting this. I don’t know if I’m more surprised that Berlin has asked you to steal the Holy Grail, or that they seem to think it’s in Wales.”
They really had. Or rather, they’d asked Nevermore to nick a potential Holy Grail, for there were dozens of candidates scattered across the globe. There was, however, only one in Wales: in a backwater called Rhydyfelin, an alleged Grail had been kept for centuries in a manor called Nanteos House, and lent out occasionally for ailing folk to drink from. The Nanteos Cup had a long tradition of healing miracles, and unlike some of its rivals, it was a simple thing, not an obviously Byzantine chalice, or tat doctored up by a Renaissance huckster. And it seemed that someone in the Reich was indeed interested in it, for Nevermore’s instructions started as follows:
OPERATION PARSIFAL.
OBTAIN HOLY GRAIL FROM NANTEOS HOUSE
RHYDYFELIN WALES N522318 W040142.
MONEY NO OBJECT.
And that was just the start of it. The rest of the plan had the overly-thought-out character that marked most transmissions Nevermore was sent by the Abwehr, who expected their agents to follow complex instructions to the letter. If successful, he was to pack the grail into a suitcase, then deposit said suitcase in the left luggage office of a major railway station. He should then put the receipt in a watertight box, peel back the turf in front of a particular headstone in Abney Park cemetery in North London, bury the box, and leave yellow flowers on the grave.
The spy trade called that rigmarole a ‘dead drop’. A dead drop allowed two spies to interact without knowing either their contact’s face or name; the agent responsible for checking the dead drop was known as the cut-out.
“Forgive me for being obvious, but that’d suggest I’m not the only German operative in London,” mused Nevermore, in a tone that indicated he was plotting what further information he could get from me. Because he was a nosy bastard with no concept of intelligence hygiene? Or for more sinister reasons?
“Even you can’t think they’d rely entirely on your own talents,” I deflected. “And we aren’t going to discuss that detail further, except to agree it’s no business or ours.” The ‘detail’ had, in fact, caused a ruckus in Station XX, which had drifted into the complacent belief that all the agents sent over by Germany were of a low grade and easily detected. But if Nevermore was being asked to set up a dead drop, the enemy must have a cut-out we didn’t know about, either infiltrated from Europe, or recruited from British Nazi sympathisers. Either would be such bad news that Bunny Hopkins had been summoned before Passion Pants Robertson himself to discuss the matter. I didn’t envy him.
“The robbery could be our business, though.” Nevermore peered at me over his glasses with those pale hazel eyes of his, almost the colour of barley sugar, that he claimed were so sensitive to light. “Money no object, Titch. Geld nebensaechlich. An invitation to drain the Fuhrer’s coffers, you can’t expect a man like me to decline. I’ll tell them the best thieves don’t come cheap, and we’ll be quids in. Can’t you put in a word with your high-ups?” He looked almost pleading.
“I could, but it would be futile,” I said, and waited until he’d slumped before adding, “because they already want us to do it. More or less.”
“Bless it all!” He leapt from his chair as if electrocuted, startling a couple of pigeons from the windowsill outside. “Reggie, I adore you, you’re the cleverest person alive!”
“Or rather, they want you to do it. You’re to be kitted out in Air Force Medical Services uniform and sent to Wales with an escort of two SOE officers who’ll play the role of your subordinates — ”
“Not you?” He made a disappointed face.
“Sadly, I probably can’t rough you up if you try any funny business.”
“Nobody trusts me,” complained the man with four British aliases and half-a-dozen foreign ones. “Story of my life. Argh, and the officers will Gog and Magog, won’t they? Gog reads the Daily Mail, and Magog thinks It’s That Man Again1 is the last word in comedy. Can’t I at least take the Bentley?”
“Medical Services officers don’t drive Bentleys. You’ll go to Wales in a RAF Tilly2 which will later be reported stolen. The morning of the robbery, you’re to visit Nanteos House and pretend to assess it for suitability as a sanatorium for injured airmen. After everyone’s gone to bed, you’re to stage a discreet but real break-in. Reckon you can manage that?”
“Do I reckon?” He started doing little jitterbug steps round the room. “Dance with me, Titch, and I’ll teach you some fancy footwork I learned in the States. No mortal soul will be able to resist.”
I remained seated. “I said ‘more or less’. What they want you to do is stall for a bit. And you’re absolutely right about how to handle Berlin. You’re to tell them a job like this takes time and cash. It’ll be a few weeks before you’re ready to go to Rhydyfelin to case the joint.”
“Case the joint?” Nevermore stopped his gyrations and hoisted an eyebrow. “That sounds wrong when you say it. Besides, I could burgle the place tomorrow! I mean, I could pretend to burgle the place tomorrow. I assume we’re not actually going to deprive a bunch of sheep-farmers of their Grail,” he drifted behind me to study the photo, “which, incidentally, is an old wassail-bowl, and can’t be older than than the Fourteenth Century. Closer in time to us than to the Last Supper.”
That was what historians at the Victoria and Albert Museum had told us about the Welsh ‘Grail’, though I didn’t say so. Nevermore didn’t strike me as an antiquarian manqué, but I wouldn’t have put it past him to have done a bit of high-end larceny in his time.
He glanced at the photo again.
“On the other hand, Titch, if I was a master woodcarver, and you told me to make a Grail that looked as if it was at least seven hundred years old, and maybe two thousand, then smear the inside with something bad for one’s health — ”
“Impressively cunning, but no.”
“ — then I reckon it would take me quite a few weeks to make one. Ha! We’re going to fake a Grail! We’re going to poison Hitler! Or maybe Himmler, Himmler would do. This is brilliant!”
“Station XX doesn’t see this as an opportunity for some half-baked assassination attempt.”
“They don’t?” His face fell. “Spoilsports.”
“But they do see it an opportunity for chickenfeed. All we need from you is a staged burglary at Nanteos House. Lord and Lady Rhydyfelin have been briefed, and they’ve been kind enough to list some valuables they can do without for the Duration, but the house staff are in the dark. Later on, you radio Berlin and say that the operation went well, but the Nanteos Cup had already been moved — that’s true, by the way — so you couldn’t leave anything for the cut-out to collect. Then the newspapers run a few short columns on how the gang cased the joint in the guise of RAF officers setting up rural sanitoria, and how all good citizens should ask for identification papers. The end.”
Nevermore made a lemon-sucking face.
“But that’s so dull. What happened to that imagination of yours?”
“I donated it to the war effort.”
“No, you didn’t. Or at any rate, you shouldn’t. An imagination is like your short and curlies. You can keep everything tidy, or you can let it run wild, but it always, always, always belongs to you.”
God give me strength, I thought (which was unlikely considering my personal opinions on God), and let me not rise to this stuff. But miraculously, the bit of me that was descended from generations of clergymen and their savagely polite wives rose to the occasion.
“If wanted advice on grooming,” I said crisply, “I wouldn’t ask a man who thinks an undercut suits him.”
The most annoying man in Europe looked at me with a pity so profound, it radiated through his sunglasses.
“An undercut doesn’t naturally suit anyone, Titch. That’s the whole point.”
Niceties over, The Most Annoying Man in Europe assisted me in hammering out a message for him to radio to Berlin: he was planning a perfect burglary, but reliable talent didn’t come cheap. He’d need time and money to find the right men, arrange to ‘borrow’ a suitable car from an airbase, and acquire black-market Air Force uniforms (in anticipation of universal conscription, there was already lively interest within the criminal fraternity for for these). And he should preferably make these preparations in a town where he wasn’t known as a go-to man for counterfeit banknotes — which, inconveniently enough, he’d just finished distributing. Would it be possible for another batch to be dropped somewhere in South-East England?
Feeling in a termagant mood, I forced both of us through the pencil-and-paper calculations to encipher this farrago ready for Morsing, which wasn’t necessary — the radio boffins usually did it with accuracy and speed — but was good practice. To my surprise, Nevermore bore it all patiently, didn’t make a single mistake, and rather gently pointed out where I had made two. I released him into the care of Gog and Magog (it seemed fatuous to try to get him to call them Mr. Philpott and Mr. Curtis), and then I sat at my government-issued schooldesk, rested my forehead in my palms, and finally allowed myself the luxury of a headache. Not for the first time, I wondered how it could be that the clock said we’d been only talking for an hour and a half. It felt like most of a day.
A Meeting at St. Bride's
Under the watchful eye of his minders, Nevermore went in his Bentley to Station XV, a wonderland of disguises fronted by a restaurant called The Thatched Barn that had seen better days. There, he was to be be kitted out with an RAF Medical Services uniform, and drilled on the bogus background story he’d tell the staff at Nanteos House. His imposture need only be fairly convincing; this ‘burglary’ was purpose-built to make it into the papers. About a week from the hitting the presses in Cardiff and London, the story should reach Berlin, and Nevermore’s German handlers would learn that their agent had failed, but not for want of trying. We’d scheduled the operation for the first half of September.
With Nevermore at the Thatched Barn, Bunny Hopkins and I could work on the problem of the the probable German agent — one we hadn’t previously known about — embedded in London, waiting to courier magical loot to the Continent. Whoever that person was, they hadn’t had the decency to make themselves obvious. It was a worry that Nevermore had to know about their existence, but it couldn’t be helped. The thing neither Bunny nor myself could fathom was not that the Germans might have successfully infiltrated a first-class agent into London (always a possibility). It was that they might risk such an asset on taking a bashed cup to Germany. That was, as Hopkins said, a truly lozenge-shaped problem. The Überprüfung der Geheime Wissenschaften might exist, but surely, they weren’t as influential within the Abwehr as all that?
It was in this preoccupied mood that I went to catch the bus to my lodgings (ah, the glamour of espionage) after the Nanteos Cup briefing. I’d developed a routine: along the Embankment, a left turn at Temple Gardens, then through the side-streets to Ludgate Circus. It was a classic bit of old London. The noise of nearby Fleet Street could still be heard in the squares and alleys, and above it all, the spire of St Bride's church reached through the plane trees like a transmission mast to God.
My nerves were horribly on edge. It wasn’t just the ever-present chance of air-raid sirens. It was that I couldn’t shake the feeling that Nevermore knew when I was lying to him.
Because of course, I’d just lied through my teeth. Station XX had every intention of leaving flowers on the grave in Abney Park cemetery, and seeing if the mysterious cut-out came to check for a cache. If they did, they were our lawful prey. They wouldn’t be immediately arrested, but they’re be photographed, and we’d study their every move until we could bring them in, interrogate them, and hopefully either turn or impersonate them. The less Nevermore knew about that project, the better. But deep in my soul, I was certain he knew — and the fact he hadn’t suggested such a plan himself only made me surer.
It was late afternoon, getting on to evening, when I took my usual cut through Bride Lane, feeling mopish. My whole life consisted of problems I couldn’t discuss. The nightmares of hunting down evil-doers, only to find I was worse than anyone I pursued, continued in an on-and-off fashion. And in spite of the fact that I spent all day wrangling Nevermore, as far as the few people who knew me were concerned, I had a cushy job in a government office. My landlord was Digging for Britain, and his wife had volunteered to serve in a mobile canteen3; the fact I wasn’t ‘doing my bit’ was starting to show. I should find time to volunteer in some way, I should…
“Look out, Miss!”
The person I’d nearly collided with was a young man hurrying out of the red-brick building opposite St. Bride’s church. He was the type that would make a perfect field agent — mousy of hair, unexceptionable of build and feature — apart from the fact he wore glasses with lenses like the bottoms of ginger-beer bottles. He was carrying a long, flat wooden box ladderwise on one shoulder, heading for the main drag of Fleet Street, but once he’d rather clumsily avoided me, the box began to slither through his grip.
“Oh, bother!” he exclaimed theatrically as he struggled. “Oh, gosh, I mustn’t drop this!” Could someone conceivably help?”
That someone was clearly me — there was no-one else within helping distance — so I caught the free end of the box. Considering that it wasn’t very deep, the thing was startlingly heavy, and blotched all over with stains. Between the two of us, we managed to carry it to the top of one of the few surviving altar tombs in St. Bride’s churchyard, and set it down with a rattle.
“Whew! Thanks awfully.” My new acquaintance peered at me like an affable mole. He would have convinced anyone who didn’t deal with professional liars on a daily basis that he really had been on the brink of dropping the box by accident, but he hadn’t. He’d crossed my path with the express intention of having an almost-mishap and hoping I’d help.
How interesting.
“Whew! You saved my bacon there, and no mistake.” He mopped his brow with a handkerchief.
“My fault. I wasn’t looking where I was going — ” God, how tactless. I brought myself up short, but the young man fielded my embarrassment with aplomb.
“That makes two of us. No harm done, though. I’d hate for this lot to get their edges bumped. The Daily Express would never lend them out again.”
“What on earth is in there? That thing’s heavy as lead.”
“To a close approximation, it is lead. Sixty-Point Uppercase Garamond. Ideal for posters, and the Express don’t use it much — but they’d be less keen to loan it if I brought it back in a state.”
I looked at the building he’d come hurrying out of, a bit of Victorian municipal brickwork with the the legend ‘St. Bride Print Works Institute’ over the door, and the penny dropped. “You’re a typesetter?”
“Paid-up member of the ink-stained wretches. It’s not as if I can be much menace to Jerry with these,” he added, tapping his specs, “but I do my bit. We’re doing a series on collecting for the War Effort. This week it’s soup-bones, for glycerine. Next, it’ll be aluminium saucepans for aircraft — ”
Some of his enthusiasm was an act, but not more than half. I recalled that young men were already being called up for military service, and generations of vicar’s wives nudged what passed for my better nature.
“Vital work,” I said firmly, “and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
“I don’t — but believe me, they drop hints. I knew you were the right sort, though,” he added mysteriously. “I’ve seen you cut through here quite a few times, and I said to myself, that lady there is almost certainly the Right Sort, for even though she is a lady, there’s something about her hat. Forgive me for stopping you, but I needed a closer look at it. Very…um…sharp,” he added with a wink.
The hat was a second-hand affair, dyed a practical green, and my new friend didn’t seem the type to have an interest in millinery. Or, for that matter, in me, for the boy wasn’t twenty, and I wasn’t the calender girl type. I put the wink down to poor eyesight and raging hormones.
“I’m glad you like it,” I said, bemused.
“Oh, I like it most awfully. Now I must be off, or Old Narker will put me on hellbox duty for a week. But I’m sure we’ll meet again, Miss — ?”
“Just ‘Miss’ will do for now.”
“Quite right.” Behind the thick lenses, his expression was limpid innocence. “These are dangerous times. But Narker will have my head if I don’t give you a way to contact us.”
He fished in his pocket and pulled out a pencil-stub, plus a visiting-card printed in several different fonts, then used the type-case as a makeshift desk to scribble a note on the back of it. He held it out hopefully.
“If you’d like to support our — um — vital work in the future, could I interest you in a typesetting sample?”
I’d recently had some nasty experiences thanks to unsolicited reading matter. Unlike Nevermore, this young man looked like the most harmless person alive, but that didn’t reassure me. The trouble with wartime is, you just can’t trust anyone (that’s also the trouble with peacetime, but in peacetime, that sort of blunder is unlikely to get you killed).
Sod it all. I took the card. If someone was keeping tabs on me, I needed to know who they were.
The young man beamed. “The Right Sort. I knew it! You’ve just won me a bet. See you on Wednesday!”
And with that, he hefted the type-case onto his shoulder and headed from the relative peace of Bride Lane into the bustle of Fleet Street, leaving me to wonder what on Earth a ‘hellbox’ might be. And I wasn’t at all sure I wanted my existence discussed with an entity called Old Narker. But none of that turned out to be half as odd as what was printed on the card. Given the boy’s job, it didn’t surprise me that it was hand-set on cream-laid stock that could have graced the calling-tray of a Duchess. What was odd about it was the content, which was (and this includes a fair sample of wartime chain letters) quite the pottiest thing I’d read in my life:
_______________________________________________________
☞ The NAZI BEAST is RISING ☜
Are YOU ready for COMBAT with EVIL ITSELF?
This is NOT a circular. Our organisation does NOT offer these cards to everybody.
YOU have received one because of your particular qualities of SPIRIT.
Would YOU ignore an Air Raid siren? Never!
If YOU detect a paranormal phenomenon:
Do Not Ignore Your SPIRITUAL WARNING SYSTEM
You are NOT Mad! Your Nation needs you!
Join the ROYAL EXORCISM FORCE* now!
AROINT.
AVAUNT.
& DEFY THE FOUL FIEND.
* acting CO: Sgt. T. Narker
_______________________________________________________
On the other side, the young man had scribbled, like someone in a Bulldog Drummond tale:
First and Third Wednesdays of the month, 6pm at St. Bride’s Printworks (side entrance). Knock thrice and ask for Mr. Narker’s evening class. Please bring pin to be assured of entry, other equipment a bonus. Ffolkes.
I took off my hat for inspection. As my new acquaintance — Ffolkes? — had observed, it was very sharp. Not the hat itself, but the pin. The more I looked at it, the less convinced I was that it was a conventional fashion accessory, or that it had belonged to my mother, for apparently it marked me out at something that it was unusual for a woman to be. I found myself wishing the sainted Reginald Diceman had bequeathed me something else.
Well, so he had, and perhaps it was time to take a better look at it all. Before catching my bus to Islington, I queued up in Woolworth’s to buy an expensive tin of metal polish. Rationing had yet to sink its measured claws into things that weren’t food, but anything that could have a military use, from shoelaces to torches to socks, had become pricy. Arriving late at my lodgings, I accepted the tuttings of my landlady and some warmed-over cottage pie that tasted, under its mash coverlet, as if it contained bits of real cottage. Then I went to my room with some rags and newspaper, and polished the bell and the Communion case from my father’s field kit until they shone.
Even cleaned up, the case was a battered object with a dent that made it awkward to open, and no treasure in it but crumbs. If Reginald Diceman had been the star of an adventure yarn, I thought, that dent would have been from a stopped bullet. Instead, he’d been the well-meaning clergyman whose job it is to die half-way though the story, and firm up the hero’s fibre. He’d been a year older than I was when he’d done that, and it was just the cheap polish that was making my eyes water. Dammit.
It was the bell that had hidden secrets. One I got it clean, I discovered that (as you, clever reader, will have surmised), that the first word on its inscription wasn’t ‘anoint’. The motto was the same as on the card the printer’s apprentice had given me: ‘AROINT. AVAUNT. DEFY THE FOUL FIEND’ — and as soon as I read it, I got the arctic shiver that every spy knows, whether they’re a field agent or working counter-intelligence in a backroom.
This isn’t a coincidence, is what the shiver means. There’s a reason for this. You just don’t have all the facts.
And in truth, leads as strange as this had led to intelligence breakthroughs. The trouble was, I wasn’t a spymaster’s spymaster like Lt. Col. Robertson, with dozens of keen minds at my beck and call. I wasn’t even in the middling position of Bunny Hopkins, bless his tweedy, analytical soul. I had my hands more than full with Nevermore, I had no idea how I’d find time to investigate an outfit that styled itself the Royal Exorcism Force, and whatever secrets lurked in the St Bride's printworks, they were unlikely to be much use in devising Hitler’s downfall.
On the other hand, the third Wednesday in the month was just over two weeks away, and I was a deeply nosy parker, tantalised by something that might shed more light on my father’s character. I resolved to go. And in hindsight, I need not have worried about finding the time. I didn’t, when it came down to it, have very much choice in the matter.
1. It’s That Man Again (often shortened to ITMA, and pronounced as such) was a hugely popular British radio comedy of WWII, set in the ‘Ministry of Aggravation and Mysteries’, and laden with catchphrases. return
2. WWII slang for a Utility Vehicle: a production-line car with tough tires, a hefty suspension and no frills, made specifically for use by the armed forces, and painted camouflage green or Air Force blue. return
3. From the spring of 1940, preparations were being made to mass-produce hot meals for people bombed out of their homes or cut off from utilities, either in government-run centres patriotically called ‘British Restaurants’, or in mobile canteens. return
Notes:
When I roughed out the plot and setting of this fic, anyone who reckoned Russia was planning a full-scale war on Ukraine would either have been a crazy person, or working in intelligence themselves. Events have made future Blitz scenes (of which there will be two) somewhat tougher to write, but they also show that nothing has changed. The brunt of aerial bombardment is borne by civilians, and the concept of ‘tactical strikes’ is a fig-leaf.
_______________________________________________________
1. A Last Appeal to Reason
Hitler actually did make this speech, only to have Sefton Delmer (later head of the SOE’s black propaganda department) reject it pretty much in real time. In spite of it going down like a lead balloon, leaflet versions were still dropped over southern England in the summer of 1940; the translation ran to four closely-set pages and you can see a surviving example here.2. The Nanteos Cup
Just under half of this cup survives, since generations of hopefuls have surreptitiously nibbled or cut pieces from it. It’s now displayed in the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth.3. The St. Bride Foundation
... is a fascinating place, and most of its collection of printing presses are still operational.
Chapter 4: The Army of Light
Summary:
'Just as the spy has to be a good actor, so too must the counter-espionage agent be.'
Notes:
It's been a while (yikes, it's been four months, and That's Terrible) but the fic is back. Mostly Witchfindery stuff and set-up work this chapter, but rest assured, a certain bookseller should make an appearance in the next one.
Chronology fix: observant (and patient) readers will note the cemetery where Nevermore’s unknown contact is due to check a grave for yellow flowers has changed, from Bunhill Fields to the Victorian cemetery of Abney Park. This is because the last burial in Bunhill Fields was in the 1850's, and even the most incurious might wonder why flowers were being left on a grave nearly a century after the event.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
If, the day I’d I’d met him, you’d told me that Duncan Cruikshank, alias Nigel Twiner, alias Anthony Crowley, alias Keir Hughes could become (after the judicious application of walnut dye) an RAF Medical Officer with a pencil moustache, a limp that hinted at an old service injury, and an accent so cut-glass you could pour sherry from it — well, I’d have believed you. The man was born for disguise, had a criminal’s knack with accents, and knew exactly how clothes could become a prosthetic personality.
The look and voice were good, but that wasn’t a surprise. The surprise was that this time, Nevermore hadn’t hidden from me how hard he’d tried to make them good. As he rehearsed his M.O. patter in the mock-Tudor breakfast room of the Thatched Barn (recently redubbed ‘Station XV’, and a hotbed of gimmicks and disguises), I finally saw the painstaking expert who could fool an enemy spymaster for months.
Nevermore knew the Grail job was a test of diligence, and he’d delivered in spades. He’d picked up medical jargon so readily that doctor who briefed him told us that in his opinion, our agent had once worked in a hospital (I followed up this tip, but Nevermore wouldn’t play ball: ‘It was a field hospital — it you can even call it that — and it was years ago.’). He changed out his cigarette-case, he ceased his forays into Soho drinking-dens, and according to Gog and Magog’s report, his Bentley was even seen to observe parking regulations. I was proud as a mother hen, and if it took the shine off my pride that I wouldn’t be in his ‘burglary’ team, that couldn’t be helped. It was still just conceivable that Nevermore might bolt, and I was still the termagant with a track record of pointing out avoidable mistakes.
At least, that’s what I’d told Nevermore. The truth of the matter was that while he was in Wales, Bunny Hopkins and I would be arranging for yellow flowers to be left on the grave of Lydia Northrop, Beloved Wife, in Abney Park Cemetery, in the hope of luring the mysterious German cut-out into the loving clutches of the SOE. I didn’t fancy the job, but needs must.
“The limp’s a nice touch,” I said, as Nevermore finished his lecture on battle neurosis. In the lobby of the former hotel, Gog and Magog were patiently waiting to whisk him off into deepest, darkest Glamorganshire.
“You like it?” He smiled beautifully. “I modelled it on yours.”
My agent was incapable of normal politeness, but once you got your eye in, there were analogues. He was rude and perfunctory with people he’d just met. Those he knew better were treated with more reserve, peppered with Nevermorian zingers. People he knew well? Those people would get personalised cheek, and I had recently become one of them. So when I smiled back at him, I meant it.
“Glad to hear I’m good for something. You look tremendous, by the way. Better than the real thing. Top Brass had their doubts — but I told them, my agent comes through when it matters. Always.”
He preened.
“So don’t bugger it up,” I added. “Go now, and burgle the Welsh, and begone from my sight.”
His answering salute was as crisp as a February morning.
I watched Nevermore’s Tilly trundle down the Barnet Road, then I biked back to Station XX in St. James’ Street, to begin the patriotic task of deceiving him. I didn’t like it, and neither did my own boss, the tweedy and ruminative Bunny Hopkins. In vain had Bunny pleaded to just identify and surveil the German cut-out, in the hope of pulling more of their contacts into our wicked web. Unfortunately, the intelligence arm of the SOE — the side that ran agents overseas — had suffered dire setbacks, especially in Holland and France, and Top Brass wanted to show Churchill that at least Operation Double-Cross was pulling its weight. They’d ordered us to concoct a dastardly scheme, and by God, we were going to deliver.
On his return from Rhydyfelin in Wales, Nevermore believed he’d be sending Berlin a coded message, detailing the failure of his mission to snatch the Nanteos Cup. In reality, his message would be ‘sent’ from an unpowered aerial, while a couple of fields away, a radio operator expert in mimicking Morse fists1 would send a live transmission, bearing tidings of success and saying they were heading for France. The grave of one Lydia Northrop, a blameless lady who died in 1916 and whose resting-place lay between two mausoleums, would be watched day and night in three-agent relays. With luck, the cut-out would visit Abney Park in search of yellow flowers…and the minute they laid a hand on them, they’d be arrested. As far as Berlin was concerned, the Grail mission would proceed as far as the coast of Kent, where their cut-out, now impersonated by our Morse expert, would ‘steal’ a fishing-boat and head for Calais on the other side of the Channel, carrying the Grail with them. But before they got there, their fictitious boat would strike a mine; the splintered remains of a real boat would be released from a British submarine, and wash ashore to show how close they’d come.
A flawless plan, with which nothing could possibly go wrong.
If the operation got to that point, we’d have to come clean with Nevermore, lest he mention the ‘failure’ of his mission in further messages. He’d be understandably vexed at being lied to, it would be my task to mollify him — and dammit, if I succeeded there, I deserved at least two extra ration biscuits.
The light relief to this skulduggery was a private mission of my own to St. Bride’s Printworks, home of something styling itself the Royal Exorcism Force. In contrast to thinking about the things that could go wrong with the Abney Park stake-out (including the enemy agent taking cyanide, or the possibility they might do mischief to our own people) this felt…almost fun.
Nonsense. Station XX handlers didn’t do fun. We did research.
On the third Wednesday of August, at 6pm precisely, I made my move. I was wearing drab blue civvies, the mysterious pin was lodged in the brim of my hat, and over my left shoulder went the strap of my now-inescapable gas-mask bag. I also carried a satchel containing the parts of my father’s field kit I felt happy showing to strangers — the handbell and the Communion case. The Book of Common Prayer, I left back at my lodgings. It had my father’s sketches in the back, and those were too precious to risk.
Standing cheek-by-jowl with St. Bride’s church, St. Bride’s Printworks didn’t look as if it was home to an elite organisation specialising in COMBAT with EVIL ITSELF. It sported the fancy brickwork that spoke of Public Works and Victorian apprentices, but it was cramped into a corner that suggested it had all been done on a budget. The only hint that it took notice of the war were two stencilled signs on its door, one giving the distance to the nearest Air-Raid shelter, the other, stating that the nearest telephone box — for reporting fires, casualties, or unexploded bombs — was located in the alley next to the church. The downstairs windows were obscured with blackout blinds, though thanks to Summer Time, it was still broad daylight.2
The blind next to the door was askew, and as I approached, it twitched itself straight. Someone was waiting in the passage behind it, someone rather obviously awaiting my knock.
Hmmm. If Mr. Ffolkes was more sinister than he seemed, and had set up this harmless-seeming lunacy to lure poor, naive Reggie Diceman into some sort of trap — well, he’d missed his vocation, and should be in the Special Operations Executive himself. But on balance, I didn’t think so. And I was long on questions about my father, and acutely short of answers, and I wanted to know. So I braced myself, and knocked.
The door opened on a security chain, just a chink. I could see nothing beyond it but a single, suspicious eye.
“Who goes’t there?” inquired a voice so stagy, it needed a tiny cloak and dagger of its own. It would have been an impressive voice on a dark and stormy night, but since it was a warm and muggy evening, the effect fell flat.
I cleared my throat. “I’m…um…here for Mr. Narker’s evening classes?”
“Art thou, indeed. Very well, stranger. Aroint.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The classes are by Special Appointment, as thou surely knowest. No password, no entry. Aroint.”
A password? My short-sighted new acquaintance had said nothing about that, but he had, by way of his business card, introduced the word ‘aroint’ into my vocabulary. I could only think of one likely countersign.
“Avaunt?” I replied, like someone in an Edgar Wallace novel. But it worked.
“And defy the foul fiend. Enter, stranger.”
The door swung open, allowing my first look at what I assumed was the Acting Chief Officer of the Royal Exorcism Force, the mysterious Sergeant T. Narker.
I’d been expecting a relic with a quill behind his ear, but the man was only in his fifties. He sported an ink-spattered leather apron and his hands were splotched blue-grey, but under the printer’s garb, his shirtsleeves were held up by chrome armbands, and his dark hair was pomaded over a startlingly white scalp in neat stripes. It was possible for me to see this effect, because Mr. Narker couldn’t have been taller than five foot two and I was in serious danger of looming over him — but if there was one thing both Hitler and Churchill had taught me, it was that being formidable and looking formidable are two different kettles of fish.
The Sergeant took a step back, in order to avoid having to tilt his head to examine me. He didn’t seem overjoyed that I’d put in an appearance, but the lad in the milk-bottle specs was lurking in the corridor behind him, and gave me a little wave.
“I knew you’d turn up. I knew it!” My short-sighted friend beamed. “Always a pleasure to meet a fellow professional. There aren’t nearly enough of us, these days, are there? I’m Private Peter Ffolkes.”
“Sergeant Tarquin Narker,” said the man in the apron, still in a voice so stagy it suggested professional training. “Acting C.O. of the R.E.F, Caretaker of Presses at St. Brides, and — incredible though it may seem — Mr. Ffolkes’ senior in both those offices.”
“I told you she’d come, Sir,” said Ffolkes encouragingly. “A genuine Witchf— I mean, a Captain of the Royal Exorcism Force. You don’t meet one of those every day.”
Narker cast a pained eye over my trouser suit. “Genuine?” he boomed, as if auditioning for Prince Hal. “Forsooth, mine young apprentice, but that’s a woman.”
“You can’t deny she has a pin, though. And you know what they say, ‘autres temps, autre moeurs’.”
“Break out the French again, and thou’rt on hellbox duty for a sennight. How cans’t thou trust a woman? Mayhap she is some occult temptress, out for your body and soul!”
“If so, she’s taking her time,” said the young pragmatist. “And there have been women in the REF, just not very many. Better equal rights than evil rites, that’s what I say. ”
“What I said about hellbox duty, goeth double for puns.”
“Also, her pin’s got four stripes, which means she technically outranks us.” He nudged the older man in the ribs. “You might get promoted, Mr. Narker.”
“I am still here, you know,” I said, earning me a dirty look from the Witchfinder Sergeant. Once you looked past the hair, he almost had the face of Prince Hal, but a Hal gone to seed — one who diced and boozed with Falstaff until he slid into the wastrel knight’s old shoes. At around the time of the last war, however, he must have been quite the dashing fellow.
“So you are,” said Ffolkes politely as, with some ill-grace, Narker ushered me in and shut the door. “Forgive us, but my colleague has his doubts about whether you’d even turn up. Trouble is,” he added sotto voce, “lady members of the REF aren’t rife — and we haven’t had a Captain since 1933.”
So that’s how it was: no-one likes to be abruptly outranked. I couldn’t do much about my sex, but the second reason for Narker’s dislike was a familiar syndrome in the SOE, and easier to work with. I was not, Dear Reader, the sort of girl who’s always very grateful for advice, but I could put on a fair act.
“I have to admit,” I said, as Narker shepherded us down a dusky corridor adorned with samplers of the printer’s art, “it’s not exactly my pin. It was my dear father’s. He was a chaplain in the Great War, but I never got to know him,” I added, laying on the pathos with a trowel.
Narker stopped to fuss over the fit of some blackout blinds, his back to me. “And yet, you began to wear it,” he observed, without turning round.
“Only out of sentiment.” I sniffed a little. Quietly. Nobly. “I’d no idea what the pin really meant, but meeting your Mr. Ffolkes seemed fortuitous, and when he mentioned you — well, I thought you might be able to tell me what this is all about. Being the Acting Chief Officer, and all that.”
We walked on in silence, but Narker was thinking, I could sense it. If I played my cards right, I’d be in.
“No living soul made you wear that pin,” he pointed out, now with more interest than dislike. “But verily, you did so. Might I ask, wherefore?”
This was perfect. Someone I was trying to get the better of had actually asked me ‘Why?’. With the eagerness of a chess player setting up a fool’s mate, I gave the textbook reply, the one that gives away no information, but tempts the questioner to load you with their assumptions.
“I suppose it just felt like the right thing to do at the time.”
Oh yes, I had the drop on Sergeant Tarquin Narker. He was the rookie at questioning, and I was the expert. So it was very unfair when he promptly sent my manoeuvring up in smoke.
“A supposition: you have no male cousins, and you’re your father’s only child.”
“What?” I blurted, for what he’d was true, even down to the bit about having no male cousins. “I thought you were exorcists, not clairvoyants.”
No member of the general public was meant to wrong-foot me with revelations. That was my job.
“Yet verily, it must be so,” said the elder Witchfinder, as if marveling at it himself. “It can be no other way, though I never thought to encounter a case myself. Is my supposition correct?”
The Truth, or not the Truth? The spy’s eternal question. I chose the former.
“It is.”
We’d stopped at the end of the corridor, where there was a door marked PRESS ROOM.
“You didn’t want to give Mr. Ffolkes your name when he recruited you, Madam. Cautious and commendable. But I note that we still don’t know it. Would it be importunate to ask?”
I took a deep breath.
“My name’s Regina Diceman — and if you swap ‘Regina’, for ‘Reginald’, my father’s name was the same.”
You’d think I’d have a host of aliases, just like Nevermore — but Nevermore was a drifter and a crook, whereas I was supposedly a respectable sort with an office job. It’s a easier to hide your real line of work than to risk being known by two names in the same town, and you’d be surprised how small a town London can be. So I gave Sergeant Narker and Private Ffolkes my real name, but I wasn’t prepared for their reaction. It was half as as if I’d claimed to be minor royalty, and half as if I’d admitted to having some rare disease. As Narker unlocked the door with an immensely noisy bunch of keys, I could overhear snatches of conversation.
“ — a descendant? You told me that was a legend — ”
“ — so it is, ‘til our Nation stands on the brink of the gravest peril — ”
“ — frankly, Sir, I’m not sure if that makes it sound any better.”
“What’s a descendant?” I asked, with the care of a psychiatrist tackling a folie à deux.
Ffolkes gave Narker an embarrassed look.
“There are said to be certain families,” he explained, “with a hereditary calling to be Wit—” he broke off.
Narker drew himself up to his full height. “There is no shame in it. Anyone can Defy the Foul Fiend — or leastways, they should — but there are certain families with a hereditary call to fight the machinations of the Devil. The known ones are Pulsifer, Hopkins, Siftings, and Diceman. Whensoe’er the Forces of Darkness rise up to walk brazenly among us, those families bring forth Witchfinders, e’en though they know not what they be.”
Fantastic. They were both mad as hatters.
“Witchfinders? Is that what your Royal Exorcism Force really is?”
“Sounds more modern, doesn’t it?” said the younger man, with an encouraging grin. “Not so Puritan and, um, thumbscrewy. Our first patron was Oliver Cromwell, of course, but then the Restoration happened, and you can’t have people thinking you want to go about abolishing the monarchy — ”
“Perish the thought,” I said, while wondering if I’d made a serious miscalculation, and these two could somehow turn out to be actually dangerous. “But don’t Witchfinders burn people at the stake? That doesn’t sound awfully modern.”
“Calumny! No witch has been burned in England since the Incident of 1656.” Narker was stern. “Besides, ‘tis a Continental practice. You, Captain Diceman, have much to learn.”
“No doubt,” I said.
“Times alter, Madam, and attitudes with them. We must be circumspect in the matter of monikers. But within these walls, we go by our ancient name, at which the powers of Hell were wont to tremble. I observed that you have a limp,” he added, but with interest rather than pity. “Might I ask if you have been wounded in action? Have you already gone unprepared against the Forces of the Night?”
“Action?” I mentally flailed again. “I fell out of a tree. Does that count?”
“A hazard of the occupation,” said Narker sadly. “And did you apprehend any of Satan’s Own at their revels?”
“To the best of my knowledge, I’ve yet to catch a single witch.”
My admission of failure seemed to please him.
“Honesty,” intoned the Witchfinder Sergeant, “is the best policy, for a lie is as good as a lockpick to our foe. I bid you welcome, Madam, to the Witchfinder Army.” He flung open the door, with all the drama of Romeo flinging open the door to the Capulet vault. “May your bell, book, and candle be with you always, and your Bayonet of Light keep no rust.”
Bayonet of Light? Ah. The pin. He meant the pin. The pin that had belonged to my father, the pin that I’d taken to be the key to some deep and personal secret. And here was the answer: Reginald Diceman, Witchfinder Captain, had bequeathed to his daughter and heir not only his name and his Communion kit, but also his peculiar hobby. Other families had normal bizarre hobbies, like naturism or amateur theatrics. The Dicemans, apparently, had this.
Ye gods and little fishes, I was in way over my head.
-----
The Headquarters of what I was still mentally calling the Royal Exorcism Force, not the Witchfinder Army (a name that at best suggested stovepipe hats and ducking-stools) turned out to be the undercroft of St. Bride’s printworks. Like a lot of subterranean London, the Press Room was older than the building above it, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if its whitewashed stone walls were medieval. It was a sizable space, but cluttered. The whole place was occupied from floor to ceiling with presses of yesteryear, moved there in case of bombardment. Several were Victorian, with elaborate cast-iron frames covered in patent numbers, but others were looked positively ancient, their oak beams black with age.
Around the walls stood cases of metal type, sorting-frames used for composition, and tall stools used by typesetters of yore. Cranks and levers nudged you in the ribs as you passed, and like everything else in the country, some of these old stagers had apparently been called up for service. The air was pungent with ink, and a series of clotheslines bore posters pegged out to dry:
Turn Over A New Leaf!
Eat VEGETABLES Daily!
suggested one batch, emphasising the word ‘vegetables’ as if us Londoners had never even seen a carrot, while those over my head went straight to the point, with a reminder to
Always Carry Your Gas Mask
FORGETFULNESS = DEATH!
My suspicions that the REF couldn’t be a large outfit were confirmed: there were only the three of us. The ‘headquarters’ — a huddle of stools, a stained Formica table, and a corner stove topped with a tin teapot — was tucked behind a press that looked as if it might have belonged to Wynkyn de Worde. Ancient as it was, even this dinosaur seemed to have seen use. As I’d edged around the slate bed of this relic, I’d nudged a pair of daubers, used for inking-up in the days before rollers.
“Oops!” Mr. Ffolkes had exclaimed. Old Narker favoured him with him a silent glare, and whisked the daubers into a cupboard built into the wall (nosy as ever, I pressed a fingertip to the place they’d stood, and picked up a dab of ink). The Witchfinder Sergeant carried on excavating his treasury in search of some essential to my initiation: a Gutenberg bible, perhaps, or the skull of Cromwell himself. Less exotically, the cupboard contained an assortment of books, a hat that had seen better days, a shaggy object that might have been taxidermy, and…hang on, was that a blunderbuss in there? Before I could be sure, he’d shoved it aside in favour of a red-and-white cylinder, which he set on the table next to my father’s Communion case and handbell, as reverently as if it had been a Fabergé egg.
It was a tin of condensed milk.
“Vintage of ‘39,” he intoned solemnly. “We shall not see its like, ‘til the Nazi Beast lies weltering in its own foul blood.”
Well, if that didn’t motivate us, nothing would. With great ceremony, he punctured the tin, shared the contents between three jam-jars with wire handles (used for mixing batches of ink, though happily, I didn’t know this at the time), and topped them up from the well-stewed teapot.
Initiation into the Witchfinder Army turned out to be short, sweet, and fiercely tannic. We clinked our jars together, and drank to Hitler’s downfall in the same tawny fluid in which our forebears had drunk to the Kaiser’s. The handbell was examined by Ffolkes (but not rung — a handbell was the warning signal for a gas attack), the Communion case was opened by Narker, who was delighted to find it still contained the fragments some WWI holy wafers. After that, it was all business. Narker banged his jam-jar on the table like a gavel, Ffolkes opened a notebook and extracted a pencil from behind his ear, and I prepared myself to hear the tallest of tall tales.
It proved unexpectedly fascinating to hear them talk shop. I’d expected them to jump on every hint of things going bump in the night, but both the Sergeant and his understudy were commendably evidence-based. They were so sensible, I wondered if the SOE already knew about this operation — or even that they’d set it up at arm’s length. The Ministry for Ungentlemanly Warfare had bagged Britain’s stage magicians for the Camouflage Corps. Why not see if there was anything to be had from people who really believed in the paranormal?
The first objection to this was that it didn’t account for the age of anything in my father’s field kit; the Witchfinder Army had clearly been around far longer than the Ministry for Ungentlemanly Warfare. The second objection, naturally, was that there were no such things as witches. Or warlocks. Or second sight, curses, scrying, the Evil Eye, voodoo or, very particularly, diabolism. But it was hard to recall that in the company of Narker and Ffolkes, who believed all of them were possible, and had a scale to assess their severity, ranging from 1 (benign hauntings suitable for tourist attractions) to 10 (the Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride out).
“Imprimis, the haunted church in Kent,” announced the Witchfinder Sergeant. I’d never heard anyone start a sentence with ‘imprimis’ before, at least not off the stage, but Narker slung it out with Shakespearian ease.
“Saint Grimbald’s?” Ffolkes jotted in his notebook. “Anything cooking there?”
“Not one accursèd sausage,” admitted Narker. “I went to check on the place, and what form did the manifestation take? The belfry door jams for no reason, and the hassocks rearrange themselves when no-one’s about. That’s not a ghost, I told him, that’s rising damp and unruly evacuees. Ignore it, and they’ll stop doing it — and after a week, they did.”
“Kid’s pranks,” confided Ffolkes to me. “Bane of a Witchfinder’s life.” He pencilled a shameful zero next to the name of St. Grimbald’s.
“No matter. Onwards, Witchfinders, to the mysterious Spectre of Bethnal Green! A blanched, distemper’d, frightsome thing, and seen by three witnesses at once. There must be something to it, boy.”
“It’s the blackout,” replied the practical Ffolkes. “The streets are dark in the mornings, and there’s a risk of being hit by traffic. The local postmen have taken to dressing in white.”
Narker sighed. “And the medium on the Caledonian Road?”
“The lady with the ectoplasm? Neutralised, Sir.”
“Neutralised?” I exclaimed. Surely not. Practicality had its limits. I took another swig of military-grade sweet tea.
“Oh, not by me.” Ffolkes smiled. “Though it’s no business of mine if a plucky young journalist from the The Daily Express goes to one of her seances, and switches on the lights half-way through. And if the medium was caught swathed in cheesecloth and muttering nonsense though a hosepipe — well, you don’t need to be in REF to tackle that sort of thing.”
Aha! So that was the reason the REF had no trouble borrowing typefaces from The Daily Express: payment in bylines.
“This plucky young journalist,” I asked, “did she get an article out of it? I do hope so.”
Poor Ffolkes blushed like a milkmaid. One point to Spymaster Diceman and her ruthless SOE training. But it was worth knowing that though Mr. Ffolkes was a keen young bean, he was apt to blurt out information. The same didn’t seem to be true of Sergeant Narker. However odd he might seem, that man had dealt with slippery customers in the past. I wondered when, and where, and why.
“Next, the matter of Grimoires and Prophecies,” announced Narker.
“Grimoires?” Once again I was out of my depth, rummaging in my schoolgirl knowledge of fantastic literature. “As in, books on literal magic?”
Ffolkes nodded. “Important work — though of course, you can never know what mischief it prevents. Grimoires, Demonologies, and Books of Prophecy are to be identified and kept out of the Wrong Hands.”
“The Wrong Hands being?”
“Hitler’s occultists. They’ve shaken down Europe for magical texts, and we’ve reason to suspect they’ve crossed the Channel. The books in big libraries are safe, but that doesn’t account for everything. We find rogue tomes more often than you’d think.”
“Make the owners offers they can’t refuse,” explained the older man.
“Good grief.” No sooner had I reassured myself these jokers weren’t assassinating mediums than something else came up. “You’re not going about threatening people for books on magic?”
“Never!” thundered Narker indignantly. “Well, not unless we have reason to suspect witchcraft,” he added. “But we’ve always paid passing well, and had the deepest pockets, at least until war broke out. To speak plainly, Madam, we’re now getting outbid. It cannot be coincidence.”
“But…how did you find the cash in the first place?” I asked. Neither the older nor the younger man looked well-heeled.
“Oh, that’s all right,” said Ffolkes unguardedly, “we’ve got a patron.”
“A patron?” I grappled with the notion that in the middle of the biggest war in history, someone (apart from Nevermore) thought it was a priority to hunt down potion-wallahs, sigil-chalkers, and mutterers of hocus-pocus. Someone with money to burn, apparently. Perhaps I was in the wrong job.
Narker sighed. “You’ve unbagged the proverbial feline, my boy, so you may as well regale her with the rest of it. Besides, she’s one of us now.”
“Our patron owns a bookshop in Soho,” said Ffolkes, “and his name is Mr. Fell. He doesn’t tell us how to run the REF, though, he’s just on the funding side. He’s not even a proper Witchfinder.”
“Says he hasn’t the requisite talents,” explained Narker, in plummy tones that I assumed must belong to Mr. Fell himself. Further questioning revealed that A. Z. Fell was an antiquarian bookseller who sported a velvet waistcoat and a head of snow-white curls, but was twenty years younger than that description would suggest. Also that his learning was formidable, and ran long to the esoteric. My imagination conjured up some dreamy acolyte of Madame Blavatsky, all drifting incense and Glimpses of the Unseen, and I immediately disliked him.
“Supposing I wanted to meet this Mr. Fell,” I asked Narker, “where might I find him?”
“Now that, Madam, is the question. By day, mayhap in his bookshop, unless he’s giving one of his celebrated displays of prestidigitation. By night, he could be anywhere — and very often, he is. He’s an ARP warden, the same as myself, and his bookshop is his castle. Tougher than he seems, is the bookman of Brewer Street.”
“I’ll try the bookshop, then. I take it that neither of you would object to my dropping in?”
Narker and Ffolkes exchanged a cryptic glance.
“No objections,” said the older man. “But fair warning, if Fell’s in no mood for visitors, ‘twould be easier to meet the King. I doubt Ffolkes or myself are likely to get an audience betimes — ”
“ — unless we lay our mitts on The Mystic Vision of Otwell Bins,” said the Witchfinder Private. “I’m promise I’m working on it.”
Binns? This felt like firmer ground. I was familiar with the works of the Reverend Binns, whose books for boys had been deemed permissible reading by Mama, on the grounds that (when not devising ripping yarns) he’d been a Unitarian minister. For a wild moment, I imagined Mr. Fell putting his feet up with ‘Java Jack’, ‘A Gipsy of the North’, or ‘The White Hands of Justice’. I hadn’t heard of ‘The Mystic Vision’, but it sounded in the Binns wheelhouse.
“Hang on, I’ve heard of him,” I said. “Didn’t he write adventure stories?”
“That’s ‘Ottwell’ with two T’s and two N's.” Now it was Ffolkes who was the expert, and I who was the beginner. “The Otwell Bins we want has just one of each, he died in 1602, and he was impressively mad, even for a Seventeenth-Century prophet. His works are like hen’s teeth, but I might just have a lead in Norfolk. If it comes to anything, I’ll report at our next meet-up.” He tapped his own teeth with his pencil, and looked at me inquiringly.
“I’ll put in in my calendar,” I said, and was surpried to find I meant it.
Narker got to his feet with the dignity of King Lear.
“Madam,” he declaimed, “I must speak plain. We last had a Witchfinder Lieutenant in 1933. We’ve not had a Witchfinder Captain in the living memory of the REF. I cannot deny, it will be a change to have one now.”
[Dear Reader: if you suppose that this deference from a man I’d never met in my life struck me as strange, you’d be monumentally right. No-one in the SOE, male or female, had treated me like this. It was gratifying on the surface, but it felt unearned, and nothing unearned is good news. Ever. The hairs on my neck rose up.]
“I won’t have you address me as ‘Captain’,” I said firmly. “My father’s rank is nothing to do with me.”
“But you answered a hereditary calling,” objected Ffolkes. “You put a Witchfinder Captain’s pin in your hat, and then, out of all the people in London, you crossed paths with one of the only two Witchfinders in the whole city. On the Scale of Inexplicable Phenomena, that rates at least a four. It must mean something.”
“But I’ve no clue what to do about that ‘something’ — assuming it ever happens. How can I train my Spiritual Warning System without the REF?”
“I suppose that’s true.”
“Mr. Ffolkes," I lied, "I work — in a small capacity — for the Ministry of Health. It took me six weeks to get to grips with how the Ministry orders bandages, and I’m not unduly dense. I doubt Witchfinding can be an easier job, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned since the war broke out, it’s that everyone needs training.”
“All right then. Same time in a fortnight?”
“Depend on it,” I said, and my name — sans the problematic ‘Captain’ was duly jotted down. Sergeant Narker handed me my father’s handbell, and gave the Communion tin a final rattle before I put them both back in my satchel.
“You’ll do, Witchfinder Diceman,” he said, as I buckled the strap. “Whatever may be the purpose for which you’ve been called up to join us, ‘tis my belief that you’ll probably do. Aroint!” he added, and touched his lapel pin in the manner of a formal salute.
“Avaunt!” said Ffolkes, and did the same.
“And defy the foul fiend!” I answered, with more enthusiasm than I’d thought possible when I first arrived.
When the assembled might of the Royal Exorcism Force emerged into St. Brides’ Passage, it was dusk. We’d been in conference for two solid hours, and while both Narker and Ffolkes lived in the vicinity, if I didn’t look sharp, I’d miss my bus back to Islington.
-----
The bus was one of those hangovers from 1938, when we were all trying to believe war might not happen; as if rationing wouldn’t keep us trim, its outside was plastered with adverts in which a lissome blonde extolled the benefits of Fulford’s Bile Beans — ‘for Health, Figure, and Charm!’. Once you were inside, windows covered with blast-netting reminded you that there were worse fates than constipation. Being a nosy parker, I’d favoured the top deck since I was a kid, but nowadays there were no lit windows to peer into as the bus trundled along its beat. I looked through the net into darkness, and an unfamiliar person was reflected back at me. Two hours ago, I’d been a roughly normal member of society, and now I was…what? A relic of beliefs I’d thought were ancient history. The awkward, female inheritor of a crusade against awkward women.
To put it another way, I was, without a doubt, my father’s daughter. Wasn’t that what I’d wanted?
Perhaps not quite like this.
At least I’d been made welcome. Narker and Ffolkes were odd ducks, but I was revising the idea they were pottier than a jam-jar factory. Their quest to round up esoteric books made an interesting fit with what Nevermore had claimed, and what even Station XX was beginning to suspect was true: not only did the Überprüfung der Geheime Wissenschaften exist, but at least one UGW agent could already be in Britain. Doing what, though? Now that was the question.
There was also the matter of the old press that loomed in front of ‘REF Headquarters’. I wasn’t clued-up about the world of print (a deficiency I intended to fix), but I was sure one with a wooden frame couldn’t manage either the typefaces or the paper used for wartime posters. Yet it had been recently used. Nothing specially odd about that, perhaps. St. Brides’ Printworks was a museum, as well as a place of study. But when I’d noticed the ink, not only had wet-behind-the-ears Mr. Ffolkes had jumped like a schoolboy, so had Mr. Narker. I was as sure as any nosy parker could be that they hadn’t been meant to ink the old girl up and let her rip. But supposing they had, to what purpose could they have done so? There was a roaring market for fake identity papers, but any printed on that relic would last have been hot when the Roundheads fought the Cavaliers.
Blast it, I thought, as I picked my way home through the too-quiet streets, I forgot to ask them what the Hell a ‘hellbox’ might be.
1. Fist: every Morse operator had their own style of sending, based on differences in the length and spacing of dots and dashes (especially the latter), and the silences between them. A gifted Morse expert could mimic another agent’s ‘fist’, just as an impressionist can mimic someone’s vocal delivery. return
2. In August 1940, Britain was running on British Summer Time (Greenwich Mean Time +1 hour); by 1941, in an effort to save fuel and get people home before the blackout, it was changed to Double Summer Time (GMT +2) making the evenings lighter still. return
Notes:
1. The mysterious word ‘aroint’
No sooner had I come up with the
WitchfinderREF motto, with its olde-timey wordes, than I found myself wondering ‘Did Shakespeare make up ‘aroint’ for the Three Witches to say in Macbeth, and what the Devil does it actually mean?’ I’m not the first person to wonder this, and after reading a veritable essay on the topic, I've discovered the answer to both questions is 'No-one has a scooby'. You're welcome.2. Notes on Witchfinding
Oliver Cromwell, Witch-Hunter?
In book GO, the Witchfinder Army is said to have been founded at the behest of Old Ironsides, presumably because of the opportunity for Witchfinders of Yore to have fun Puritan names like Thou-Shalt-Not-Commit-Adultery. The only problem: Cromwell remains both famous and notorious in British history, but he was a brutally efficient soldier, not a hunter of witches. England under the Commonwealth (1649 - 1660) never had officially-appointed witch-hunters (the situation in Scotland was different, since King James VI of Scotland had endorsed the practice in the late C16, but was somewhat less witch-obsessed by the time he became King James I of England). Under Cromwell's rule, English witch-hunting was a for-profit enterprise outsourced to the private sector.
The question of Female Witchfinders (warning, some of this is grim)
The body search which women accused of witchcraft endured was often, but not always, done by female examiners. Ordinary women considered ‘respectable’ could be ordered by a judge or magistrate to perform the task, like some ghastly jury service, and naturally, they reported every last pimple, haemorrhoid, and skin-tag. In contrast, ‘Female Witchfinders’ who oversaw interrogations were seriously rare, they tended to be Scottish, and there was almost always something odd about how they got the gig in the first place. Two famous examples are Margaret Aitken, a former accused 'witch' who did it in a doomed attempt to save her own life, and Christian Caddell, who after a short, lucrative career as a ‘male’ witchfinder (complete with retractable pins!) was exposed as a woman and transported to America. You'd think this plot twist would result in soul-searching about witch-hunts in general, but No Lessons Were Learned.
3. On a lighter note…Bile Beans!
In case anyone doubts that there was ever a patent laxative with this unlikely name, click this link (if you dare) for an infodump on how to stay Healthy, Bright-Eyed, & Slim! Remarkably, Bile Beans carried on being advertised throughout the war, right through strict rationing, and were still being sold in the early 1980’s.
Chapter 5: Bouquets and Bookshops
Summary:
'It is easy to follow the thought-processes of a patriot who carries out a dangerous job for love of his country. But when a man changes sides, it is hard to know if he is entirely ‘off with the old love’ when he puts on the new.'
Notes:
Writing this chapter was like wrestling a greased air mattress into the shape of an equestrian statue, and every time I came back to it, I heard Michael Sheen trill ‘I love all the…talking!’. So here it is: the Chapter with All The Talking. I guess there’s one in every multi-chapter fic, and I thank you for your patience.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Decades after the war ended, we learned that by August 1940, British Intelligence had war-gamed the outcomes of the Battle of Britain. They concluded that Hitler’s attempt to soften us up for direct invasion would fail, replaced with a war of attrition which we still had every chance of losing. Did they tell the rest of us this? Absolutely not. Churchill, that notable bastard, reckoned a Great Invasion Scare would ‘keep every man and woman tuned to a high pitch of readiness’ — just in case any of us were getting complacent after Dunkirk. Road signs were removed, to make it harder for invaders to navigate. Concrete pillboxes popped up in the countryside like fossilised mushrooms. Firearms of every sort were requisitioned for use of the Home Guard, who rehearsed repelling the Wehrmacht with farmers' shotguns and pearl-handled pistols. We were in a high pitch of readiness, all right.
Despite the possibility of invasion, Operation Parsifal proceeded along its path as smoothly as a submarine. The Holy Grail mission might be silly, but the chance of capturing a cut-out agent was not, and at 58 St. James’ Street, a mood of defiant optimism broke out among those who knew about the operation. Lt. Col. Robertson once again the donned tartan trews he’d laid aside after the Passion Pants Incident, and Bunny Hopkins was twice seen with a smile on his craggy features. Even I started telling myself that we might actually catch the cut-out, assuming we didn’t get obliterated by the Reich in the meantime. With any luck, I might become Captain Diceman of the Special Operations Executive, as well as the Royal Exorcism Force.
I still had my fingers crossed when Nevermore sent Parsifal to Hell in a handcart.
My exasperating agent had had a fine time in Wales, prancing about in his RAF medic’s uniform. He’d bought Gog and Magog (better known to the SOE as Mr. Philpott and Mr. Curtis) more than a few rounds of flat Welsh ale in the Rhydyfelin Arms. Armed with a natty clipboard, he’d done a tour of Nanteos House, made the housemaids swoon, and winked at the butler. He had, in fact, charmed everyone apart from Lord and Lady Rhydyfelin’s corgi, which took a nippy dislike to the visiting Englishman and had to be locked in the stables.
There had been worries about the servants waking up mid-burglary, but in the event, all residents of Nanteos House had slept like logs, even the corgi. Nevermore and his two minders had faked the break-in like artists, sticking layers of treacle-paper over a scullery window before silently cracking it, and cheekily leaving the brush and pot on the sill. They’d turned over the drawing-room and study, then crated up a second-rate Turner, some silverware, and Lord Rhydyfelin’s collection of netsuke. They’d hidden this ‘swag’ carefully on the edge of the estate for its owners to collect and drop off at a bank in Aberystwyth, stowed in its vaults until the war was over.
As re-interpreted by the SOE, ‘Operation Parsifal’ had gone like a waltz by Strauss. The only ingredients to add were finger-wagging articles in British newspapers, and the stake-out of Lydia Northrop’s grave, which was scheduled to start two days after Nevermore, Gog, and Magog came back to London. Bunny Hopkins and I were on the sort of tenterhooks that are suspended from other tenterhooks, wondering what could go wrong.
Even we didn’t think Nevermore would bolt three miles from St. James’s Street, slipping through the fingers of Gog and Magog, both Detective Inspectors who’d worked for Scotland Yard before the war, and as experienced a pair of minders as you could find.
Like the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, Step One of the disaster had been a wrong turn. Approaching Finchley rather late in the evening, Magog (the driver) had made a left when he should have made a right, Gog (sitting next to Nevermore in the back) had failed to notice this, and the Tilly had ended up on the Holloway Road. It was true that due to the threat of invasion, all the street-signs had been removed. It was true that driving at night, with the slitted headlamps enforced by the blackout, required utter concentration. It was also true that Gog and Magog were of a calibre you’d think were beyond such blunders. Nevermore, who’d spent the return journey gazing out of the window and humming snatches of jazz, had passed no remarks until the error was apparent.
On to Step Two. On the Holloway Road, for reasons known only to God or the Devil, one of the Tilly’s reinforced tyres had got a puncture. Swearing under their breaths in the darkness, by the light of torches pointed downwards so as to be as invisible as possible to any overhead planes, they dragged out the spare tire and jack, and got to work. Nevermore (for once) offered to assist, and was growled at to stay inside. Like most Utility Vehicles, the Tilly had key ignition, but no locks on its doors. This shouldn’t have been a problem, however, because they all opened and shut with a clunk like a bank-vault.
Gog had been sure their awkward passenger had been sitting on Magog’s side, and Magog had been quite positive he’d been on Gog’s, and thus it was that Step Three of the debacle unfolded. Once they’d changed the wheel, it took a few seconds for Nevermore’s minders to accept that he was on neither of the back seats, nor in the front seats, nor in the boot, nor lurking under the car for Nevermorian reasons of his own. Their passenger had vanished, leaving on the dashboard one-half of a shoplifted postcard of sheep-covered hills, torn neatly in two. On the other side was his familiar scrawl:
__________________________________
Something’s come up, Titch.
Saw something I shouldn’t have.
Back soon. Don’t blame Gog & Magog.
They’re not bad, but I’m the best. N.
__________________________________
Six hours later, this communication lay face-up on a long table at 58 St. James’ Street, in what had been a dining-room, its walls marked with the sooty outlines of art removed for its own safety. The ‘dining-room’ was used by Station XX for urgent conferences, and there were five people present at this one. Four of them were Bunny Hopkins, Gog and Magog, and myself, the cold sweat trickling down my spine. At the head of the table sat the dread vision of Lt. Col. Thomas Argyle Robertson, aka Passion Pants, aka Lord High Pooh-Bah of the SOE, and as far as we were concerned, the next thing to God Almighty.
In the garden outside, dawn was breaking. Everyone but Robertson had been up since the evening before, and everyone was exaggeratedly calm. I tried to remember that an agent going AWOL wasn’t top of the list of a handler’s fears. Nevermore hadn’t killed anyone (that we knew about) or turned up dead, and he had (in his fashion) left a note. Even so, as the supposed expert on Nevermore’s moods, it was my job to nip such possibilities in the bud. I should have spotted the signs, dammit —
“You should have known,” said Robertson to me, as if we were having a fireside chat as his club. “That’s what you keep telling yourself, isn’t it?”
As counter-intelligence people went, Passion Pants was the stranger in the room. I was the hard-boiled handler of tricky cases, Bunny was the tweedy cogitator with jutting eyebrows, and Gog and Magog were the sort of policemen who’d make fine agents, did they not bear the unshakable scent of Scotland Yard. But Robertson was a fulsome chap in his early thirties, in a Savile Row suit and shoes by Lobb. He looked and spoke like any other West End playboy, but God knows he didn’t think like one.
“Yes, Sir,” I answered miserably. I couldn’t help thinking that the postcard, so careful to exonerate Gog and Magog, hadn’t asked Robertson not to blame me. Or Bunny Hopkins. Or, for that matter, Nevermore himself.
Robertson made a pencil note. Favourable, or unfavourable? It was like trying to second-guess the Cumean Sibyl.
“The question to ask isn’t ‘should’, Diceman, it’s ‘could’. Looking back, could you — or anyone — have known your agent was going to bolt?”
That was a hard question. If I wasn’t careful, Mr. Philpott (Gog) and Mr. Curtis (Magog) might get blamed for losing Nevermore, and that wouldn’t do at all. Gog and Magog were my people, and if I couldn’t defend them, I was worth less than Nevermore, whose last act before vanishing had been to absolve them of blame.
“I don’t think he ever believed we wouldn’t stake out Abney Park,” I said, “and my fear was that sooner or later, he’d send someone to check. With his history in the underworld, he might have confederates we still don’t know about. But — ”
“ — but what he wouldn’t do is carry out a perfect job in Wales, then bolt as soon as he got back. He’s intercepted heaps of counterfeit currency for us. If he’s in Berlin’s pocket, why blow our goodwill now?”
“I’ve no good answers to that, Sir.”
“I’ll make do with your bad ones.”
“Nevermore is brilliant but erratic,” I said. “He’s prone to hunches, and some are off-the-wall. Perhaps he did think he’d noticed something peculiar — or someone.”
Robertson looked sceptical. “From the back seat of a car, in the middle of a blackout?”
“I wouldn’t put it past him, Sir, but it’s more likely he thought he saw something peculiar. He’s cagey about his paranormal beliefs, since part of him knows they’re irrational, but he holds them firmly. And sometimes they’re not quite as outré as they seem. He was right about Der Überprüfung der Geheime Wissenschaften — ”
“You think that might have something to do with it? Some odd fish in that little outfit. But it is a real outfit.” Robertson regarded me shrewdly, then turned to my superior. “What d’you reckon, Bunny?”
“Nevermore is a streak of ginger shit in a pinstripe suit,” growled my superior. “More trouble than two of our other doubles put together.” Bunny was a thinking machine powered by Old Navy Shag, but he was always polite. To hear him swear was unsettling. “But if he went bad, it’d be for cash. He’d get his hands on something sellable, then bolt back to Germany.”
“I make that one vote for Nevermore being some species of shaman, one for him being a rational bastard, and we’re not ruling out the possibility he has the vision of a cat.” Robertson jotted inscrutably again. “But overall — and I cast my vote with the rest of you — I’m not writing him off quite yet. I want him found. What we do with him next, I’ll decide.”
“Should we kill the Abney Park job?” asked Bunny.
Robertson shook his head. “We push it as hard as possible. Assuming Nevermore doesn’t know who the cut-out is, and has no way of contacting them, we might pull something out of this. Make sure the cemetery’s watched day and night. If Nevermore is Berlin’s man, he’ll find it hard to contact his real masters — ”
Magog raised his hand like a schoolboy.
“ — unless he contrived to stash a second Morse set before he handed himself in, Sir.”
“You think he might have come over here with two?” asked Passion Pants 1. “Really?”
“I wouldn’t put it past him,” put in Magog (aka Mr. Curtis). “He’s the stashing type. A regular Squirrel Nutkin, is our Nevermore — ”
“ — cigarettes, stockings, half-a-dozen sovereigns,” added Gog (aka Mr. Philpott, a man of much experience, but few words). “Got hideaways all round his flat, neat as it seems. As soon as we’ve found one, he’ll move the stuff somewhere else.”
“Something else has gone missing, hasn’t it?” Roberts raised a quizzical eyebrow. “He can’t have had a gun hidden away, by any chance? You’d better tell me the worst.”
“I don’t think he likes being armed,” said Magog. “Once, he told me a knuckleduster did nothing for the hang of my suit — and according to Nevermore, the only good weapon is improvised. Carrying one shows lack of imagination.”
“Droll fellow.” Robertson’s smile was as dry as a curl of Melba toast. “All right, back to the point where something — not a weapon, but still potentially awkward — has gone missing. Out with it, Curtis.”
“The car’s gone,” admitted Magog. “His Bentley. He loves that car like a child, keeps it in a mews garage in Mayfair. Now it’s missing. And no-one saw it go.”
There was a long silence.
“Well, Donner und Blitzen und heiliger Bimbam,” said Passion Pants mildly. “Perhaps the man really is a magician. If he can play games like that with Scotland Yard’s finest, I suppose a second wireless set’s not impossible. Very well. Hopkins? Tell Barnet Y-Station2 we want to know about every radio chirp they hear. Philpott and Curtis? Make sure there’s always someone at his flat in case he has a change of heart, and put feelers out in the Underworld — bribes, if necessary — to find his car. It’s too conspicuous for an escape attempt, but he might have sold it for ready cash.”
“What about Diceman?” asked a deferential Bunny.
Robertson’s eyes flicked to my face, then back to his notes with no change of expression. I’d been told he radiated charm, even when Hell was breaking loose, but at this particular moment, his face gave away nothing. He could have read me the Riot Act; he could have given me a pep talk. He did neither.
“Since Nevermore’s handler is at a loose end,” he said, “she can provide the flowers.”
-----
Curse you, Nevermore, I thought, as pedalled towards the flower market in Columbia Road in a rage of Old Testament proportions, as far from a hard-boiled spy-handler as it was possible to be. Columbia Road was the fourth place I’d tried to find yellow flowers for the cemetery stake-out, drawing a blank each time. In addition, my quest had been interrupted by ululating sirens, and I’d spent over an hour in a public shelter before the All Clear released us.
I was more furious with my rogue agent than I could remember being with anyone. Angrier than when I found out my mother had replaced my Robert E. Howard collection with Anne of Green Gables. Angrier than I’d been with myself for falling off a ladder and busting my hip, which was normally fine for pedalling, but protested against my current speed. Angrier than I was with God, in whose service my father been devoured by the last War. Angrier than I was with Adolph Hitler, who’d nurtured the current one.
May your Bentley get squashed out of recognisable shape, Nevermore. May the fleas of ten thousand camels infest your armpits. May you get caught by Gog and Magog, who aren’t surprised by your antics so much as they’re sorely disappointed; you reckon they lack imagination, but I think you’ll find you’re wrong. Never mind being sent to Inverlair Lodge, du gottverdammter Hurensohn, I hope you end up in The Cage —
‘Paarp!’ blared a truck-horn, right next to my ear. ‘PAAAARP!’
While stewing on Nevermore’s perfidy, I’d nearly run smack into a salvage truck laden with sooty furniture; its female driver and her mate swerved off, after politely inquiring if I was bleedin’ blind. I should concentrate on the road, before I got squashed myself. Besides, the bike was borrowed from St. James’s Street, and at the moment, the SOE probably considered it a more useful asset that I was.
I slowed my pedaling, and took stock. I was angry with my disgraceful agent. But angry enough to want him sent to the Cage? The Cage was an SOE interrogation centre in Kensington that dealt with captured spies. I had never been there, but it had a hushed reputation for getting results. Nevermore might be The Most Annoying Man in Europe, but unless he really was a traitor, he didn’t deserve The Cage. Hating the blasted man wouldn’t find him — and nor would it put flowers on the grave of Lydia Northrop, Beloved Wife.
You may think it impossible for anywhere in London to be hawking flowers in wartime, but that wasn’t so. At the outbreak of hostilities, the nation had been informed by the BBC about the ‘inessentials’ (everything from make-up and he cinema, to ice-cream and beer) we’d have to do without, probably for years. The effect on morale was so dire that by mid-1940, treats made from the leavings of the War Beast had become a strategic weapon. Our ice-cream was milk-powder and saccharine — but it was dispatched by refrigerated train to cities that had recently been bombed. The pages of Woolworth’s childrens’ books were smaller than a postcard — but they only cost threepence, and there were new ones each month. Hitler was said to loathe red lipstick — it became the shade to wear, even if it was on the gritty side. And in the fields of Britain, alongside potatoes and carrots, there were occasional stripes of flowers.
When I got to Columbia Road, I found Hermann Göring had beaten me to it: halfway down the terrace was a roof with an ominous fresh hole in it, and ropes and trestles blocked off the street. An ARP officer in blue overalls waved me to a halt. Behind him, I could see anxious people being shepherded away by his colleagues.
“No-one’s been killed, love,” said the warden kindly. “UXB3. Went clean through three floors without going off. We’ve sent for the Bomb Squad, but the street’s closed for the foreseeable.” I must have still looked in a state, for he added, “Did you come for something in particular?”
“Flowers for my aunt. She was out of town when her house was hit,” I fibbed, “and I’ve just been to see the place. A write-off, sadly — but a friend of the family offered a spare room, and I thought flowers might soften the blow. I know it seems foolish.”
The warden looked sympathetic. “In that case, I’d try Ron the Barrowman in Soho. That barrow’s been there since the reign of Queen Vic, and I’m pretty sure it won’t shift until the Last Trump.”
-----
When I arrived at Ron’s Flowers in Soho, my luck wasn’t in there, either.
“You must have something in yellow,” I pleaded. “Anything.”
The barrow’s owner eyed me with interest.
“Emergency, is it?” he said. “Usually it’s the blokes as need ‘em in such a flaming ‘urry.” He was the sort of florist that even in the 40’s were rare, a barrowman from his hobnailed boots to the rick-rack braid on his cap, and he spoke crisp and flawless Cockney. Ordinarily, I’d have delighted in a bit of verbal sparring with such a gent, but time was short. In the time I’d taken to get to Soho, I’d embroidered the tale of my aunt until it would have moved a heart of stone, and Ron the barrowman got the full treatment.
“—she’s a brave soul, but frightfully upset,” I concluded, having described a sweet old creature whose end-of-terrace lay in smithereens, her sole consolation a posy in her favourite shade. “I must find something to cheer her up. I’ve looked simply everywhere.”
“Sorry, Miss, but I can’t ‘elp. Can’t the lady’s spirits be lifted by delphiniums? Got some lovely delphiniums — providing you want white. Or navy. Or lilac.”
God, my day was shaping up to be worse and worse. I eyed the white delphiniums, recalling schoolgirl experiments with tulips and ink, though the effect was never as dramatic as advertised. And even if it worked, the effect would be odd, and the last thing we needed was for our stupid, cunning trap in Abney Park to look odd. Dammit, dammit, dammit.
“Has to be yellow, but I’ll take anything. Sunflowers. Buttercups. Dandelions, even.”
“An’ if I was a magician, you should ‘ave ‘em. Which, alas, I ain’t.”
“Ahem,” said a polite voice behind us. It was the sort of ‘Ahem’ that would do credit to a butler who’s just noticed your flies are undone, and it was instantly effective. The barrowman and I stopped arguing, and the newcomer stepped into the fray: a man in a camel-coloured three-piece that was so obviously bespoke, he could have given Passion Pants a run for his money. He’d accessorised this get-up with a gas-mask satchel, a bow-tie, and a head of lamb-like curls. I freely confess that I gawped.
It couldn’t be him. It couldn’t be Narker and Ffolkes’ mysterious sponsor. Fair enough, we were just down the road from Brewer Street, but it what were the odds? (Better than I thought at the time, dear Reader, for nothing was more likely to result in an encounter with Mr. Fell than having an argument or an accident in Soho. But I’m getting ahead of myself.)
“Speak of the Devil,” said the barrowman, with a grin. “Maybe you’re in luck. Behold the Fantastic Mr. Fell, our resident practitioner of the conjuror’s arts. Got the requisite articles up yer sleeve, Sir?”
“Not quite,” said the newcomer. “Nevertheless, might it not be worth checking your stock?” His speaking voice removed all doubt. These were the plummy tones Sergeant Narker had imitated for me at the meeting of the Royal Exorcism Force, and this was our proud but shy patron, the bookman of Brewer Street.
“I know my goods,” answered the feisty florist. “Got flowers for your button’ole. Got lovely delphiniums. Got the last of the Norfolk lavender — an’ in the ‘ipothetical situation in which lavender came in yeller, the lady should ‘ave first dibs.”
“Things can get overlooked, Ron. Humour me?”
The barrowman sighed. “Anything to oblige an old friend. For your sake, and no-one else’s, I’ll search on me ‘ands and knees on these ‘orrid old cobbles.”
He knelt and poked about under his barrow, keeping up a litany of complaints.
“…I’ll do it regardless of personal dignity. I’ll scrape an’ I’ll scrounge, an’ — Argh!” A cry of horror. “Is that a rat?! In daylight!” A clang. “Nope. Must’ve bin the light. Buggerall under ‘ere but an old bus ticket, Mr. Fell, an’ a carnation what’s seen better days.”
The bookseller turned to me apologetically. “Oh dear. Well, they do say it’s the thought that counts.”
There was a muffled exclamation. “ ‘Ang on. There is another bucket.” A scraping sound. “Well, I’ll be jiggered. Yeller lupins.” The barrowman emerged, flowers in hand. “Been in the wars, mind. Four lupins for the luckless aunt. One ‘arf-squashed carnation.”
The bookseller smiled beatifically. “Not squashed, dear fellow, merely avant-garde. I insist on having the lot — carnation included. Call it three-and-six?”
Having paid the barrowman, Fell fussed his carnation into shape with hands so clean and soft they could have been made from fondant. My mother, veteran of a thousand church flower-arrangements, would have been favourably impressed. As for me, I was also impressed. Mr. Fell had walked into a situation he could have only seen from across the street. He’d been confident and charming. He’d controlled the conversation from start to finish, with charm, diplomacy, and a small overpayment for the flowers. Those were skills I associated with ambassadors and maître d's, not whipped-cream exquisites who dabbled in books. You didn’t get as slick as that without practice.
“The thing I like best about our city,” remarked my selcouth new friend, as he tucked the carnation into his lapel, “is that it’s full of fascinating specimens.” He handed me the lupins, now wrapped in newspaper. “Captain Diceman, isn’t it?” My surprise must have shown on my face, for he added, “I may seem a duffer, but I know an REF pin when I see one, and our organisation is not vast. I heard you made quite the splash at St. Brides'.”
Cripes, I thought, I wonder what Old Narker’s been saying. It also occurred to me that somebody capable of scrutinising a hatpin from any distance must have the eyes of an eagle. Mr. Fell might be gifted with aquiline powers of observation, but if so, his mild grey peepers gave nothing away.
“I can’t let you pay for the flowers, Mr. Fell. They’re a family expense — not a company one.” I supposed the Royal Exorcism Force was a company, of sorts. More than ever, I felt I didn’t belong anywhere near it.
“Ah, yes. My commiserations to your aunt.” My REF patron looked genuinely sympathetic. “It’s nice to meet such a stickler for fair dealing. You can pay me back at the bookshop.”
-----
You will note that Mr. Fell didn’t ask if I actually wanted to visit his bookshop, but it was the sort of treasure you’d have to be a dullard not to want to investigate. Most shops are just places to buy things, but the right sort of bric-a-brac dealer, bookshop, or ironmonger is the closest you can get, in this earthly plane, to haggling in a goblin market, or picking through a dragon’s hoard. Beneath its grubby gilt sign, every pane of A.Z. Fell & Co.’s ancient windows was criss-crossed with blast tape, but the shop was open for business — in its fashion. A typed note stuck to the inside of the door gave a flavour of what lay within:
Since I am now your local ARP Warden, I will endeavour to keep this shop manned during the hours of ten until two, Tuesdays to Thursdays, so that books can be purchased and exchanged, but displays of stage magic must become less frequent. When not on duty as Warden, I may occasionally perform in public air raid shelters, but I make no guarantees.
Please keep to the public areas of the shop. The area beyond the taped line is effectively my sitting-room and contains nothing that could be of interest (any valuable stock has been moved to a place of safety for the Duration). Anyone attempting to enter my sitting-room will not be prosecuted; they will be given an improving recital from Tupper’s Proverbial Philosophy. Repeat offenders are advised that I also own the complete works of William McGonagall.
At first, the interior of the shop seemed a mad jumble, but as my eyes adjusted to the light, I could see that it was a fortress of two halves, divided by a half-height wall made not of stone, but of bookshelves, strategically reinforced with a hatstand and a Welsh dresser. Everything in this barricade had a purpose. On the dresser were pyramids of bandages, and tins of ointment for mustard-gas burns, while the hatstand bore a set of bluette overalls, an Air Raid Warden’s helmet, and an ancient, cream-coloured top hat, presumably for use in stage magic.
The air smelled of wax and age, so the books on the accessible shelves were a surprise. They covered a variety of subjects (‘The Divine Comedy’ rubbed shoulders with ‘Riders of the Purple Sage’), but they were secondhand paperbacks by Everyman, Penguin, and even Mills and Boon. About a fifth were Woolworths’ Mighty Midgets, the childrens’ books that sold new for threepence. An honesty box bolted to a bookshelf bore the price-list:
Paperbacks: 3d ea. or, three for 6d (return discount per book: 1d)
Hardbacks: 4d ea. or, three for 1/– (return discount per book: 1 1/2d)
Woolworth's Mighty Midgets: 1/2 d ea. or, three for 2d (return discount per book: 1/4d)
With the return discount, that was the same price as the old twopenny libraries that had sprung up after the Depression, where you could rent (not buy) a book for tuppence a fortnight. Most had long since shut — but A.Z. Fell’s, it seemed, had steeped into the breach. Whatever it might have been out of wartime, the shop was now furnished with books for which there was an insatiable demand. Just not very much cash.
“Not what you expected?” asked the owner of this escapist stockpile.
“You must subsidise the reading of half the West End. How can you make money?”
“By doing what I’ve always done — match uncommon books to uncommon buyers. But war is a mental battle, just as much as a physical one, and therefore, one does one’s bit. See anything you fancy?” he said, noticing my glance at the Mysteries and Adventures. “A Gladys Mitchell for long evenings? A Zane Grey? A dash of Ottwell Binns?”
“I think I’ve read almost everything by Binns.”
“So have I! A challenger appears! Binns wrote a great deal, though.” He fossicked among the books, and held one out. “How about ‘The Trail of Adventure’?”
“Read it, I’m afraid.”
“Perhaps you’d prefer ‘The Poisoned Pen’?”
“Read that one too.”
“Foiled again! All right, what about ‘The Lost Stradivarius’?”
“Isn’t that one by J. Meade Faulkner?”
“Heavens! So it is. I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is to meet a veritable Binns enthusiast. All right, I can offer ‘The Diamond-Buckled Shoe’, ‘The Green Arrow’, or ‘Diana of the Islands’ — though I think he wrote those under a pen name — ”
“Ben Bolt,” said I, before recalling I was meant to be a pedestrian secretary type4. There was something about Mr. Fell that invited perilous levels of honesty; I’d have to be on my guard. “I’ll take the first one. But I’ve still got to pay you for the flowers.”
“I will accept three shillings from you, Captain Diceman, and not a penny more. And don’t forget about our return discount.”
“Do you really do conjuring tricks?” I asked, as I put ‘The Diamond-Buckled Shoe’ in my satchel.
“I dabble, but there’s been less call for it since the evacuation.” He gave the top-hat a regretful pat. “Most of my conjuring these days happens on the page.” He indicated the Woolworth's Mighty Midgets, where among such childrens' tales as ‘The Runaway Robot’, ‘Lifeboat Ahoy!’, and ‘Brave Nurse Emily’, there were indeed titles starring ‘Fantastic Mr. Fell’. The Fantastic Mr. Fell and the Bookshop of Wonders. The Fantastic Mr. Fell Sees All. The Fantastic Mr. Fell and the Mysterious Mummy, its cover a riot of Egyptian hokum.
“Good Lord,” I said. “You’re famous.”
“Moderately, to a readership between the ages of six and twelve. Woolworth’s had a notion to bring out childrens’ books about real people, and one of their researchers happened to hear about me. Before I knew it, there was a series, and I was hunting a jewel thief wrapped head-to-foot in bandages through the British Museum.”
“You, or the thief?”
“I think it might have been both of us. Not bad for a ha’penny, if you don’t mind creased covers and the occasional trace of jam.”
Mr. Fell ushered me over the strip of blast-tape that separated the public bit of the shop from the inner sanctum. There seemed nothing (apart from the fear of William MacGonagall) to stop the inquisitive from crossing it if they were so inclined, and I wondered how he dealt with real-life thieves. Perhaps he waited for them to get lost, for beyond the point where hoi polloi were permitted to browse, things grew labyrinthine. Most bookshops arrange their stock by theme, but the hinterland of A.Z. Fell & Co. made no such concessions. The pricy stock might have been evacuated, but it still contained Collected Works in ambush, teetering stacks of musical scores, and more French/English dictionaries than Soho could possibly need. The only symptom of the Twentieth Century was a glossy black telephone; a private house number was quite an indulgence at the time. Mr. Fell’s furniture looked like it had been rescued from distressed country-house libraries, but he must be making money somewhere.
“Have a pew,” said the bookman, as he settled into an armchair from which I expected springs to pop at any moment, and indicated that I should follow suit. “This seems as good a time as any for the interview.”
Ffolkes and Narker hadn’t sad anything about an interview, but thanks to my quest for the last yellow flowers in London, I’d now been thrown in at the deep end. With trepidation, I sat in a chair embroidered with a Bible scene — a dove returning to a tatty little Noah's Ark. I grimly recalled such furniture from my youth; it always belonged to the sort of vicar who tested you on your knowledge of the Psalms. I prepared myself to be bored rigid.
“The interview?" I asked. "Will I be chucked out if I don’t pass?”
He raised a remonstrating hand. “Captain Diceman — ”
“That’s just the start of it. Even if my father was a Witchf— a member of the REF, there’s no earthly way I deserve to inherit his rank.”
“I did not found the REF, you realise, and nor did I come up with its colourful traditions. If you found your way to St. Brides’ under your own steam, under the summons of a hereditary calling, then I doubt my humble self could stop you from becoming a Witchfinder. The interview is because some REF missions are frankly rather perilous. Others need diplomacy, or knowledge of ancient texts. Not every member of the Royal Exorcism Force is suited for every operation.”
“Not ideal, seeing as there are so few of us.”
“It is not in numbers, but in unity, that our great strength lies,” intoned the bookseller. “There may only be threescore Witchfinders in this Sceptred Isle, but every one is worth his hire. Or her hire, of course,” he added.
Threescore witchfinders? Having met Narker and Ffolkes, I suspected you could strike the ‘score’ off that claim. When the actual REF reconvened at St. Brides’, the Sergeant and I were going to have words.
“Mr. Fell, I don’t know what wild tales Sergeant Narker has told you about my father, but I’m only a secretary at the Ministry of Labour,” I said. “If I have any notable Witchfinding talents, I’ll be very surprised.”
He leaned forward in his chair, which exhaled a puff of dust. “Very well. Let us find out.”
There followed the oddest interrogation that up to that point, I’d ever had with anybody; Nevermore included. I’d expected a bunch of questions about my late father and the Bible. Instead, Mr. Fell put me through my paces with an assortment of fiendish crossword clues, of which I managed two-thirds. Then we were onto codes and ciphers, which, given my actual line of work, was a bit disconcerting. Had I heard of the Baconian cipher (‘Isn’t that the one people use to prove Francis Bacon was Shakespeare?), the works of Trithemius (I had, but denied all knowledge), and the Alphabetum Kaldeorum (A Medieval substitution alphabet that was genuinely new to me). The bookseller’s knowledge of cryptography was formidable — just three hundred years out of date.
On to the matter of the paranormal. Did I believe in ghosts? How about werewolves and vampires? (I replied that the latter two seemed pure bunkum, and though I couldn’t prove that everyone who reported seeing a ghost was imagining things, it was odd that ghosts were so crowd-shy). If someone did claim they had supernatural powers, what would be the most modern way of tackling the issue? (I admiringly described Private Ffolkes’ run-in with Medium of the Caledonian Road, which earned me a wry chuckle). On to the the meat and drink of the matter: on a scale from Daily Mail horoscopes to Nostradamus, what did I think about…prophecies?
This was the project for which Mr. Fell provided the Witchfinder Army with funding, and therefore, the question on which I needed to be most open-minded. Sitting in a threadbare armchair in the inmost recess of London’s oddest bookshop, I gave it my best shot: if the ability to see the future was real, then surely, it would long since have been weaponised.
“Weaponised?” That had been the wrong word to use. Too military, too unlike a secretary at the Ministry of Labour, too likely to stick out like a sore thumb to a professional dealer in words. Suddenly, I had the undivided attention of an alarmingly sharp mind.
“You’re not going to tell me people haven’t tried,” I offered. “Sooner or later, if it were possible, some king or other would have found someone who could see the future, rather than rummage in goat guts. They’d have told their priests to keep an eye out. They’d have offered them money. Privilege. Positions at court.”
“Yes, yes,” said my sponsor impatiently. “Let’s suppose those inducements were tried. Let’s suppose that they drew false prophets — God help the poor buggers — like moths to a flame.”
“Why didn’t they work on the real ones?”
His grey eyes twinkled. “One can only suppose it was because they could see into the future.”
Ha. That little paradox was tricky to counter. Fell’s gaze went vague, as if looking into a great distance, but I was sure that behind them, the Fell brains were making connections like a telephone exchange.
“Miss Diceman, if you could see the fates of men, and you’d seen what happens to people who simply imagine they can do so, would you tell everyone about it?”
“Absolutely not.” I shuddered. “I’d rather become a hermit.”
“Curious, isn’t it, how many prophets have lived that way? But suppose your knowledge becomes hard to bear. In whom can you safely confide? Not anyone in your own time, surely. Before the dawn of art, you might howl your secrets to the wind. Later, you might paint them on the walls of caves. But when writing comes along — ”
“You can send it to the future. And someone in the future might even understand you, after you’re dead. You’d have to be an odd duck to find that satisfying. But if you could see the future, maybe that would matter less.”
“Not bad," he said lightly. "There is, of course, another way of sending oneself to the future.”
“You surely don’t believe in time travel?”
“An interesting idea…but not the answer in this case. Try again.”
For the first time in my life, I found myself thinking about what it might be like to have prophetic powers. At best, you might get life in a gilded cage — until you made your first mistake. At worst, you might meet the sort of fate that involves pincers and hot tar. More likely than both: a secret taken to the grave. I thought about the Mighty Midget childrens’ books, and the conjuror’s topper gathering dust on the hatstand.
“You could write it down for your children,” I said at last, “assuming you had some. And they could hand the prophecies down to theirs. A leg-up for your descendants, for as far into the future as you can see.”
“Emperors have fought wars for less.”
He got up, and showed me to a glass-fronted cabinet, right at the back of the shop. It contained small, padded cradles of chamois leather, for books too precious for normal shelving. Four-fifths of the cradles were empty.
“This is where I kept my collection. All the old classics: Nostradamus, Ignatius Sibylla, the Shabuhragan of Mani. I studied them minutely, in first editions. I searched for codes, for variations in spelling or typefaces. After years of study, I concluded that’s probably not what we’re looking for.”
The man was utterly serious. I was no bibliophile, but even the dross of Mr. Fell’s collection looked more than a hundred years old; the only title familiar to me was an antique Mother Shipton. “Is this why you fund the REF? You think books like that really exist?”
“Sergeant Narker warned me you are something of a sceptic — and even you just admitted their existence is theoretically possible. We must keep looking.”
“How will you know if you’ve got the goods?”
“By identifying successful predictions, probably involving money, land, or personal preferment for particular families, that happened between the publication date and our present time. But they might well be abstruse, in case the book fell into the wrong hands. Unlocked only with familial knowledge, or tied to small local events. Finding ‘the goods’, as you out it, might need a great deal of lateral thinking.”
“Hence the interest in crossword puzzles.”
Fell’s face, dimly reflected in the glass of the book-case, lit up with gratified intelligence. It was like being caught in the reflected beam of a lighthouse.
“Very, very good!” He turned to me and clapped his hands together like a child. “If I do find a candidate, I know you’ll be an asset to the cause.”
“There are candidates, then?”
“That isn’t common knowledge, but indeed there are. People say they’re legendary, but then, people say the unicorn was legendary — ”
I waited for him to elaborate, but before he could do so, his telephone shrilled into life.
“Drat!” exclaimed the bookseller. He picked up the receiver — “Soho 324” — and listened intently to whoever was on the other end. Whoever they were, they started talking without letting him get a word in, and what he heard didn’t seem good. His sunny expression hardened, and he put a hand over the receiver.
“Duty calls,” he said quietly, with a nod towards the door. “Until we meet again, Captain.”
In spite of myself, I touched my Witchfinder’s pin.
I biked the yellow lupins to 58 St. James’ Street, where they were glumly received by Magog, who’d be spending the next 12 hours with another SOE heavy in a cramped mausoleum in Abney Park, hoping to catch the cut-out. He strapped them carefully to the top of his haversack, which contained his blankets, his camera, and his service revolver. I’d volunteered to be art of the watch team, pointless though such a gesture might be. Unlike yours truly, Gog and Magog had real surveillance expertise, and between watching the grave and looking for the Bentley, they’d both be run at least as ragged as me. I wasn’t the only SOE operative to be dropped in the soup by Nevermore.
On the bus home, I thought and thought and thought. But I wasn’t thinking about Nevermore, and whether or not he was a traitor. I wasn’t even thinking about what game might be afoot in Abney Park Cemetery. I was thinking about the mistake Mr. Fell had made about ‘The Lost Stradivarius’. That slip had been very well done. It would have fooled anyone who hadn’t been drilled in the interrogator’s arts by an expert like Bunny Hopkins. It had not, however, fooled me. It was what was known in the spy trade as a ‘scrutiny check’: an error that would be picked up by someone who knew the field, but missed by anyone else. He'd even used a follow-up question: what was the author's pen-name?
What his reasons might have been I couldn’t fathom. But I was pretty sure that although Mr. Fell and I had had what Bunny would call ‘a nice little chat’, the important thing, from Fell’s point of view, was that I really had read the works of the Reverend Ottwell Binns.
1. A reasonable question at the time. At the start of WWII, portable radio transmitters for espionage use were the size of briefcases. return
2. Y-Stations were British Signals Intelligence sites that recorded Morse radio traffic; some were tiny outfits operated by individual radio hams. The Y-Station collation site in Barnet dealt with encrypted messages. return
3. An unexploded bomb in WWII parlance, now usually called ‘unexploded ordnance’, or UXO. return
4. Dear Reader, I now know that this is an extreme presumption regarding real-life secretaries and their reading habits, but it was how I thought at the time. Mea culpa. return
Notes:
1. Lt. Col. Thomas Argyll Robertson, alias 'Passion Pants' head of the Station XX.
I solemnly swear that Robertson will be the only further non-GO cast member to make an appearance. He’s also the only character who’s a real-life person, though online article on him are still scanty. His genuinely oddball character is cribbed from this article (oddly, from the Scottish Daily Mail, but I'll take it).
2. How many people does Aziraphale think are in the Witchfinder Army?
In the book, WA membership has been on the slide since the last C19, so it’s likely the payroll was padded out well before Shadwell’s time. Book Shadwell’s ‘Witchfinder Army’ not only has Majors named Saucepan, Tin, Milk, and Cupboard, but boasts 500(!) bogus members. I had to reduce this because c’mon, Aziraphale has his Angel-brain Moments but he's not actually stupid.
3. Woolworth’s ‘Mighty Midget’ childrens' books.
These tiny books were a significant feature of WWII for British children, and will (with the very mildest spoilers) feature in the ongoing plot. The word ‘midget’ was, at the time, used to imply that a product packed a lot into physically small dimensions. I would not use it in a work set in the modern day, but since this is a historical fic, it must stand.
Chapter 6: Three Men in Suits
Summary:
'In counter-espionage, patience is indeed a virtue.'
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
1. Champagne and Pin-Stripes
When I started this confession, Dear Reader, I could have sworn that September the 7th wasn’t a memorable date before the early autumn of 1940. That was foolish. Important things have happened on various September the Sevenths: 1812 gave Napoleon his Pyrrhic victory at Borodino, for example, and in 1936, the last Tasmanian Wolf curled into his basket, never to awake. What I meant, of course, was that prior to 1940, September the 7th hadn’t brought much of note into the life of Regina Morley Diceman.
Days after I’d visited A. Z. Fell & Co., that all changed. One definition of power is the ability to change the lives of people you’ll never meet, and on September the 7th, 1940, Hitler showed how he planned to change ours. His messengers came on wings, like great grey angels of death. We'd seen them before in broad daylight, but now they came by night.
I was at Station XX when the ack-acks first started; it was mid-afternoon. London’s anti-aircraft guns were concentrated in city parks and on the Docklands, and in St. James’ Street, we’d got used to hearing them intermittently. They were the signal that the sirens weren’t a false alarm, and it was time to seek refuge in the mansion’s cellars, newly fitted with lights, tables, and a reinforced ceiling, so that XX personnel could keep working during raids 1. This time, though, the racket went on for what felt like hours, making it hard to focus on my task: painstakingly attaching names and backgrounds to the people Gog and Magog had photographed passing through Abney Park. Night-porters and nurses, boilermakers and illustrators, undertakers and editors, and one probable lady of the night passed before my increasingly-weary eyes, while the ack-acks went ‘Whump…Fratz! Whump…Fratz!’, like the fireworks of a demented giant.
That evening, my bus home was waved down and redirected by a grim-faced policeman (I was developing the knack of not thinking about why), and as we slogged toward Islington, the sirens wailed once more. That, I felt, was so wholly unfair that it must be a false alarm; not even the Luftwaffe would come for us twice in one day. I coddled that notion until I got back to my lodgings in Matilda Street. No sooner had I knocked once than the door was snatched open, and a hand grabbed my collar. It belonged to my landlady.
“Finally!” she said, slamming the door and switching on an electric torch. “We’re to get in the shelter. Mr. Digby’s orders.” Even under normal circumstances, Mrs. Irene Digby — world-class knitter, and noted authority on the difference between 'marrying types', 'fast boys', and 'rotters' — was not a woman to trifle with. Under threat of bombardment, she was Queen Victoria in a siren suit.
“Another raid? We’ve had one already.” As I spoke, the sirens were joined by the crackle of ack-ack guns, more distant than they’d been that afternoon, but just as frantic.
“At least the size of the first, is what the ARP was told. You’ll be needing one of these,” added Mrs. Digby, as she handed me her spare torch. “My Albert said they’ll aim at fires below, and hit what they didn’t get the first time. First time he’s spoke about fighting, these past twenty years.”
Mr. Digby had served in the Great War. As far as I knew, he’d come through physically unscathed, but as soon as Chamberlain had declared we were at war, Mrs. Digby had drawn me aside, and requested that I ask nothing about Albert’s time in France. In spite of experiences too grim to describe, he had nonetheless volunteered as an Air Raid Warden.
“Has your Albert gone out?” I asked.
“Soon as the Red Alert came through. Clapped his helmet on, and off he went. Last thing he said was to get in the shelter, and no objections.” She smiled tightly. “Let’s hope it’s comfier than it looks.”
Up to this point, no-one had used the Anderson shelter apart from Mr. Digby, who’d found its earth-covered roof perfect for growing vegetable marrows. There were reasons for this aversion. An Anderson was a corrugated-iron hut, half above ground and half below; they were cramped and spidery, and even less inviting in the wet. The cots had upholsterer’s webbing nailed into them in lieu of mattresses, and managed to combine the worst aspects of both bed and hammock. An Anderson was preferable to the tomb — but it did a fair impression of one.
“Surely they won’t waste bombs on us?” The instant I said that stupid thing, I thought of Columbia Road. There’d been nothing to make that street worth hitting either. Its biggest attraction was its flower market, but even so, it had had a narrow escape.
“That’s what I told Bert. And you know what he said to me?” She put a hand on my shoulder. “He said, ‘If you were up there, Irene, and you didn’t get rid of all your bombs on your first run, but the ack-acks were going and you had one or two over, what would you do?’ ”
Two minutes later, I was scrambling into my own siren suit and packing my things, in a completely different state of dread to the one I’d felt when told Nevermore had skipped town. I’m going to have to pretend to be physically brave, I thought in dismay, as I shoved my worldly goods into a Rexine suitcase. And I’m not brave. I’m a wretched Nosy Parker who wants to feel important and clever, and God help me, that’s not at all the same thing. How long can I keep this up? A month? Six months? A year? 2 However much I wish I was the hero of this story, it wouldn’t be the truth. Please remember while I was covering myself from being blamed for Nevermore’s antics and desperately trying to find him, people like Mr. Digby supplied the routine courage, keeping watch over the Highbury and Islington station which was furnished with a one-man shelter, shaped like a big iron bell, to lock himself in if things got really bad. I often wondered how anyone sat it them without going round the bend.
At least I didn’t have much to pack. My father’s Communion kit, of course. My stock of other reading matter, now comprising a copy of The Diamond-Buckled Shoe by the Reverend Ottwell Binns, and a Hinds and Noble English-German Dictionary I’d won at school. Studying of the tongue of Schiller and Goethe was deprecated by the Digbys — ‘I suppose someone has to know the wretched language’ — but it gave useful cover; they both believed I worked as a translator in a big Governmental bureau, which was handy when I kept odd hours. Since my furtively-reading schooldays, my dictionary had had an additional use, as the ideal place to store texts I’d rather nobody knew about. For example, a folded copy of ‘Diabolical! Hot off the Press!’.
Under the threat of being blown up, the Anderson shelter proved 25% more inviting than it had looked in daylight. Inside, the two of us coaxed a fishtail of flame from our safety lantern, just enough for Mrs. Digby to unravel an old jumper by, ready for a second life as socks. As for me, I lay on one of the cots we’d made back in the Spring, wishing we’d nailed the webbing a bit tighter. Half my brain kept insisting we were play-acting, but the other half knew all too well that we weren’t, and wanted distraction. ‘The Diamond-Buckled Shoe’ wouldn’t cut it. The Reverend Binns was a dab hand at buckling the swash, but what I’d appreciated about his books now proved a weakness: however great the danger, his heroes would always pull through.
Like many people caught up in real-life upheavals, I found myself in the mood for hokum. Which, as it happened, I possessed — in the form of ‘Diabolical! Hot off the Press’. Providential, that.
Bring me vampires, werewolves, and abyssal merfolk, I thought, bring me horrors too otherworldly to be true. If it didn’t take my mind off doom from the skies, perhaps it would provide insight into Nevermore’s corkscrew psyche. Sadly, there were fewer pages of werewolves and drowned temples than I remembered — but on the other hand, there were considerably more pages of ‘Von Schall of the Reich’. At least twice as many, enough for a whole second installment that I surely wouldn’t have overlooked before. But there it was, in black and white, inviting itself to be read. From the opening scenes in Germany, the setting had shifted to a party in the States.
What I read, head under the blankets by torchlight as I’d done in my guilty teens, was this:
VON SCHALL IN MANHATTAN
{Panel 1: A party in full swing in an exclusive hotel. Chandeliers glitter, men in white tie dance with women in silk dresses, and ice sculptures drip onto the canapés.}
Caption:
New York, 1938. A charity fund-raiser for the Federal Writers Project.
There are two late additions to the guest list. One is a red-haired stranger
with the air of someone important, though nobody knows what he does.
- - -
{Panel 2: On a balcony above the dance floor, the Demon peers out from behind an ice swan. He wears an obnoxiously smart pin-stripe suit, and the expression of someone whose night has just been ruined.}
Caption:
The other addition got in the old-fashioned way: donations and blackmail.
No-one quite knows what he does, either. Which is probably just as well.
- - -
{Panel 3: Von Schall strolls up beside the Demon, a champagne coupe in either hand.}
SCHALL: [proffering a glass] So, my friend…
DEMON: [scowling] —don’tsayitdon’tsayitdon’tsayitdon’tsayit —
SCHALL: …we meet again.
DEMON: Have you any idea how hackneyed that sounds? How in Heaven’s name did you find me?
SCHALL: You did not expect us to meet without a Summoning Seal? Yet here I stand, though I had to find you by old-fashioned detective work. A pleasure, truly. Take a glass.
- - -
{Panel 4: A snarl of illegible curses appears above Demon’s head. The ice swan becomes a puddle.}
DEMON: [taking a glass, with reluctance] You didn’t have to make it an order.
SCHALL: I find it useful to test the limits of our temporary arrangement. Soon, I hope, to be more permanent.
DEMON: No human ever roped me into a longterm contract. Ever. And believe me, lots have tried.
SCHALL: All part of your rare charm. I own many books, my friend, yet not one of them contains your Seal. Dagon, yes. Malphas, sicher. Even Beelzebub, if I was radically insane. But not you.
DEMON: I’m ex-directory. Like all the best people.
- - -
{Panel 4: Von Schall mops up the melted swan with his handkerchief, and wrings it into an ice-bucket.}
SCHALL: ‘Und die Schlange war listiger denn alle Tiere auf dem Felde.’ Happily, your kind are predictable in the matter of souls. I knew you would come hunting here. Not even an educated guess. Let me tell you, I feel jilted.
DEMON: Heinz, you’re a hundred and thirty-six, you're damned, and if you complete the ritual you’ll be damned twice over. I want fresher goods.
- - -
{Panel 5: Von Schall leans his elbows on the balustrade. Below, the crowd are drinking and dancing.}
SCHALL: You expect me to believe you are tempting them? Pah! The souls down there are marked with their asking price, and the price is always in cash. Fools, I tell you. Fools!
DEMON: More sensible than you.
SCHALL: I am power-crazed, not stupid. I do not, for one moment, believe you are here for any of these specimens.
- - -
{Panel 6: Von Schall points out a man who stands apart from the rest, arms folded, brooding nobly.}
SCHALL: No, no. You are here for him. The literary wunderkind. The latest to perpetrate the Great American Novel that is somehow just around the corner.
DEMON: Not my type — any more than I’m his.
SCHALL: Do not be obtuse. He is a person of pure heart; you intend to corrupt him, and prevent me from completing my ritual.
- - -
{Panel 7: A young Waiter approaches, bearing a tray of filled glasses.}
DEMON: [Grinning] Intend? Intend? Why d’you think he came in the first place?
SCHALL: It was you! And it was you who corrupted the doctor in Lisbon, wasn’t it! His discovery could have saved millions, yet he sold out to the highest bidder. There were two British educators who might have been suitable. A month after I found them, they were at each other’s throats —
- - -
{Panel 8: As Von Schall rants, the Demon switches his own glass for another. The Waiter passes on.}
SCHALL: — I assume that was you as well. There was the woman who sold the diary her dying friend asked her to burn. And the nun with the visions! I thought her safe in her convent — but even there, she fell to spiritual pride!
DEMON: [Shrugging] A hazard of the profession?
SCHALL: I demand you tell me, here and now, how you managed to cross Holy Ground!
DEMON: Nuns are gonna nun. That one was nothing to do with me.
- - -
{Panel 9: Von Schall advances on the Demon with an accusing finger outstretched.}
SCHALL: But all the rest were! You are tempting the pure of heart as soon as their paths cross mine.
DEMON: I’m just doing my job.
SCHALL: Pah! You cannot directly defy me; you cannot harm me; therefore, you follow my movements and spoil my candidates. You…you are cheating!
DEMON: Not my fault if the ingredients for a certain rite are rare.
SCHALL: Nak-Hayauda, I carry Holy Water in my pocket, and the Host in a case on my watch chain. I could have put either in your glass. I could order you to drink it —
- - -
{Panel 10: Before Von Schall can finish, the Demon drains his champagne defiantly.}
SCHALL: Magnificent! Proud as Satan, yet more subtle. I can see why no-one has succeeded in taming you.
DEMON: And you aren’t going to be my first. Look, final offer: quit the human sacrifice scene — messy and old-fashioned — and I’ll do my best for you when you die. It won’t be much, but then, you don’t have that many options.
SCHALL: I have three years, and the pure-hearted are not so rare as that. But now I must be off, in search of…fresher goods, as you might say.
DEMON: See what I did tonight, getting to the goods ahead of you? Think I can’t manage an encore?
SCHALL: Yet there are places you cannot go, and there are weapons that you fear. But not for long! Soon, we will be in a position to correct one another’s deficiencies. I tell you, my friend, we will be unstoppable.
DEMON: [SOTTO VOCE] We’re both going to lose.
- - -
{Panel 11: The party is over. Servants attack the debris with mops and brooms. Above them, on the balcony, the Demon is asleep on a chaise-longue, surrounded by empty bottles.}
- - -
{Panel 12: The Demon is still asleep, but the young Waiter is shaking him gently by the shoulder.}
WAITER: Mister? Hey, Mister, are you okay?
[The Demon doesn’t move.]
WAITER: All dressed up, and no home to go to, huh? You wouldn’t be the first.
- - -
{Panel 13: A blanket now covers the Demon’s shoulders, and a carafe of water is on the floor beside him.}
WAITER: [checking his watch] Buddy, you got two hours to get sober. If you’re here after that, you’re out.
[The Demon doesn’t move, but one eye is slightly open, a sickle of brightness in the dark.]
- - -
{Panel 14: Dawn. The clock over the dance floor reads 2.30 am, and the hotel staff are clearing away the last of the festivities.]
[The Demon saunters past, heading for the street and ignored by all, including the young Waiter, who is polishing mirrors.]
[The Demon’s bearing is that of a soldier after an exhausting, hard-won victory. But he is smiling.]
----------
The long B-flat of the All-Clear sounded at 4.00am. At 4.30, Mr. Digby arrived back with the news that nothing major had dropped in our area, and the less welcome news that it was time to search for stray incendiaries, armed with downturned torches, stirrup-pumps, and buckets of sand. We found no incendiaries that time, and blundered back to bed in our siren suits to try getting some sleep.
I had yet to discover the knack of sleeping after such a night. Instead, I checked my blackout blinds and I re-read the Von Schall part of ‘Diabolical!’ from start to finish, as thoroughly as if it had been a captured enemy document. I had the growing conviction that ‘Von Schall of the Reich’ was a roman à clef — and that the clef was Nevermore's life before he joined the Special Operations Executive. In Germany, the 'demon' had appeared in a dressing-gown, Byronically disheveled, but once he was dressed to the nines, there was no ignoring the resemblance to my agent. The artist was even skilled enough to give the the ‘demon’ the same loose, expressive gestures, and the same deftness when he switched the coupes of champagne. But if Nevermore was depicted more-or-less faithfully, what about his persecutor? When I’d read the first installment, I’d wondered if Heinz von Schall of the Überprüfung der Geheime Wissenschaften, and ‘Von Schall of the Reich’, were the real and the fictionalised forms of the same person.
Now, I was almost certain of it.
The comic showed von Schall’s face angle by angle: a high, sarcastic forehead and a long, inquisitive nose. It was a face disguisable with glasses and a beard, but even so, if I saw the original in good light, I would stand a decent chance of recognising him. Had Nevermore commissioned the comic while he was in the States? That would be a strange thing to do, not to mention expensive, but Nevermore was a man of strange and expensive tastes. And if you were being coerced into working for the Nazis, commissioning a portable allegory of your plight wouldn’t be so stupid. Had Nevermore, the first time I’d met him, presented me with a plea for help?
Stripped to essentials, the story showed a demon who didn’t want to serve his Summoner, let alone be tied to him any closer, but was bound against his will and couldn’t break free. Which, in the real world, meant blackmail or threats. I racked my brains for a secret that might force Nevermore, who had hidden neither his shady past, nor his freewheeling views on the masculine and the feminine, into obeying someone against his will. It was hard to imagine him having anything as easy for SOE background-checkers to discover as a wife and family, but could there be someone, female or otherwise, who was definitely not his wife?
Could he have a secret love child? (Not impossible, but surely a chap like Nevermore, with years to get such a hostage to fortune out of Europe, would have long ago finagled them into a safe country like the United States.) Could he actually have killed someone? I reluctantly admitted that that I couldn't strike that ugly notion out. But in that case, Nevermore’s guilt must be provable here, in Britain, perhaps years after the event; short of a hand-written confession, I didn't see how that was possible. And how would his German handlers inform the British police of their agent’s crimes, and expect to be believed?
At least the whole comic was a nod to fantasy. Because if I were a Nazi diabolist, and I’d bound a demon into serving the cause of the Reich, they wouldn’t be going near anything that might be the Holy Grail, no matter how unlikely a candidate it might be. And I definitely wouldn’t put their dead drop in the middle of hallowed ground.
2. Bovril and Brown Flannel
“If I didn’t know better,” mused Magog, as he settled his cup on its saucer, “I’d say the late Mrs. Northrop knows we’re using her grave for shenanigans. And the lady doesn’t like it.”
At the time of the Great War, Detective Sergeant Curtis must have been what Dickens unkindly called a ‘beef-faced boy’. At present, he was pale about the gills, but at least he was being honest about the reason for it. In a job where women were thin on the ground, being dropped in the soup by my agent had had one good result: Nevermore’s gruff minders, previously stand-offish, had decided we were Companions in Woe. Thus it was that after a fruitless fortnight putting out feelers into the London underworld (nix to that), waiting for our agent to surface of his own accord (no luck there), and searching city garages for the Bentley (which, in spite of Gog and Magog’s best efforts, might as well have been a phantom coach thus far), Miss Diceman and Mr. Curtis sat as approximate equals in the canteen of Station XX, drowning our sorrows in Bovril at six in the morning. St. James’ Street was always manned, but for the moment, we had the room to ourselves.
Incredible as it seems, wartime London still boasted — on straitened menus and eroding wine-lists — a number of gentlemens’ clubs, and a fair number of Station XX Top Brass were members. Those of us who, for whatever reason, didn’t count as ‘gentlemen’ had the canteen: an aluminium hot-water urn, a series of tables, and those institutional teacups of a particular green that send me back to my war years like Proust with his madeleines. The canteen had once been the mansion’s kitchen. Hooks for pheasant now carried telephone-cables, and over the door were bells, to summon the footmen of a vanished age.
“There’s been a rational explanation every time,” I said unconvincingly. Acquiring lupins in Soho had been the bright spot in two shitty weeks, and even that had proved a qualified triumph. They’d lasted an hour before vanishing, later spotted woven into a squirrel drey in one of Abney Park’s great oaks.
“I can’t argue with that, and you know it,” grumbled the former detective sergeant. Mr. Curtis, if you remember, was the one of Nevermore’s minders who favoured brown suits and no tie, in case someone grabbed it while he was walloping them, and he favoured a hard man's brush cut. He was, however, no fool. “There isn’t a good explanation for how many times it’s happened.” He counted off the incidents on his meaty fingers. “Blown away by a gust of wind — twice. Eaten by slugs — twice. Dragged underground by moles — moles! In the middle of London — once. Carried off by squirrels, crows, and on four occasions, rats — ” He broke off, and stared at me. “I don’t expect you to believe this, but I reckon the rats work in pairs, same as Gog and I do. One to do the job, and one on lookout.”
In the forties, Bovril was widely advertised as a remedy for ‘that sinking feeling’. It wasn’t working on me.
“Lookout rats? Surely not, Mr. Curtis — ”
“Magog. Our wide boy Nevermore calls me Magog, and Mr. Philpott is Gog, and we both know you know it, so don’t fib. First time in our lives we’ve been given codenames,” added the detective, with a touch of pride, “so we’re keeping ‘em. The thing we both wonder is, what does he call you?”
“Titch,” I admitted, and the big man smiled as if I’d just won him a bet (perhaps I had). His mood didn’t last.
“Look, neither Gog or me are the nervous type. We’ll camp in a graveyard with cameras for as long as it takes, air raids or no air raids, and at least a mausoleum keeps the rain off. We don’t believe in ghosts — leastways, not the sort in white sheets. Maybe there aren’t any lookout rats. But both of us reckon something’s messing us about.”
It was true that the flowers on Mrs. Northrop’s grave vanished with weird regularity. At least I’d had no trouble finding replacements. Every florist I tried managed to find something in yellow, usually late-season sunflowers. It was a war of attrition between my ability to find the blooms, and the ability of Abney Park Cemetery to vanish them again.
“Well, if that’s the case — and I’m not saying the flower business isn’t strange — it only seems to be affecting you two,” I said. “No-one else seems to be put off going through Abney Park; Mr. Hopkins is very pleased with your pictures. How many people have you photographed so far?”
“Thirty-six. But the flowers are sometimes there, and sometimes not, so no-one’s come close enough to the grave to definitely be our man — or woman. Could be one of the people we’ve photographed. Could be none of ‘em. Your Mr. Hopkins has pinned the lot of them up on a corkboard, all covered in notes,” he added, with professional distaste. “No actual detective actually does that.”
“Well, maybe they should,” I said tartly. Bunny Hopkins was my mentor, and no-one else was allowed to cast aspersions on his methods, thank-you. “We’re making good progress.”
The detective looked attentively sceptical, as only policemen can.
“Mr. Curt— Magog. In your old line of work, I suppose you sometimes — in a casual sort of way — asked a suspect who you reckoned had been somewhere they shouldn’t, if they had any explanation for their movements.”
“All the time. Give ‘em enough rope, and wait for ‘em get into a tangle.”
“And how often did that line fail? How often did they have a credible, checkable explanation?”
“Credible and checkable?” He took a slurp of beef tea. “About one time in ten.”
“But that’s the trouble with being a cut-out: you must have a credible excuse. Honest people will have any number of half-baked reasons for walking through Abney Park. But anyone who checks a dead drop has have a plausible reason for passing by, in case they’re ever asked about it. So either they live in the vicinity —
“ — or someone they were close to really is buried there. Or, at a stretch, they tend to the place. That does narrow it down.” Another thoughtful slurp. “Maybe your Mr. Hopkins and his little cork-board will come good, and maybe they won’t. But nothing beats catching your man red-handed.”
“I believe you. But we may have to get them by cross-referencing personal details. Cut-out work is safe as long as no-one on the other side knows you exist, or where your dead drop is — and we know both of those things. Have faith.”
“Christ, I wish I did,” he replied, with surprising earnestness. “Do you believe in this religion lark?”
“Descended from four generations of vicars.”
It was the truth, but hardly the whole truth, and definitely not nothing but the truth. Magog raised an eyebrow, as well he might.
“That’s on a need-to-know basis,” I added. “Don’t noise it about, or I’ll get ribbed for it.”
That seemed to reassure him, so I didn’t reveal that I was the familial black sheep. Detective Sergeant Curtis was clearly steeling himself to articulate something that didn’t make entire and perfect sense to him. I knew that sort of expression. I’d caught it on my own face more often than I liked, reflected in the dark windows of my homeward bus, as I considered what peculiar mental clockwork might make Nevermore tick.
“Titch — ” he began unhappily.
“Magog,” I replied, stern as someone who in no way belonged to a witch-finding club that classed supernatural threats on a ten-point scale.
“Suppose something is messing us about. Not the late Mrs. Northrop. But — something.”
“All right, suppose that something is. What should we do about it?”
Curtis gazed deep into his cup, as if some hint to the future of Operation Parsifal might lie at the bottom of it. “We were thinking, maybe, something along the lines of a priest? They sprinkle Holy Water and say things in Latin.”
“An exorcist? You want to exorcise her grave?”
“That’s what Gog called it, ‘cept he doesn’t hold with the Church of Rome. Personally, I’d shake the hand of the Pope himself, provided he could sort things out. Do priests over here still do that sort of stuff? Does anyone?”
As luck would have it, I know the very people —
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said.
3. Tobacco and Tweeds
Before I could discuss the subject of exorcism with the assembled might of the REF, there was a further development. I was summoned to Bunny Hopkins' office in St. James’ Street (the same one which I’d used for debriefing Nevermore) for a one-to-one conversation with the master of extracting usable intelligence from shit. It was evening, which made me apprehensive; Bunny was what my match-making landlady would call ‘a confirmed bachelor’, but he’d already become notorious for ignoring air-raid sirens.
As I opened the door, enough smoke billowed into the corridor to make an ordinary person reach for a stirrup-pump. I knew better, and prepared to be mercilessly kippered. Having now lived so long that it’s starting to embarrass me, I suppose I should thank Benjamin Hopkins for putting me off tobacco in an age when everyone lit up at the least excuse. The lamp on his desk cut a cone of light through the smoky air.
“Just got up a good thinking fug,” explained my mentor, waving his briar pipe at me as if from a great distance. “Shut the door, and don’t let the genie out.”
Received wisdom at the SOE was that Bunny was always in a bad mood. The truth was that his good moods coincided with other peoples’ bad ones, for he loved tough problems as a caterpillar loves a ragwort leaf. I described him before as a wizard; not the majestic sort in flowing robes, but the scraggy sort who roughs it through the forest, living on roots and berries, talking to trees, and sometimes getting answers. As further proof of eccentricity, at a time when every second man you met had a moustache, Bunny sported a beard that was already flecked with grey. Odd he might be, but he was an irreplaceable asset. Trained minds like Gog’s and Magog’s are useful in counter-espionage, but not rare. Mercurial minds like Nevermore’s are fun, but hit-and-miss with results. Rarely do you get minds like Bunny’s, equipped (or cursed) by Nature with the ability to cross-reference hundreds of marginally-useful facts, and draw testable conclusions. In general, people like him were spirited away by the cryptography crowd before the SOE caught the scent of them — though you’d have to be somewhat upwind of Bunny to fail to do that. I thought of him as an ancient being; in reality, I doubt he was over fifty. The war, which removed the necessity of pretending to have a personal life, must have been a blessing to him.
As I picked my way though the ‘thinking fug’, black-and-white images swam out of the haze, as if at a séance: a young chap with his hands in his pockets; a grey-haired gent stooping to tie a shoelace; a lady in a narrow-brimmed hat; a man in a Homburg, frozen mid-stride. Bunny had hung his contentious new cork-board next to our office map of Europe, and on it were candid-camera photos of people passing through Abney Park cemetery, along with dates, times, and a nickname. The nonchalant young man was ‘Donkey Jacket’, for example, the two older men were ‘Shoelace’ and ‘Homburg’, and the lady was ‘Flowerpot’. Bunny must have been working round the clock, but for the moment, he sat with his back to his labours, frowning at what I could now make out as a radio intercept.
“Agent Tyche,” he said formally, “this meeting never happened. We might think we’re having a nice little chat, but in reality, we are not here. Understood?”
My heart sank. “Understood.”
“Sit.”
Dear reader, you are no doubt familiar with this scene from films, where the person thus addressed looks keen to be let in on a ripping secret. In reality, I can tell you, it doesn’t feel ripping at all. I sat in the chair in which my rogue agent had once laughed at me, one red-socked ankle crossed on his pinstriped knee, and braced myself to hear that he was dead.
“I was only briefed myself because of our mutual connection to Nevermore. I was briefed because you — you, of all level-headed souls — convinced our Lord and Master Robertson that Nevermore’s magical beliefs might be behind his disappearance.”
“I still think that could be true,” I said cautiously, and allowed myself to feel a touch of hope. Unless Nevermore had resumed communication with Station XX by ouija board, anything connected to his belief in magic probably wasn’t terminal.
“Well, here’s your earthly reward. The Y-Station in Barnet picked it up, along with two others, but this is the only one the Unmentionables have been able to break 3. Barnet asked us if it could be a list of codenamed enemy operations, but Robertson thought it might be something else. See what you make of it.” He slid the decoded intercept over the desk with one fingertip. It read:
- - - - - - - - - -
DATE 23/09/40 / TIME 23.44HRS
STATIONS: Y-BARNET (OP. #11), INVICTA MOBILE #3 /
INTERCEPT GP. #3495-2 /
MESSAGE BEGINS /
- - - - - - - - - -
R O B E R T N I X O N Y
U R S U L A S H I P T O N Y
I G N A T I U S S I B Y L L A N
O T W E L L B I N S Y
A G N E S N U T T E R U N V O L V
M A R T H A D I E Z I G E U N E R I N Y
H A R M O N Y
- - - - - - - - - -
/ MESSAGE ENDS
- - - - - - - - - -
I double-checked the T’s and N’s in ‘OtweIl Bins’: one apiece. For an obscure English madman, I was coming across that name a lot of late. I’d never heard of Robert Nixon or Agnes Nutter, but Mother Shipton was a prophetess, anyone called ‘Martha the Gypsy’ was probably in a similar line of work. Decoded intercepts were often cryptic, but this was the first one I’d seen that was literally arcane.
“By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes,” observed my mentor. “I got someone in from the British Library to confirm they’re prophetic works by sundry British lunatics — though one of them might not exist. Agnes Nutter was notorious enough to die at the stake, and a single prediction apparently did the rounds in the 1700’s, but our librarian opined that there was never an actual book.”
“But all the rest are real?”
“For a charitable interpretation of ‘real’. Their contents may be bosh — I suspect you share my opinions on that — but the intent was in earnest. What Robertson and I wondered was if Nevermore had ever mentioned anything on the list.”
“He has his oddities, but I’d not forget something like this. Can you tell me where it was sent from?”
“Not exactly — ” he puffed out more fumes, “but if you suspect the reason for this secrecy is that it’s on our side of the Channel, you wouldn’t be wrong. It’s a low-powered transmitter operating in South-East England, and it shifts position between each message. In my opinion, we’ve caught ourselves a live one.”
By 1940, Britain bristled with direction-finding antennas, some of them in mobile vans. Operating a rogue transmitter in such territory is risky, and if they can avoid it, a field agent never sends from the same spot twice. Either the mystery cut-out had started making transmissions (a rare development; owning a radio set is far more dangerous than checking a dead drop), or there was another German spy we didn’t know about. Or…the transmissions were being sent by my own vanished agent. I didn’t pray the last possibility wasn’t true, but I found myself hoping particularly hard. And something else was bothering me, though I couldn’t quite put it into words.
“There’s another agent over here? It couldn’t…it couldn’t possibly be Nevermore?”
“Unlikely. First, the fist’s very different. Second — and this is to go no further than this room — Nevermore’s messages would presumably be going in the direction of the coast; these started at the coast, and are working inland. But that’s not the funniest thing.” He leaned forward eagerly. “The funniest thing is that whoever this Harmony might be, he’s a deep scholar, but no great shakes as a cryptographer.”
I scanned the message again. “Three repeats of ‘O-N-Y’?”
“A serious oversight on the part our unknown friend — especially if ‘Harmony’ is his codename. Even so, the Unmentionables needed three days to brute-force it. The keyword turned out to be Derqulutha.”
I admitted that the word meant nothing to me.
“I’d be more surprised if it did. Apparently, it means ‘opponent’ in Classical Syriac. Extinct in all but a liturgical capacity for centuries.” Bunny held up a didactic finger. “Remind me, Reggie, what’s the blunder that can always be avoided?” It was his favourite bit of the spycatcher’s catechism, and I’d given the answer many times before.
“Codewords based on personal details.”
“ — and woe to those who pick ‘em. But this chap? This chap is cleverer than everyone he’s ever met — so far,” added the spycatcher fondly, like a poisoner planning his next brew. “I reckon we’re evenly matched.”
One reason why no-one works as both spy and spycatcher is that the roles are so specialised. Another reason is that what a cable is to a high-wire artist, a ‘legend’ is to a field agent: a tight, high path on which they must balance or die. There are truths woven into a spy’s legend, of course — one can’t change one’s age or sex, and social class is near-impossible to shift — but not enough to support their weight. And who could sleep knowing that wire-cutter minds like Bunny’s are out there, snipping though the falsehoods, strand by strand?
“What makes you so sure it’s a man?” I asked, looking over his shoulder the photographs on the pinboard. About a third of the passers-by were women, and my mentor had often groused that British counter-intelligence didn’t worry enough about loyal, diligent secretary types. One of the photos bothered me, but I couldn’t quite say why.
“Between ourselves, I don’t consider myself a ranking expert on the female sex,” admitted Bunny. “But I recall that you got cold-shouldered for pointing out that some of our agent’s codenames were clues to their real identities. I also know that some of the Twenty Committee — I won’t name my sources — consider you ‘a bolshie box of goods who thinks she’s the cleverest thing out’. Would you have done something like this?”
“Not in a million years.”
He smiled — or at least, the corners of his beard twitched a little. “There we have it: our uninvited guest is a man. Even so, the Unmentionables couldn’t have broken this message without his insistence on gifting us triplets by suffixing the titles Y or N. Or, in one case, V. A particularly interesting ‘V’, don’t you think?”
“Ya, Nein, Vielleicht — yes, no, and perhaps,” I guessed. “ ‘Unvol’ for the Nutter book is probably ‘Unvollständig’ 4 — seems a bit generous for something with one surviving prophecy. All right. I think it’s possible that the entire Überprüfung der Geheime Wissenschaften is deep cover for some other operation, and that when they list prophetic tomes, they’re actually referring to military targets — ”
“ — but despite valiant attempts at common sense, your feeling is that someone might be trying to find this stuff.” He took the intercept back off me, and tucked it securely in a folder that (disappointingly) was not marked TOP SECRET, but with a jumble of letters and numbers.
“It just seems so incredible.”
“Interesting times, Reggie, interesting times. Would it stretch your credulity any further to learn that Himmler leads an actual cult? Runes. Ceremonies. The works.”
Bunny got up and beckoned me over to the Map of Europe. He glared at Germany, found Westphalia, then traced a path eastwards from Dortmund to where a single dot had been inked in by hand: Wewelsburg.
“Some Holy Roman bigwig built a fortress there in the sixteen-hundreds. Himmler’s kitted it out as his Aryan Temple. Top Secret since ‘39, and half the Schutzstaffel are members. With regard to Operation Parsifal, the place even has a Grail Room, and — more relevant to our mystery message — an esoteric library. Its scholars are SS to the last man.” My jaw must have been hanging open, for my mentor waved a palm irritably before my face. “Don’t look so astonished, Reggie. You’re the person who persuaded Top Brass to take the UGW seriously.”
I looked from the map to the corkboard; once again, something about the cemetery photographs bothered me, but once again, I couldn’t articulate what it was.
“Not this seriously,” I said at last. “You honestly think that whoever sent that message could be one of Himmler’s inner circle?
“And I’m not the only one. This goes right to the top of a certain house in Downing Street.”
I stared at him. “Good Lord.”
“I’d be surprised,” said Bunny, dry as ever, “if the celebrants of Wewelsburg have very much interest in him.”
After that, he made me recite the authors on the intercept, first in order, and then in reverse, along with their status according to the mysterious ‘Harmony’: four 'yes's, one 'no', and that interesting 'perhaps'. Not to boast, Dear Reader, but I very rarely made mistakes at that sort of task, so I was taken aback when Bunny didn’t immediately dismiss me and get back to his cogitating.
“Did I make a mistake?” I asked, after the silence had gone on for longer than was comfortable.
“You know you didn’t, Reggie, but you seem preoccupied. I wondered if there was something bothering you. You know my motto: only a fool thinks a thing is too foolish to mention.”
“I just I keep wondering where Nevermore is, Sir, and if he’ll turn up.”
“Hmmm.” He exhaled rich fumes of Lamb’s Navy Shag. “Don’t we all, Agent Tyche. Don’t we all.”
I left the resident hermit of Station XX to his pipe, his corkboard, and his everlasting hunt for tiny lies and unavoidable truths.
-----
Of course there was something bothering me, Dear Reader, and since you’re an inquisitive sort, I’m sure you’re busy guessing what it was. I’ll give you one point for concluding that I knew someone in the Abney Park photographs. I’ll give you two points (redeemable for feeling jolly smug) if you’re right about who it turned out to be.
I didn’t recognise the young man keeping his hands warm in the pockets of his donkey jacket, and I didn’t know the lady in the flowerpot hat, gas-mask satchel on her hip. I didn’t know the man in the Homburg.
But I was pretty sure I knew the grey-haired man, stooping beneath an oak-tree for reasons I couldn’t make out. It was probably something innocuous, for he wasn’t anywhere near Lydia Northrop’s grave. He really might have been fussing over a shoelace. But at a time when most people had invested in dark clothes, he stood out in a pale overcoat, and since the photographs was black-and-white, his hair could have been anything from grey to flaxen. His face was only in half-profile, but he had a distinctive retroussé nose.
I reckoned it was my civilised friend, Mr. A. Z. Fell, and I should definitely have said so: another one for the books, as Gog and Magog would have put it. And believe me, I tried. Even as we were talking, I kept on thinking ‘I must tell Bunny that photograph no. 23 is probably one A. Z. Fell, Soho eccentric and mild-mannered bibliophile’. But just as soon as I mentally jotted down that notion, it was erased agan. Granted, we were discussing important matters, but that didn’t explain it. It was the reverse of the experiment where you’re told to under no circumstances think about pink elephants. I needed an idea to take shape. I actively willed it to do so. It wouldn’t.
So it was in a state of silent frustration that I left Bunny Hopkins alone with his photographs. The worst of it was that the feeling didn’t dissipate, in spite of my using various subterfuges to make sure I didn’t forget. I tied a knot in my handkerchief, for example; I jotted ‘TELL BUNNY’ on a piece of paper, which I found a year later in the pocket of a coat I wasn’t even wearing at the time.
At first, I tried putting this personal oubliette down to overwork. The trouble with that idea was that when I concentrated on any other task, I was rewarded with at least my usual powers of concentration. And not to put too fine a point on it…no-one really wants to believe that they might be losing their marbles, do they?
Have you ever gone upstairs in search of something, only to forget what you came for? Down you go again, and the moment your foot touches the bottom step, you recall why you went upstairs in the first place. Do you tell a single soul — the love of your life, the friend of your heart — about this mortifying insight into the vicissitudes of memory? Perhaps you are too young to know this, dear reader, but believe me, you do not.
1. Perfectly safe, we assured each other, though a direct hit would have blown us to smithereens. Underneath Whitehall — though not far enough — Churchill’s own bunker ran on much the same basis. return
2. The answer was eight months, more or less. It was probably a good thing we didn’t know this at the time. return
3. Since their existence is now public knowledge, you’d be right in thinking the ‘Unmentionables’ were indeed the codebreakers at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. In 1941, Bletchley was so secret that even at Station XX, only Lt. Col. Robinson would have known its physical location — the rest of us knew of it by function, but not by name. You probably know more about the place than I do. return
4. ‘Unvollständig’ : 'incomplete' return
Notes:
1. The fundraiser Crowley and Von Schall attend in New York is for the Federal Writers Project, created to tide at least some professional writers through the Depression.
2. The crockery of which Reggie has such vivid memories is Woods Ware, a staple of the war years that was efficient to make and came in any colour, as long as it was pastel green/blue/yellow. Years ago, there was still a ton of it knocking about in English village halls, hospitals, and schools. I never saw it in anyone's home, and was mystified as to where it came from: the answer was WWII. Teenage me should have stockpiled some and cashed out later, because now it's 1940's chic.
3. I don't want to get too bogged down on the minutiae of radio direction-finding (or code-breaking) in this fic, but a quick diagram of direction-finding can be found on this Cryptomuseum page, under the heading 'Triangulation'.
Chapter 7: Rats and Rationality
Summary:
'The secret agent must always be patient. The task itself may be humdrum -- but a useful link with other facts.'
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
As far as I was concerned, the Blitz had one great merit, a thing that almost made the chance of being blown up worthwhile: it gave us the chance to put Operation Parsifal on ice. The more days that Gog and Magog spent in fruitless vigil at Abney Park Cemetery, the more convinced I became that staking out Lydia Northrop’s grave was a mistake, more likely to scare off the cut-out agent — assuming they were still alive, active, and in London — than ensnare them. In addition, with no Nevermore on the horizon, we needed to play for time, and I reckoned the Blitz could help with that too.
By insisting that the Welsh ‘Grail’ be deposited at the left-luggage office of a railway station, Nevermore’s Berlin handlers had given us an unwitting gift. A left-luggage ticket was handy if you didn’t want two agents to know each other’s identity, but it also provided a spanner to chuck in the works of Grail retrieval. I argued strongly with the SOE for morsing Berlin a message, purporting to come from my missing agent, with the news that although he’d thought the station where he’d stashed the cup was far enough from London to be considered safe, it had sustained an unlucky hit in recent raids. The place hadn’t burned to the ground, but the surviving luggage had been taken away, and of course, Nevermore the Diligent was trying to find out where. But for the moment, there was no point in the cut-out trying to retrieve the left-luggage ticket from its sealed pot, buried just an inch deep next to the Northrop headstone, since Nevermore had retrieved it himself. The cut-out would have to bide their time. It was a plan made from the offcuts of circumstance, but it had its points.
Alas, at least one of my XX Committee superiors must have been dead set on their trophy capture, even though the chances of pulling it off were lower than a dachshund’s belly-button. It was a stupid decision made by intelligent people — and it was so far from being the first time I’d seen it happen, I’d taken to calling it the Carruthers Effect.
Reader in the sainted future, you’re probably familiar with the Evening Standard’s ‘All Behind You, Winston’ cartoon: our unlikely champion rolling up his sleeves like a boxer, followed by the War Cabinet, then by the rest of the country, determined to pull together for the National Good. The truth is that there’s nothing like war for leapfrogging one’s career over the bounder (let us dub him ‘Carruthers’, an irritating name) whose unwarranted promotions have held back one’s own deserved advancement. When an ambitious chap of upper-middling rank must choose between minutely bettering the odds of Hitler’s downfall, and a decent chance of getting promoted ahead of that wart Carruthers, the War on Carruthers often wins — and the advice of handlers, minders, or even a backroom boy like Bunny Hopkins, is as chaff upon the breeze. The person who solves this problem will become the greatest military genius the world has ever known, but that person wasn’t going to be Regina Morley Diceman.
An additional problem was that I’d promised Magog — alias Inspector Curtis (and, but extension, Gog — alias Inspector Philpott) that I could arrange for Lydia Northrop’s grave to be exorcised of whatever spookery was ailing it. I couldn’t very well invite Sergeant Narker or Private Ffolkes to that little party, so that left Yours Truly, hereditary Witchfinder at large and increasingly put-upon sceptic. Could someone who didn’t actually beIieve in God (beyond a mutinous conviction that if They existed, They showed every sign of being a bastard) go convincingly through the motions of an exorcism? I found myself in the position of the Nobel Prize winner who was once taken to task by a fellow scientist about the fact he kept a horseshoe over his door.
“Don’t tell me you believe in that sort of thing?” scoffed the colleague.
“Of course not,” replied the Titan of Science, “but I have it on authority that it still works, even if you don’t.”
I hoped that was approximately true.
Hassocks and Hellboxes
The next time I knocked for admittance at St. Brides’ Printworks, at 3pm rather than 6 — it being no longer prudent to meet in the evenings — I got a surprise. The voice demanding that I Avaunt, Aroint, and Defy the Foul Fiend wasn’t cloak-and-dagger, but young and chirpy, and when the door opened I beheld the bespectacled form of Peter Ffolkes, illuminated by a torch pointed at the ground in ARP-approved fashion. At first I feared that the Witchfinder Private had been beaten up, perhaps whilst subduing an obstreperous coven, or flirting short-sightedly with the wrong girl, for there was a blue-black mark on his forehead, and a purplish one on his cheek. Then I noticed his hands, which were even more discoloured than his face. Of course, the ‘bruises’ must be smudges of ink.
“Working the presses?” I asked, as we navigated the blacked-out corridors by torchlight.
“Alone? No fear! A press is a two-ma — a two-person job. But there are lots of other chores,” he added virtuously. “Old Narker says the devil makes work for idle hands.”
“Douce fellow,” said I. “And where might he be at present, if that’s permitted knowledge?”
“Gone next door for a meeting with the padre.”
I was startled. I’d yet to meet the vicar of St. Brides, but from Narker and Ffolkes’ description, the man was about as Church Militant as a rich tea biscuit.
“Is he mixed up in all this?”
“Not exactly, but the REF and the church have been neighbours for a very long time. The vicar never asks what we do with the stuff, but he sometimes supplies us with Holy Water — and the Host, if we happen to need it.”
“Sounds like a job for Van Helsing,” I quipped. Surely the boy was pulling my leg? In my youth, I’d read Dracula an embarrassing number of times, and as far as I recalled, Van Helsing’s gentler therapies had met with mixed success. Sooner or later, the good doctor would break out stakes and a mallet.
“The REF is prepared for all eventualities.” It seemed that the boy was not. I privately wondered where vampires fell on the REF’s 10-point threat scale.
Though no less crowded with machines, the printing-room looked more modern than the last time I’d seen it — there was a large-letter Reliance press used by the poster-makers, a smaller one used for pamphlets, several lever-operated models for student use, and a few that had actually been made less than thirty years ago. These changes, it transpired, was also down to the Blitz. St. Brides’ Printworks possessed cellars, the ARP needed space, and the room that was accessible by stairs from the exterior had been requisitioned as a bomb shelter. Its presses now huddled in the Witchfinder Army’s headquarters, displacing some real antiques which had been moved out of London entirely. All but one: a Common Press so old it worked by a brass screw, with an inscription on its cross beam:
☙ FONS SAPIENTIAE VERBUM DEI • B&S • 1647 ❧
“The Fount of Knowledge is the Word of God.” At least my schoolgirl Latin was good for something. “Why’s that one still here?”
“Officially, because no-one knows how to take it apart — ” Ffolkes, who had the heart of a lion, but not the eyes of an eagle, gestured at the press, and then did a tiny double-take. There was a something like a small, dark notebook resting on the corner of the press, something that I got the strong impression should not have been there. Something he hoped I hadn’t seen.
“And unofficially?” I said quickly.
“Unofficially, Sergeant Narker has a hand-drawn manual passed down since the Regency. Hang up your kit, Captain, and I’ll get the stove going.”
I made a great show of hanging up my coat and gas-mask satchel, and sure enough, Ffolkes took the opportunity to tuck the offending object into his palm, and slip it into a desk-drawer like a conjuror. By the time I joined him in the corner I was starting to call the Witchfinder’s Snug, with its jam-jar mugs and cupboard of mysterious Supplies, he’d recovered his composure.
“The truth is, the REF still has a use for that press,” he fed the stove a handful of precious coke chippings, and blew on the flame, “or more to the point, I do. When the time comes, we’ll ‘find’ the manual and dismantle it. But not quite yet. And in the meantime,” he complained, “I’ve been sorting Hellboxes for hours and hours. My eyes are going squiffy.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask what a Hellbox actually is.”
The Witchfinder Private gave me an owlish blink. Then he grinned, in the time-honoured way of someone who’s just got a new recruit to ask for the tartan paint.
“Now you’ve done it. It’s those that ask as gets the task. Prepare to be ineffably bored.”
A Hellbox, it turned out, was a relic from the days of old-fashioned printing, and sorting one is typesetting in reverse. As a setter, you pick your metal type from a shallow wooden tray divided into dozens of compartments, one for each letter, upper and lower-case, plus punctuation. You assemble the text, line-by-backwards-line, into ‘sticks’ (chunks of typeface the size of a bar of chocolate) then hand them to the actual printers, who clamp them into what will, when inked and pressed, become a page: the ‘galley’. At the end of a print run, the galleys are released, but before the setters can re-use them, the jumbled letters need reassigning to their compartments — and hence, the Hellbox. Sorting one is a task traditionally reserved for the most junior members of a printworks, or any newcomer who expresses curiosity about the name.
Fortunately for me, the type used by the trainees of St. Brides for their pamphlets was on the large side, and since SOE training made one methodical, I didn’t disgrace myself when sorting my p’s from my q’s. But I couldn’t hope to match Ffolkes. The young printer removed his milk-bottle specs, perched on a vertiginous stool at a tilted desk black with time, then attacked a second Hellbox like a short-sighted machine by the light of an Anglepoise lamp. I was equal parts impressed and curious.
“Surely those are too small for posters?” I asked, as type pattered into the setting-tray.
“Well spotted. They’re for my graduation masterpiece,” admitted Ffolkes, without a trace of boasting; his use of ‘masterpiece’ was entirely accurate, just two hundred years out-of-date. “Well, one of them, anyway. Officially, it’ll be The Dunciad — which I did not choose, by the way, it's the dullest thing out — but satire won’t do for exorcisms. Well, not unless you really respect the works of Alexander Pope.”
Exorcisms? Ever since Inspector Philpott’s polite but unusual request, I’d racked my brains how to broach this subject with the REF, and here it was, served on an inky platter. Not for the first time since Nevermore became my agent, Lady Luck had come to my assistance as if someone had slipped her a ten bob note.
“What’s your book of choice?” I asked. This was no time to quibble with the notion of combat literature.
“‘A popular History of Witchcraft’ by the Reverend Montague Summers. If that doesn’t put the wind up the Forces of Evil,” Ffolkes added, with the relish of a weapons expert, “I don’t know what will. But it’s a secret project. It’s all right if you know about it, you’re REF, but —”
“ — not everyone at St. Bride’s would understand.”
“Old Narker can’t help me, he’s out checking crypts and tunnels. Pretends to be examining them for choke-damp, but we both know what he’s really after.” He tapped the side of his nose.
I didn’t know, but I could guess. As it became clear that London was desperately short of deep shelters, every available underground space — some sealed off for years — was being investigated by Air Raid Protection. The Medieval tunnel-mines at Chislehurst had been opened, as had old wine-cellars in the East End, and even crypts cleared out by Victorian champions of burial reform. It might be sensible to check the air in such places was breathable, and Mr. Narker did do part-time duties for the ARP, but I had a feeling he was really looking for something else.
“Ghosties and ghoulies?” I asked. “Dracula himself?”
“I’m pretty sure London’s never had a major ghoul problem. But I don’t think we can write off the possibility of vampires. Not in the Dracula way, with fangs and a garlic allergy, but — ”
I remembered my last run-in with ‘Diabolical! Von Schall of the Reich’, and the diabolist’s determination to the sacrifice not just the symbolically pure or treacherous, but anyone foolhardy enough to love him.
“ — but in the sense of people who’d do anything, anything at all, to live forever?”
“If there was a way, no matter how grim, someone would try it. And who’d try to stop them but us?” The glare of the Anglepoise momentarily limned the young Witchfinder in light, as if he really might be able to drive the Forces of Darkness before him, and then the illusion was gone. He sighed. “Meanwhile, we’ve got three apprentices still studying here, and I’m a journeyman nowadays, so all the extra teaching falls on me. I’ve had to make extra time for sorting the blasted Hellboxes. I might as well live down here.”
“Can’t you just use a Bible for exorcisms?”
“Yes, but I’d still like something I’ve put together myself. In its heyday, the REF did a lot of field testing, and it turns out that a book you’ve got personal faith in sometimes works better than the actual Good Book. Old Narker’s got a Polyglot Bible1 that Mr. Fell gave him, and a copy of Blades’ ‘Shakespeare and Typography’ he set himself. He says where exorcism’s concerned, an expert learns to play it by ear.”
The most recently-printed page of Montague Summer’s magnum opus was pegged out to dry above the stove, and Ffolkes took it down for my inspection. Monty had certainly given it both barrels:
‘The depths of diabolism are well-nigh as difficult to reach as the heights of sanctity, and its Grand Masters are gifted with genius, distorted and diseased though it may be. The majority of the population are safeguarded because few human beings want anything very strongly, and fewer still are capable of fierce self-discipline. Vast ambitions entail proportionate exertions; they do not admit of mental untidiness. It is for this reason that an unwearying will sometimes becomes a focused power, almost a hypnotic force. In the realm of created intelligences, a supreme example of this intensified will is Satan.’
“Powerful stuff,” observed the Witchfinder Private.
“Not half.” Lurid though the the assertions might be, they again reminded me uncomfortably of Heinz von Schall’s vile quest to wring every ounce of value from damnation. Which was a fiction, of course. No Nazi occultist was scouting for the ingredients of a ritual that would cheat Hell of his rotten soul, if only for another hundred years. No put-upon demon was trying every trick in the book to stop him.
The distant jangle of the doorbell indicated the arrival of Sergeant Narker, and Ffolkes departed to Aroint, Avaunt, etc. — leaving me a precious half-minute to betray the young man’s trust. As soon as he was gone, I shamelessly opened the drawer he’d nudged shut when he thought I wasn’t looking. What he’d stowed there wasn’t a notebook. Instead, it was a composing-stick, shorter than normal page-width and made of wood, loaded with antiquated type that was impossible to read backwards. I wasn’t certain the text was even English, but it was evidently no part of Witchcraft and Black Magic which was in a different and larger font. There was no time to waste, so I fished a scrap of paper from the discard bin, and pressed it as had as I could against the four lines of type in the stick — uninked, of course, but there are ways of making such impressions legible later. By the time Ffolkes returned with Mr. Narker, I was diligently sorting through the Hellbox labelled ‘Pamphlets’, with the impressed paper tucked inside my shoe. If my motives for this information theft hadn’t been so bizarre, Bunny Hopkins would have been proud of my fieldcraft. My haste and guile proved unnecessary, because when the rest of the Witchfinder Army returned, they were having a noisy difference of opinion.
“…refresh my aging memory, Private Ffolkes — is our organisation dubbed the Royal Scepticism Force?”
“No, but to be frank with you, Sir, it sounds like the vicar might have been at the Communion wine. Again.”
“I tell thee, the Game is Certifiably Afoot!”
The short, determined figure of Tarquin Narker radiated such excitement that it had dislodged his combover. He bore what I first assumed was a Bible under one arm, but on closer inspection, it turned out to be a church hassock, which he flung to the table with the air of a triumphant gun-dog.
“Devilry!” he announced, as London grime, embedded in the cross-stitch by generations of knees, whomped into the air like snuff. “Cunning familiars! Sendings of evil! Behold their ghastly works!”
I sneezed. “Are you sure it’s not moths?”
“Mr. Narkers says not.” Ffolkes poked at the cassock, which bore a couple of half-crown sized holes. “Did this one come from St. Brides’, Sir?”
“E’en so,” said the Sergeant. He flipped his errant locks into place with a practiced gesture, helped himself to a jarful of tea, and began searching the Witchfinder Army’s field supplies cupboard for powdered milk. ‘‘ ‘Tis a Portent. A Portent, with the eyewitness proof of a Man of God! The vicar himself saw the culprits in the vestry — ” He broke off in horror. “Dear God! What modern Hell is this?”
Next to the milk sat a depressingly beige tin that was becoming a familiar sight to anyone with a sweet tooth. Mr. Narker looked at it as Hamlet might regard the skull of Yorick.
“The milk, I must and will endure,” he said, with tragic dignity. “A pinch of bicarbonate to stretch the tea-leaves? Such horrors happened in the last War too. But alas, has the REF come down to saccharin?”
Ffolkes nodded sadly. The Witchfinder Sergeant fixed his tea as best he could, and drank with the air of a man newly resolved to slay the Nazi Beast.
“Concerning these intruders,” I asked, “would the vicar know them if he saw them again?”
“I misdoubt it, Madam, for they were rats. A rodent invasion at our very gates.”
“This is London, though,” objected the practical Ffolkes. “They say you’re never more than ten feet from a rat, whether you know it or not.”
“Then hear this, O ye of little faith: one rat was searching the cupboard of altar linens — hanging ajar, though the vicar swore he’d locked it — and the other was keeping watch.”
“Keeping watch?” That detail knocked me back, for it chimed with what Magog had told me about the rats in Abney Park. One mention of unnaturally observant rodents in a week could be laughed off. Two was a worrisome coincidence. Three, and I’d keep an eye out for the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
“Like a sentry.” The REF Sergeant nodded. “The man was adamant.”
Ffolkes have his specs a rub on his sleeve. “Sir, you know as well as I do that the ARP are turning the city upside down to make more deep shelters. Couldn’t the rats just be getting turfed out?”
“Perchance they could, young Witchfinder. But that cannot account for the phenomenon entire. Rats have been seen reading notice-boards — rat-traps have been triggered with pencil-stubs — and dozens of hassocks have been found — ” his voice dropped to a stage whisper, “tunneled clean through!”
He took up the hassock and a broom, and demonstrated. It was true.
“If you have a mundane explanation for that, good Sir and Madam, I would fain hear it.”
Ffolkes and I exchanged a look.
“Are you suggesting London’s churches under siege from rat detectives?” I said.
“Stranger things have happened. Though admittedly, not often.”
“In that case,” pondered Ffolkes, “what are they looking for?”
“Who can say?” Narker was as serious as a High Court judge. “The question is, what we do about it. If it they prove to minions of evil, we must Thwart them — but if they be hunting some wickedness, we share a common quarry. In either case, we should be in practice.” He turned to Ffolkes. “Time to don your bells, boy.”
Ffolkes grimaced. “Do I have to? I’ve been practicing like anything in private.”
“All the more reason for a senior Witchfinder to check your technique.” He passed the young Private a pair of what looked like leather greaves, adorned with jingling bells. I hadn’t seen such things since I was a girl, dragged along by Mother to make up the numbers at church fêtes, but I was pretty sure what I was looking at, and Ffolkes confirmed it as he strapped them to his sock-clad shins.
“On loan from the Ludgate Hill Morris Men. We took off the ribbons, though. They set the wrong mood.”
“The REF moves with the times,” announced the Witchfinder Sergeant, “and at present, the times require stealthy exorcism at a moment’s notice. One never knows when the call may come. A pair of roomy trews, a couple of tea-towels to muffle the noise, judicious use of bicycle-clips, and behold! The Modern Witchfinder, ready for Instant Action.”
Ffolkes looked as if he’d just as soon drown in an ink-vat, but he obliged, clipping the towels in place and rolling his trousers down over them. The Special Operations Executive was no stranger to ill-advised concealments, and I yearned to point out that the Modern Witchfinder’s get-up gave the young man the calves of a prize-fighter.
“Ingenious,” I said, as Ffolkes removed the tea-towels, and took from his jacket something that looked like a large matchbox, but unfolded into something else. Something made of tinplate and glass.
“Is that actually a trench lantern?” I asked Sergeant Narker.
“Army surplus, verily — but now they have a new purpose.”
Ffolkes fitted this last piece of exorcism kit with a candle-stub, and lit it. “Ready, Sir. Should I do the Barebones Denunciation, or the Pulsifer Special?”
“The latter, I think; less subtlety, but more firepower. Miss Diceman, you shall play the role of Evil Spirit. I rely on you to look as grim as possible.”
I put on a battleaxe glare.
“Not bad, not bad,” said Narker, with the a director’s condescension. “Mr. Ffolkes, you may begin.”
Book in one hand, tiny lantern in the other, Ffolkes jingled forwards with the speed of an exorcist sloth. Slowly, slowly, he brought the lantern up to shoulder level, then glared at me through his spectacles. I couldn’t imagine anything less likely to intimidate the forces of Satan, but perhaps that was the point. Catch ‘em off their guard.
Jingle, jingle. Jingle, jingle. Were we going to banish the Powers of Evil by the Powers of Improvised Comedy? I tried my utmost to keep a straight face — aided by the thought that I’d somewhat wildly promised Gog and Magog to find them an exorcist, and that I might have to do this rigmarole myself.
Narker nodded approval. “Remember that the true power is in the delivery, Private, and not the volume. Take it from the top.”
The young Witchfinder cleared his throat, and lowered his voice to a credibly menacing bass. "By the Powers invested in me by Virtue of my Office,” he growled, “I charge Thee to quit this Place, and return henceforth to the Place You came from — oh, hang it all!” he exclaimed, returning to his normal tones.
“To the Place from whence Thou came’st,” prompted Narker.
“To the Place from whence Thou came’st, pausing not to bargain, curse, equivocate, or temporise.” Ffolkes took a deep breath, and jingled his bells afresh. “May We be delivered from thy Presence by Bell, Book, and Candle, and may Thou never to come again to vex this Spot, but welter in the Fetters ordained for Thee, returning to plague Us — ” he stepped forward, brandishing his book, and gave the antique language full emphasis, “ — No More!"
Narker and I applauded, and the Witchfinder Private put the book and extinguished lantern back on the table.
“How’d I do, Sir?”
“Much improved. Lean a little more on the ‘Weltering in Fetters’, and you’ll be as sound an exorcist as any in the Kingdom.”
I had my doubts as to whether or not Ffolkes’ performance (or anyone’s) could actually rout supernatural foes, but the recitation was entirely in English, with no whiff of Popery. It might just do for the Abney Park exorcism. At which point, I made a fateful request.
“Could you possibly write that down for me?”
Narker and Ffolkes looked as if all their Birthdays had come at once.
_____
They not only wrote the Pulsifer Special down, Dear Reader, they got me to recite it. They made me try out the Morris bells (of which, in the eternal hope of a flood of keen recruits the Witchfinder Army had borrowed four sets). They lent me a pair, ‘for practice’, as well as one of the old folding lanterns, witch could be tucked into a gas-mask satchel, along with one's chosen Book. As Private Ffolkes pointed out, one advantage of the female fashion for Siren Suits was that the bells (dear God, the bells) could be easily concealed too. The Modern Witchfinder could as easily be a woman as a man — at least, if she had no sense of the ridiculous.
We also re-jigged our meeting hourse. Unless we wanted to scoot home amid showers of incendiaries, and probably spend the night in a public shelter, it was increasingly unwise for the Royal Exorcism Force to meet later than 4.30 pm. On the other hand, it was also difficult for all of us to get time off to meet in the working week (not that I ever had any true 'time off' from fretting about Nevermore, but of course, I couldn't say so). We settled on the usual REF fix of notifying members via the Printworks notice-board, a fixture so old that most passers-by had ceased to notice it. There would have to be one slight alteration. 'Mr. Narker's evening classes', the euphemism by which the Witchfinder Sergeant had previously notified his Army of its meeting-times, became 'Mr. Narker's remedial lessons'. Which was true, in its way.
Something in London needed a remedy, and needed it very badly. I just wished I knew what, and where, and when...and how.
In which the Banner of Reason grows increasingly tatty
Two days later, I took the 06:46 Underground from Islington, early enough that it overlapped with the station’s new use as a bomb shelter. Fresh lines of paint designated sleeping-places, and one stepped gingerly past people who were trying to get 15 minutes’ extra kip. My olive-green siren suit (still, at that point in the war, technically nightwear) drew no glances at all. Like any good agent, I’d committed the REF’s antique ritual to memory, and in police terms, I was undoubtedly going equipped:
I had the latest in stealth exorcism equipment — a muffled set of Morris mens’ ankle bells.
I had a book I believed in, which was, of course, the Book of Common Prayer from my father’s old field kit.
I had Sergeant Narker’s folding lantern, loaded with a candle-stub.
I was as ready as I’d ever be to exorcise the grave of Lydia Northrop.
The one thing I did not have, I reflected nervously as I got off the train at Abney Park, was a good explanation in case someone asked me why I was walking on the spot in a cemetery, holding a tiny lantern and a book and muttering to myself. The only thing between me and a trip the loony hatch was Gog and Magog’s skill as watchers. Nerves wouldn’t do for this sort of job, though, and one thing about working in impossible places like Station XX is that it makes you very good at faking confidence. When I passed the gates of Abney Park Cemetery, I was an awkward interloper into weird beliefs held by my father, but the time I got to the grave, I was Regina Diceman, Hereditary Witchfinder, and the Forces of Darkness would jolly well fear me. If Peter Ffolkes could do it, so could I. I got out my book, readied my lantern, and prepared the bells for Instant Action.
‘By the powers invested in me by virtue of my office, I charge thee to quit this place, and return henceforth to the place from whence thou came’st, pausing not to bargain, curse, equivocate, or temporise…’
As you might have anticipated, when I got to ‘returning to plague us no more!’ nothing paranormal happened. Which is not to say that nothing happened at all. No ectoplasm oozed from Mrs. Northrop’s grave, and the turf declined to steam underfoot — but as soon as I’d uttered that final ‘No more!’ I got the unshakable sense of being watched. Gog and Magog had been guarding both ends of the path, specifically to ward off any ill-timed passers-by, so any peeping tom would have to have known my bizarre plans, and got there hours in advance while the bombs were falling. Nevertheless, I was sure that someone had seen my woeful attempt at exorcism. Someone not just nearby, but close behind me. Close enough, almost, to tap me on the shoulder…
I spun round, heart in my mouth, and looked into the face of an angel. To my relief, it was just a memorial statue, with weepers of soot running down its marble cheeks — but perched on its shoulder, like Long John Silver’s parrot, was a rat. It whisked to the ground and scurried twenty feet along the other side of the path before vanishing into a thicket of cock-eyed iron stakes.
When one person tells you about inquisitive rats, you laugh it off. When a second insists that London is awash with nosy rodents, you smile uncomfortably. When you get the same information from three sources, and one of them is your own eyes? Perhaps I should start looking out for the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
I was still encumbered with prayer-book and lantern, and no human is quicker than a rat, so I stowed my exorcist’s kit in my satchel, then trotted over to where the creature had gone. The crooked stakes gave me an odd sense of deja vu, until I realised that they formed the backdrop to Gog and Magog’s photograph of Mr. Fell. The ground here was higher here than in posher parts of the cemetery, and when I peered at some of the ‘stakes’ I could see the rusty remains of initials. These were the cheapest graves in Abney Park, one step up from pauper’s burials, and turnover in Victorian times had clearly been brisk. It would be a poor place to conceal something if another person had to find it later. Perhaps Mr. Fell really had been tying his shoelace.
The ground between the stakes was thick with leaf-litter, and small, brown objects that rolled and crunched underfoot. Acorns? No, not acorns. They were round as marbles but light as corks, and each was perforated by a hole where the insect within had drilled its way out. Oak galls. I collected two or three for further inspection, and resigned myself to informing Gog and Magog that though I’d performed the ritual, there was no earthly way of knowing if it had worked.
But it appeared that the Pulsifer Special had its own priorities. Because shortly after that, after weeks of fruitless gruntwork, we found Nevermore’s car.
Sleeping Beauty
The Bentley’s hiding-place had been created by one of London’s more memorable transportion cock-ups.
In 1834, a generation before the birth of the London Underground, a bunch of gung-ho engineers started a shareholder venture to invigorate the south-east of the city with a railway-line, raising the heroic sum of six hundred thousand pounds. They were almost too successful, for sundry politicians scented a prestige project, christened it the London & Greenwich Railway, and sent it rocketing forward before the engineers had worked out how to deal with the fact that Southwark, Bermondsey, and Deptford were in their way. Faced with a gargantuan number of level crossings, they solved the problem by building upwards. With Parliament’s blessing, red-brick viaducts began marching across London with the streets threaded beneath them, at such a pace that there are still pubs in those districts called the Bricklayer’s Arms. The MPs were assured that no space would be wasted, for the arches — almost nine hundred of them — would become shops and dwellings, injecting prosperity into some of the city’s toughest parishes.
There was one problem with this: the noise. No-one who had any choice at all wanted to live under a railway line, and if the London and Greenwich Railway hadn’t looked sharp, it would have become the landlord of the longest slum in Britain. The shops and dwellings were downgraded to workshops and breweries, but even so, it was beyond the powers of the London & Greenwich Railway to make them inviting. Eighty years later, only about half were occupied, and by the early 20’s clusters had been sold off on 99-year leases to anyone needing storage space. In a development that should surprise nobody, some were put to criminal uses, to the extent that by 1926, Scotland Yard had its own copy of the viaduct map, annotated with known lease-owners.
Most arches had been bought in contiguous blocks, but one buyer had a different approach. Wrigley and Burrows Property Management, Inc. had snapped up arches by ones, twos, and occasional threes all over south London, as if laying out a child’s game of join-the-dots. Exactly one fact was known about Wrigley and Burrows: its sole manager had been recorded (in a note in the bottom-left corner of Scotland Yard’s map) as —
“Anthony J. Crowley,” declared Gog (aka Inspector Philpott, that noted despiser of Popery), as the three of us stood around the desk in Bunny’s office, on which the viaduct map was spread for inspection.
“Are we quite sure it’s him?” I asked. No doubt there were dozens of Anthony Crowleys in the country, but it was one of Nevermore’s more copper-bottomed identities, one that had no whiff of criminality attached to it. And that ‘J’ was suggestive. But even so, “There’s probably more than one Bentley in London, even now.”
“Of course,” replied Magog, “but the thing is, once you’ve narrow things right down, you can start saying you’ve got a warrant.”
“And have you got one?”
“We have now,” said Gog with satisfaction. Unlike the chattier Inspector Curtis, Philpott rarely passed remarks unless game of some sort was afoot. He reminded me slightly of Inspector Javert, if that redoubtable policeman had been as English as steak-and-kidney pie, and raised (I suspected) a Methodist. “X marks the spot, I reckon.”
A sheet of tracing paper was paperclipped over the map, with the arches belonging to Wrigley and Burrows Property Management dotted in red pencil. Gog and Magog were right to say there was no rhyme or reason to their placement. They were so random I’d had to get myself a pocket map of London, and copy all the locations on to it, together with the number assigned to them by the London & Greenwich Railway. It had taken much shoe-leather for Station XX’s beefy boys to visit them, on a variety of pretexts, until they’d struck gold — a garage called where Inspector Curtis was pretty sure he’d glimpsed the wheels of a tarpaulin-covered Bentley. This location was marked on the map with a big red X: Milton Motors on Whitgift Street, across the Thames in deepest, darkest Lambeth.
“This is tremendous work,” I said, and I meant it. Nothing I was involved in ever had luck like this, where extra effort was crowned with actual success. “I’ll do my best to see it gets pushed all the way up the ladder. It’s a pity I can’t come with you, gentlemen, but I await your report on tenterhooks.”
“A pity. Yes, indeed,” mused Inspector Curtis, who was now holding up a carpet-bag. “Agent Tyche, how d’you feel about committing a crime?”
“That would depend on the crime.” I peered into the proffered receptacle, to find it contained nothing nefarious, just a navy skirt suit with black buttons, and a pair of very sensible shoes. “What did you have in mind?”
“Impersonating a Police Constable.”
Dear Reader, I was both gratified and vexed. On the one hand, providing a sympathetic ear to Gog ang Magog’s suspicions that Operation Parsifal might be cursed had borne fruit. On the other, for the purposes of imposture, both Philpott and Curtis would very much outrank me. This pleasing thought had clearly occurred to them too.
“Constable?” I asked Inspector Philpott. “Any special reason for it?”
Gog shrugged his broad shoulders. “Your Mr. Hopkins’ suggestion. Three Inspectors is too much for this sort of trip, but a constable can take notes and keep mum. Even with the war on, there aren’t many woman police inspectors — and there definitely aren’t any woman D.I.’s. If you want to have a look at the place yourself, it’s Constable or nothing.”
That was another thing about Bunny Hopkins; he knew exactly what coin to pay you in. Of course I was dying to have a look at Nevermore’s hideout, and I had to admit that it was a sensible disguise. No-one was likely to look twice at a quiet, efficient, note-taking lady constable.
I took the bag. “Lead me to it.”
_____
Milton Motors occupied three of Wrigley and Burrows’s viaduct arches on Whitgift Street, and proved to be the sort of outfit whose proprietor a) spits on the very idea of formal training, and b) still knows that a 3/8 Whitworth and a 7/16 British Standard are the exact same spanner2. Though it clearly did a fair amount of business, it didn’t seem exclusive. A buddleia sprouted above the left-hand arch, which did duty as office and workshop, and in the grime of its windows an absent child had sketched a series of racing-cars. Next to it were two additional arches fitted with steel doors, to secure the vehicles of proud but discreet owners. Inspector Philpott, a man of few words but who’d forgotten more about breaking and entering than most thieves would ever know, drifted over to study their locks with interest. The whole enterprise was tucked beneath the viaduct as neatly as the nest of a potter-wasp.
Next to the office door was a red klaxon that must have come off a fire-engine, and a button jauntily labelled ‘Honk for Assistance’. When Magog did the honours, a bald, spry man in his forties buzzed out to greet us, wiping oily hands on his apron, and exuding the bonhomie of someone who’s wondering if his premises are about to be searched by warrant.
“Inspector Curtis! I didn’t expect to see you back so soon. Has something come up?”
“Mr. Milton, this is Inspector Philpott,” said Magog, “and this is W.P.C. Diceman.”
As Philpott and Curtis had promised, the man’s gaze slid over me as if I was a recording device. Police Inspectors were a major irritant; a W.P.C. was just background noise. I got out my notebook and prepared to play secretary.
“A pleasure to meet your colleagues,” said the mechanic, extending a hand that was almost clean, but not quite. “Am I to infer from this that I’m still in some sort of trouble? I thought we’d got that misunderstanding with the tires sorted out.”
“Absolutely!” said the Magog, with massive reassurance. “However, on my last visit, I noticed a vehicle with a sheet over it — a vehicle I judged, by its wheels, to be a Bentley, and I thought Inspector Philpott here might like to have a look at it. Inspector Philpott works for the Fraud Squad,” he added. Just by way of making conversation.
As expected, the garageman’s face fell several fathoms. The dread Inspector Philpott returned from his scrutiny of the doors, and brought out the story we’d come up with to get a closer look at Nevermore’s car.
“We have reason to believe, Sir, that gangs of black marketeers are stowing their profits in high-end motor vehicles, and keeping them hidden until they can be driven off to barns in the country.”
“When the war ends”, chimed in Inspector Curtis, “no matter who wins — and a shrewd man like you can work out who they’re hoping will win — they’ll sell ‘em to the highest bidder. Nonsense like that undermines the war effort.”
“Don’t talk to me about the war effort!” snapped the mechanic. “I’m doing my bit, fixing up motors when you can’t get as much as spare spark plug, and the best it’s got me is undeserved attention from you lot. But I swear there’s no black-marketeers round here. Like I said, the only car I’ve got locked up is absolutely legal, and I can prove who owns it.”
“Then all we need to do is confirm it,” said Inspector Curtis. “The property of a lady, I think you mentioned?”
“So it is. The particular property of a very particular lady.”
“And could you describe to me in what way she’s ‘particular’. A fussy sort, perhaps?”
The garageman scratched his chin. “She’s a professional lady,” he said, “and I can’t believe an experienced policeman you needs more of a hint than that. Not pretty, but she had class.”
I kept my head down and made more notes. Ye gods, I thought, could my wild theory about Nevermore having some personal entanglement actually be true?
“You believe this lady and Mr. Crowley are romantically involved?”
A wry chuckle. “I’d hope not. But he knows her well enough to give her his lighter, and a letter in his own hand.”
Magog must have put the wind up Mr. Milton at his last visit, because the garageman had brought these items out for inspection in the pocket of his apron. Unfortunately, being in the role of ammanuensis, I couldn’t get such a good look at them as they could. I was 90% certain that it was Nevermore’s lighter — it was one of those fancy ones that are a cigarette case and lighter combined, damascened to give the effect of watered silk. But I was also pretty sure that last time I’d seen it, it hadn’t been monogrammed A.J.C.
“And these affidavits persuaded you to let her a garage?” asked Philpott (alias Gog). “She must have extraordinary powers of persuasion.”
“Well, that was the other thing about her,” said Milton. “She was a tall, red-headed lady, and thin as a whippet. Not my type, to be honest, but there was a family resemblance.”
I put the pencil-point clean through the page. Magog, the more seasoned operator, took it in his stride.
“You believed this woman might be Mr. Crowley’s relative? His sister? His cousin?”
“She didn’t say, Inspector Curtis, and I didn’t ask. No business of mine what Mr. Crowley’s acquaintances get up to, but when a lady wears a fur coat and enough scent for your average quinquireme of Nineveh, a man draws his own conclusions. Seamed stockings,” added the mechanic, with more appreciation, “but I can’t say she hadn’t the pins for them.”
Gog and Magog perused Nevermore’s note, then passed it to me to hand-copy. It read:
I need a favour for the friend who bears this letter, name of Miss Melody Weaver, who’s come into the ownership of a Bentley, left to her by a nice old gentleman. The car’s hers by right, and she can legally prove it, but the dear departed’s family don’t like her. I reckon they’ll try to spirit away her inheritance before the will is read, betting she hasn’t the wherewithal to challenge them, but they’ll have trouble doing that if she’s parked it in your garage. Only for a month or two, until it’s legally proven who owns the car. Enclosing five pounds for costs. AJC.
“So, you took Miss Weaver at face value,” marvelled Curtis. “The car was willed to her — perfectly above board, but the deceased’s relations might not see it that way — and you agreed to help her conceal it until it was proven to be hers. Why?”
The garageman sighed. “Inspector, you remember the thirties. The government had nothing for us, nothing. If it hadn’t been for Mr. Crowley, this place would’ve gone under. You know why he helped? Because he came from nothing, and he knows what it’s like not to have a soul who’ll stand up for you. So when a relative of his turns out to be a kindly companion to older gentlemen, I can’t say I’m shocked to the core.”
“And you do you always believe what Mr. Crowley tells you?” Inspector Philpott raised a quizzical eyebrow.
“He’s yet to play me false, and respectable men have tried to cheat me plenty of times. Now, if you lot are going to arrest me, I’ll need to phone my nephew to mind the shop, and then you can get on with it.” He held out his wrists.
Inspector Curtis shook his head. “I’m not going to arrest you, Sir, and neither is my colleague. Would you have any objections to us inspecting the vehicle?”
“Ha! I'm not so green as I'm cabbage looking. You’d not have come without a warrant.”
The policeman duly produced it. “I don’t suppose Miss Weaver can have been back without your knowledge?”
“Not a chance. You can’t let people just come and go — even if you’re doing them a favour. All my lock-ups use detector locks3. Pricy, but worth it.” He pulled a keyring from his belt; there was a complicated jingling. “There you go,” he said, as the sheet-iron door slid open. “That car’s in showroom condition, so I’ll thank you that it stays that way.”
Magog ushered the mechanic away to question him, leaving Gog and I free to investigate the garage. The arch — which was bricked in completely on the opposite side — was empty apart from a set of mechanic’s tool-benches against the back wall, an Edwardian washstand on which sat a bashed Primus stove and a bar of soap (clearly a place that boasted all mod cons), and the tarpaulin-draped presence of Nevermore’s Bentley. The stark light of the ceiling bulb gave the folds a weird grandeur, as if it we’d broken into a tomb and stood before the catafalque of a king.
We rolled back the tarp, revealing the magnificence beneath. The car was too attention-grabbing for a break for the coast, but sellable at fence’s rates if Nevermore needed cash. But nothing about the hiding-place suggested the idea of selling it had crossed his mind. It was a 2-door coupé, austerely two-toned in black and grey, and it was not just rarity that made it a thoroughbred. It had style: the flanks of its bonnet were slitted like gills, and its chrome air-horns announced ‘Out of my way, peasants!’ by sheer force of entitlement. It was probably the overhead bulb glinting in the reflectors that gave its headlamps a watchful look.
We took out torches and gave the mechanic’s benches the once-over: mostly stuff like oil-cans and wrenches, but also (prudent Nevermore!) a toolbox full of nylons in cellophane, and another of cartons of cigarettes, enough to barter with for weeks. The Bentley proved a less obliging witness. Granted, it was a high-end vehicle, but Inspector Philpott possessed some high-end lockpicks, and skeleton keys only available to police officers. Nevertheless, he spent ten minutes fiddling, sweating, and muttering mild imprecations, until the car appeared to decide it had had enough fun, and the driver’s door popped open and clouted him on the elbow and me on the hip (fortunately, not the one I’d pranged by falling off a ladder, back when I was trying to be a Land Girl). We thought the car contained no secrets until we found a khaki bundle wadded up on the backseat. It turned out to be an army-issue sleeping-bag, turned back on itself like a discarded sock, and as Gog lifted it, something fell at his feet with a plop.
“Well, I’ll go to Jericho,” he observed.
It was a rubber hot-water bottle, stone cold.
Unless you happen to be a vintage car enthusiast, dear Reader, I don’t suppose you’re familiar with the internals of a Bentley coupé. The cars were the last word in luxury, but only if your idea of luxury was being bucketed along by one hundred and seventy-five horsepower. They did not boast a lot of room, especially in the rear, and modern extravagances like lay-down seats were decades away. Of all the feats of my bizarre agent, I found it easier to imagine him impersonating a leggy temptress (and to someone who knew him, if not his car?) than getting a night’s kip in his Bentley. Gog, who was of a broader build than Nevermore but three inches shorter, tried various ways he might have managed it, and quit the Procrustean experiment after five minutes.
But Nevermore had been back, I was sure of it. Perhaps not every night, but when he had no other options, he’d somehow wrangled his way into that cheerless little bolthole that wasn’t even particularly safe, and spent the night there. Checked his hair in the washstand’s spotted mirror. Boiled up water on the dented Primus. Eaten God knows what, obtained God knows where. Managed all this after picking a lock that didn’t forgive a single mistake. How long could he go on like this, bartering for necessities with nylons and smokes — and, perhaps, services of a sort that no vicar’s daughter should be able to imagine? At any rate, it couldn’t be allowed to go on.
My rogue agent had left us a piece in play. We didn’t leave a scratch on his beloved car, but Inspector Philpott did do a few things to it that weren’t entirely cricket, but were also wholly reversible. By the time Gog had had his way with Nevermore’s Bentley, you’d have had to be Malcolm Campbell to work out why the damned thing wouldn’t start. To the best of my knowledge, the SOE had never taken a motor vehicle hostage before, but I supposed there was a first time for everything.
1. In case this record reaches the eyes of a Bible scholar, I should point out that Sergeant Narker’s Bible was not one of the multi-volume Renaissance polyglots, where each copy is worth as much a townhouse (and is almost as heavy). This was a Bagster’s Polyglot Bible of 1816 — but even so, I didn’t realise what a generous gift it was, or I would have been even more interested in munificent Mr. Fell. As I write, a Bagster’s in good condition will fetch about £1000. return
2. Reader in the Decimalised Future, this will doubtless seem an arcane jest, and I assure you, it was almost as bad at the time. To this day, I — a native of the Imperial System — don’t undestand how 3/8 of an inch can also be 7/16 of an inch where nuts and bolts are concerned. The thing is like a Zen koan. I suspect anyone who achieved enlightenment either dropped dead on the spot, or spontaneously became a mechanic. return
3. A now-outdated way to flag attempts at lock-picking. If you don’t shift the correct pins in a detector lock simultaneously and at exactly the right height, the lock seizes and only a master key can open it. It’s pickable by an expert, but the process is time-consuming. return
Notes:
1. 'All Behind You, Winston' - Here is the cartoon on Wikimedia Commons, in case you haven't seen it.
2. 'Common Press' - A dull name for a now rare type of press, visibly descended from the ones used by Gutenberg, which flourished in the C17 but was still in use here and there until 1850. There's a selection of original ones here.
3. Montague Summers (Wikipedia link) - A self-styled Catholic priest and scholarly weirdo who manages to be on the sinister side of the absurd, even at a distance of 70+ years. As close to a modern(ish) Witchfinder as I'd ever want to get.
4. Malcolm Campbell - A byword for motoring skill for someone from Reggie's generation, but maybe less so today. Here's his wikipedia page.
Chapter 8: Between the Lines
Summary:
'When a spy wants to send out a secret letter, he often writes a straightforward letter on a piece of paper — but makes sure to leave plenty of space between the lines.'
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Seeing the Invisible
Dear Reader, at this point there are no doubt many questions you’re itching to see answered. Alas, for the moment I must subject you to the frustration I was experiencing myself. On the SOE side of things, I did not know where Nevermore was, or why Operation Parsifal had failed to catch the German cut-out, or who or what ‘Harmony’ might be; on the side of what the REF would term Inexplicable Phenomena, I had no explanation for Nevermore’s weird comic, or why the churches of London were so fascinating to rats — or indeed, the odd facility with which I’d taken up the cape (or rather, the pin) of my late father, Reginald Morley Diceman, to the point I’d had no trouble performing a literal exorcism. ‘Out of character’ was putting it mildly.
But I can tell you about the scrap of paper on which I’d impressed a snippet of the Witchfinder Army’s secret printing project. Once I got back to my lodgings, I’d grated a pencil-stub on a brick, then swiped a graphite-covered fingertip over the paper, so the indented letters stood out in white. This Boy’s Own procedure yielded the following gnomic text:
{1348} for 1939:
Shippes will goe lyk Gulls upon the Storm-clowd,
& Cannon tread lyk Oliphants the Earthe,
The River moveth underneath the Mounteyn
& carves a Cradell for an Empyre’s Birthe.
Doggerel, perhaps — but doggerel with a distinctly prophetic feel to it.
Peter Ffolkes had lied to me. Or at least, he’d been economical with the truth, because it wasn’t just the language that was obscure: so was the typeface. It was cramped, spiked English Blackletter, the sort of thing you get in cranky Elizabethan pamphlets that promise their readers Strange Newes. Only one press remained in St. Brides’ Printworks that could use such type — the ancient Common Press. It might be true that only Tarquin Narker knew how to dismantle it, that surely couldn’t be the sole reason it was still there when less ancient machines had been moved out of London. To get it ‘overlooked’, you’d need influence or cash, preferably both.
There was a person connected to the Witchfinder Army who wielded at least one of those powers, and that person kept a bookshop in Soho. I wasn’t sure how rich A. Z. Fell was, but he had the air of a man unaccustomed to cheese-paring. Mr. Fell, with his interest in books of prophecy; a man who, by his own admission, matched uncommon books to uncommon buyers. He’d never said anything about all his wares being real.
I took the oak-galls I’d picked up after the Abney Park Rat Incident from my pocket, rolled them to and fro across my desk, and pondered. If, dear Reader, you are the sort of well-rounded nosy parker who delights in childish experiments, your thoughts will possibly be running along the same lines as mine were. There are only a few uses for these little spheres of tannin, and they include leathermaking, cloth-dyeing…and formerly, the production of permanent ink.
Every forger dreams of wartime, when looting or sales of desperation serve up backstories for your long-lost Rembrandt or spare first edition of The Raven. But the upheaval created by air raids made similar shenanigans possible in Britain. Treasures in both public and private ownership were being boxed up and sent to mines and caverns where they would be safe, but the actual locations were understandably secret. So, you could hint to your less-than-honest buyer that you had someone on the inside of such an operation — or, if you actually did have an inside man, you could exchange a forgery for the real thing, and hope the swap would be missed for years.
There might be honest reasons to print a text using centuries-old techniques in the middle of wartime, and there might be honest reasons for Mr. A. Z. Fell to collect oak-galls in Abney Park cemetery, but now I wondered if his patronage of the Royal Exorcism Force was a front for something bigger. Could A. Z. Fell, reluctant star of Woolworth’s Mighty Midgets, also be head of Britain’s strangest band of literary forgers?
I needed to pay Mr. Fell a visit, and for that, I needed a cover story. I needed a cover story like a skinny dipper when the tide starts going out.
A vision in a bookshop
I’d become a semi-regular at the Ron the Barrowman’s Flowers in Soho (my mythical aunt was now considerably recovered from her air-raid ordeal, but still needed moral support), and a further visit was unlikely to be remarked upon. Combined with the return of the Ottwell Binns I’d bought from Mr. Fell’s stock of ripping yarns, I reckoned that could be spun into cover for an unscheduled visit to his bookshop (opening hours ten until two, Tuesdays to Thursdays). The man might just possibly be a criminal mastermind, but he also had a genuine drive to aid the distressed. I intended to play on it by admitting to him, in a state of discombobulation, that the revelation of my Witch-finding heritage was giving me an identity crisis — the last layer in my cover story, and one that had the additional benefit of being 100% true.
Alas for my best-laid plans, when I reached the bookshop I was pipped to the post. As I was locking Station XX’s bike to a lamp-post, someone pulled their car to the kerb and parked in front of the shop as if they were thoroughly expected. The car, a grey Hillman Minx, was a commonish sight in those days, though somewhat muddier than you might expect for central London. Its driver, on the other hand, wasn’t a common sight at all. As I made for the front door, the prettiest woman I’d ever seen who wasn’t on a movie screen got out of the driver’s seat, and made briskly for the bookshop, carrying a camera-case.
Her dark hair was perfectly tucked, her make-up was an art form, and her energetic bearing could have given the well-purged lovelies on Bile Beans adverts a run for their money. From her patent heels to the feather on her hat, she was what my mother (for whom cleanliness was next to godliness, but two doors down in the other direction from bitchiness) would have called ‘a Perfect Vision’.
Whatever their sex, Perfect Visions subconsciously expect people to make way for them, so of course I did the opposite. I reached the door just ahead of Mr. Fell’s visitor, and made to go in myself. She cleared her throat and flashed a brilliant smile.
“Excuse me, but I am expected,” she said, in tones that suggested a couple of years at finishing-school.
“So am I,” I lied, without taking my hand off the doorhandle. The smile became a shade more brilliant.
“Oh, I don’t doubt it for a second. Mr. Fell does so much for his community,” she said. “In fact, it’s part of the reason I’m here. He’s probably too humble to mention that his good works have made him more than a little famous.”
I widened my eyes, but I didn’t open the door. “Really?” I said.
“Oh, yes. I wouldn’t call myself an author,” she added modestly, “but an imaginative interview with someone who’s actually interesting is a little story in own right. So if you can just pop back in an hour — you do seem to be local? — I’m sure you can have Mr. Fell all to yourself.”
I opened the door, which rang the bell, then held it like a deferential butler for the Perfect Vision to enter. This move didn’t please her, but she was too ladylike to scowl — even when I nipped through the door myself, just before it fell closed.
“Miss Montgomery?” called a voice from behind a distant shelf. A. Z. Fell was in the depths of his bookish fortress, and it sounded as if he was preparing refreshments; I caught the faint tinkle of tea-cups and the whiff of Earl Grey. Trust a man like that to have a stash of the good stuff. He probably even had lump sugar.
“Darling Mr. Fell! It is I. And a plus-one,” added his visitor, “on frightfully urgent business.”
Mr. Fell bustled into view and helped Rose Montgomery out her smart black overcoat. Meanwhile, I was coming up with a new story that didn’t involve any mishaps with the vexed process of become a fully-fledged Witchfinder. But that turned out to be unnecessary, because Fell immediately did the honours for me.
“Regina Diceman — Rose Montgomery. Rose Montgomery — Regina Diceman. Miss Montgomery is my literary contact at Woolworth’s, and Miss Diceman is a dear acquaintance from church — ” he said, putting a smidge of emphasis on the last word, “ — and also, as far as I’ve been able to tell, London’s leading authority on the works of Ottwell Binns. A fellow enthusiast for tales of adventure! We could form a little club.”
“That would be marvellous,” said the Vision, observing me with well-concealed antipathy, “after the war, when we’ve all got more time. Which church do you belong to, by the way? My employer has a lot of joint projects on the boil, I might know it already.”
I took Mr. Fell’s hint, and spun a white lie. This was no time to talk about anything connected to St. Brides’ or the Royal Exorcism Force, but the church I’d attended with Mother for fifteen years, St. Egwin’s in Kensal Green, genuinely was engaged in a project to collect storybooks for child evacuees, and she still had connections there. It was a worthy scheme run by one of the largest and dullest churches in London, and my description had the desired curiosity-quelling effect on Miss Montgomery. Her eyes glazed over. Oh yes, Dear Reader, I could do a good church mouse with the best of them.
“But to think you work for Woolworths!” I gushed, as if this was the most glamorous thing ever. “Oh, you should have said! Are you the lady who writes those childrens’ books? I think they’re ripping — especially the one with the fake Egyptian mummy. The St. Egwin’s boys can’t get enough of ‘The Fantastic Mr. Fell’. He’s their hero!”.
My keenness pleased Miss Montgomery, but the real-life Mr. Fell turned pink to the ears.
“Only on paper — and on that embarrassing note, Miss Diceman, I present my offering.” He snapped his fingers and reached under the counter. “Behold!”
To my amazement, the ‘offering’ took the form of a grocer’s orange-crate labeled DONATIONS, stacked to the brim with tatty but readable childrens’ books secured with an old net shopping-bag. Of course, the logical explanation must be that the bookseller was in the habit of collecting beaten-up volumes for charity, but it was a good wheeze to use it to explain my presence. I mentally tipped my hat to the resourceful Mr. Fell.
“Usable goods?” he inquired.
I beamed. “They’ll eat this up. You’ve made a lot of young readers very happy.”
Even the sharp-eyed Miss Montgomery appeared mollified. Her air-raid satchel wasn’t regulation green, but a smart glossy grey, and from it she drew a small sheaf of typewritten pages and laid it before our host.
“My best work to date. A treasure-hunting tale. ‘The Fantastic Mr. Fell and the Treasure of Hook-Hand Harry’.”
“Really?” Fell took up the manuscript doubtfully. “I’m not sure I’m cut out for piracy. And I draw the line entirely at profiting from stolen goods. Even if they were stolen a very long time ago.”
“Piracy? The very thought!” Miss Montgomery had a musical laugh. “Have no fear, stray doubloons will immediately declared as Treasure Trove. All strictly above board. There’s even a bit in the budget for me to pop down to the coast and take photographs.”
“Flattering, but I’m not sure I could take that long away from my ARP duties. I know I gad about the country in your stories, but a fellow can’t be in two places at once.”
“That’s what I told Woollies — but this is the twentieth century, Azariah, and we do have photographic compositors. I’ll take some shots of you on my box Brownie, and they’ll razor them in later. You need never leave your post.”
Azariah? I supposed that if any contemporary Englishman could concievably be an Azariah, that man would be A. Z. Fell (what did the ‘Z’ stand for? Zacchaeus? Zozimus? Zadok?). And since Rose Montgomery and Azariah Fell appeared to be on first-name terms, if I stayed any longer I really would be in danger of wearing out my welcome. I returned ‘The Diamond-Buckled Shoe’ to Mr. Fell’s Ottwell Binns selection, and looked for its successor.
“Don’t forget, a return gets you a shilling discount on your next purchase.” The grey eyes twinkled. “Do you fancy ‘The Lost Stradivarius’, or ‘The Green Arrow’?”
I chose the latter, fussed out of the door with my box of books, fastened it to the luggage-rack of my bike and pedalled a safe distance away from the shop. Then I locked up my bike again down an alleyway and scraped my hair into a secretarial bun. From my gas-mask satchel I dug out a pair of spectacles and a lipstick, which I took care to put on slightly smudged. I gave it five minutes to make sure neither Miss Montgomery or Mr. Fell were going to pop out unexpectedly, then strolled back cautiously in my improvised disguise to take a butcher’s at Miss Montgomery’s Hillman Minx.
Bending to fix my lipstick in the wing-mirror — a common enough dodge in those days — allowed me to peek into the car’s interior. On the back seat, Miss Montgomery kept her parcels of childrens’ books, ready to distribute. Some were wrapped up in brown paper and string, bearing signs of re-use as befitted a staunch upholder of the War Effort; others were in canvas holdalls. She seemed to be a busy woman, and after determining there wasn’t anything more information to be got from her transport, I memorised the numberplate — DPB 568 —retrieved my bike, and returned to St. James’ Street for a meeting with my mentor Bunny Hopkins.
Bunny Hopkins gets a lead
The beardy, tweedy wizard of Station XX was in the sort of ebullient mood that boded no good to someone, and it had made its way into his report for Lt. Col. Robertson, the tone of which was puckish —
“After tireless investigations by Inspectors Philpott and Curtis of Station XX, we located Nevermore’s Bentley in a lock-up garage in Southwark. The car has not been sold, and since there is every reason to suppose Nevermore (whereabouts unknown) intends to return for it, we searched it and left it in situ. Thanks to a number of tweaks made by Mr. Philpott that would be invisible to all but an expert mechanic, Nevermore won’t be able to start the car, let alone drive it.”
He looked at me enquiringly. “All right so far? You asked me to lay in on thick for your policemen.”
“I still haven’t forgiven Nevermore for bolting and landing them in it. They should get the credit, not me.”
“A sensible investment. I approve. ” Benjamin Hopkins reloaded his awful pipe, and continued:
“In a not wholly surprising development, the landlord of the garage is a company called Wrigley and Burrows, Managing Director: Anthony J. Crowley, a known Nevermore alias. W&B owns a long lease on twenty-six railway arches throughout the city. We subsequently talked to a sample of their tenants who didn’t know each other. All spoke highly of Mr. Crowley’s fairness, without which their enterprises would have sunk in the Depression. Any friend of Crowley’s who needs help in a hurry, will find it if they know where to look.
“Such a personage was Miss Melody Weaver, a lady of negotiable virtue, who feared that the family of the gentleman who left her a Bentley in his will might not agree she deserved it. It was she who drove the car to the garage and invoked the name of Crowley, presenting his cigarette-case and a handwritten note as her bona fides.
“In a twist which I did not anticipate, but I’m sure you now have, the garage-owner’s description of Miss Melody Weaver bears a striking resemblance to Nevermore, though he didn’t seem to consider they could be the same person. Which leaves us with two remarkable possibilities. Either Nevermore has a close female relative we don’t know about — or our agent is able to convincingly disguise himself as a high-class tart, furs and heels complete.
“On the upside, it seems highly improbable that he’s heading for the Continent.”
He laid the report on his desk. “What do you think?”
“Short of collaring Nevermore, I don’t know how much more we can give him. I just wish we knew why ‘Anthony J. Crowley’ owns those archways. The Colonel’s bound to ask.”
“A curious line for Nevermore; not glamorous, not lucrative, and as far as we know, not even crooked.” He puffed out smoke. “There’s an angle there, Reggie — but at present it escapes me.”
“Have the Unmentionables broken any more of those moving-transmitter messages from South-East England?”
“Alas, they have not — though I suspect their knowledge of extinct Aramaic languages has improved considerably.” He ran a saffron-taloned hand through his awful beard. “On the other hand, I think the Lady Fortune might finally be favouring us again on the Abney Park job.”
“Surely that one’s lost in the weeds. I’ve never known a stake-out have such bad luck.”
“Not necessarily bad luck, Reggie. Different luck. What do you do when your plans lie in ruins?”
“You sieve the rubble for insights,” I said dutifully. My mentor always had more success with that than I did.
Bunny beckoned me over to his everlasting cork-board.
“I present the result of a weeks’ sieving, with a focus on whether or not the Northrop grave actually had flowers on it when our particular pigeons passed by. Philpott and Curtis didn’t keep minute-by-minute notes as to when your floral offerings had been made away with by animals, or blown away by the wind — but they were pretty good about it. Sometimes the trap was baited and sometimes it was not; very well, let us look at the best candidates who never passed by when it was baited.”
“There are some?”
“Oh yes.” Bunny had a sorcerer’s smile: the smile of someone who always knows a little more than you do. “More to the point, there are two.” He showed me his pinned photographs of Abney Park pedestrians, which were already getting dingy at the edges. One showed a middle-aged man with a puggish features but an intellectual air, the other a long-faced young woman who looked like a gust of wind would blow her away.
“Julian Glozier, authority on the European Bronze Age — and nothing to do with middle-Eastern esoterica, just before you ask. Done plenty of travelling in Europe, but never hob-nobbed with the Reich. His grandfather invented Glozier’s Glass-Shine boot-polish; he’s a gentleman scholar and not short of money. Not my preferred candidate.”
“Who’s the hot favourite?” I looked at the photo of the girl: pale, nervous features but a very upright bearing.
“Maud Whelan. Works as a fabric runner for the Fore Street Textile Warehouse. And one of their clients is the House of de Wolkoff — ”
I whistled under my breath. The glamorous figure of Anna de Wolkoff has vanished into history, but at the time, she was straight out of a novel: a White Russian who’d fled the Bolsheviks in ‘17, set up in Mayfair as a couturier, and belonged to the Right Club, an upper-class clique who believed that Hitler, whatever his other faults, should be welcomed as the antidote to Stalin. The snooty dressmaker to London’s Upper Ten was also on the counter-intelligence Grey List.
“Miss Whelan is particularly appreciated by Madam de Wolkoff for her skill in pattern-matching. She’s as Irish as the name suggests, she’s not rich, and she’s young and impressionable. Perfect raw material for a cut-out.”
And that, dear Reader, is how a master of information-gathering can get it wrong: by finding someone who matches his template too well. For a few irreplaceable weeks, the little expert in damask and georgette is the subject of invisible scrutiny — because she’s the favourite runner of a Russian dressmaker, because she’s Irish and poor, and because after she’s spent a day helping her patron stockpile exquisite fabric in advance of rationing, she crosses Abney Park on her way to meet a Savile Row under-tailor with whom she plans to elope.
I left Bunny at his cogitations, and I was sitting in muggy, lurching, shuttered dimness on the bus back to Islington when I remembered that he hadn’t picked out A. Z. Fell, which was…good, surely? The proud but shy patron of the Witchfinder Army must have passed through Abney Park at a time when there were flowers on Lydia Northrop’s grave, and he hadn’t gone to investigate. Ergo, Mr. Fell was in the clear.
Which was more than I could say for myself.
Because once again, I hadn’t told Bunny that one of the photographs showed Mr. Fell at all. There seemed to be no way of telling my immediate superior about this interesting man, short of tattooing his name on my forehead. And even then, I had the feeling things would go haywire. I’d have an allergic reaction to the ink, or I’d fall off my bike, bang my head, and spend weeks unconscious and swathed in bandages. At some level, my subconscious mind regarded Mr. Fell as worthy of a modern-day damnatio memoriae.
The bus was horribly crowded, but never had I felt more alone.
I settled on an approximately rational explanation: I’d spent a lot of time with Nevermore, and he had a background on the stage. In terms of my ability to believe in Inexplicable Phenomena, I was undoubtedly the worst Witchfinder in London, but I was prepared to consider the idea of hypnotic suggestion. Which, it turned out, was rather like someone lost in the Sahara Desert reluctantly conceding the possibility of sand.
Saying it with flowers
When I unlatched the door of my lodging-house, I was bowled over by a blaze of colour and scent. It appeared that someone had delivered a bouquet to the Digby’s modest domicile — but these weren’t the scrappy lupins I’d managed to lay in twos and threes on the grave of Lydia Northrop. These were silky, deep-yellow roses, standing front and centre on Irene Digby’s hallstand in her best Mandalay vase, and glowing like Flaming June. An extravagant offering in any season, but an impossible indulgence in late Autumn the middle of a modern-day siege. Almost literally impossible. To get roses like that in November, in Britain, and in wartime, and you’d have to know a millionaire with a private hothouse, and even then…
“A dozen roses!” My landlady bustled forward, beaming at me. “Regina Diceman, you dark horse! Have you met a special someone?”
And something in my psyche went click.
“I met a bookshop owner called Mr. Fell, who also sometimes frequents Abney Park Cemetery, and an associate of his called Miss Montgomery, who is exceptionally pretty,” I recited. “Before that I met a man who keeps a garage called Mr. Milton, and before him, I met two policemen called Philpott and Curtis. I bought white gloves1 in a haberdasher's last Wednesday but I don’t know the name of the woman behind the counter. I — ”
I wish I was a Gothic poet, so I could convey how grim it is to hear your own voice reel off information that would have to be tortured out of you, as obediently as a speaking clock. Up until that point in my life, dear Reader, I don’t think I’d been truly frightened. You know the saying ‘someone walked over my grave’? I never knew what it meant until then.
My landlady shook me by the shoulder, and the spell was broken. “Being a bit literal, aren’t you? I didn’t ask for a list of everyone you’ve met.”
With a Herculean effort, clenching my fists so the nails bit into my palms, I wrenched my mind round to some half-plausible explanation. “Sorry about that, Mrs. D. Too much translation work; we’ve all been working like machines. When someone asks me what I’ve been doing recently, I just tend to reel off a list.”
The kindly, blessedly normal woman not only believed me, she looked concerned and patted me on the arm.
“Wars can last a long time, dear. Don’t you wear yourself out.”
I examined the roses, smelled them, counted them. They were at least as real as I was.
“Who on Earth brought them?”
“Well, there was a knock, but I was taking in washing, and by the time I opened the door, there was no-one there. Just roses on the doorstep. I couldn’t risk them wilting, so I took off the card to get them in water — ” My face must have been a picture, for she added, “don’t worry, Reggie, there’s nothing naughty on it. Bit of an odd card, though. Must be the paper shortage.”
She held out a length of string. Attached to it was a postcard, torn neatly in half, depicting rolling Welsh hills, a beautiful sunset, and somewhat less romantically, the back half of a sheep. I knew where the front half of the sheep was, and so (assuming you’ve been paying attention) do you: it was on the other half of the postcard Nevermore had left on the back seat of Gog and Magog’s Tilly, before he’d vanished into the night like Spring-Heeled Jack. The message was short and sweet:
_________________
My inimitable Reggie,
I saw these, and thought of you.
Won’t you keep me warm at night?
C.
_________________
Well, Donner und Blitzen und heiliger Bimbam, I thought. Nevermore knows knows about the yellow flowers, which I suppose was always likely. Even better, he knows where I live. He knows I know his current alias is Crowley. The man knows far too much, and as if that wasn’t enough, he also seems to have some genuine psychic power — mesmerism, is mesmerism allowed to exist? — which he’s seen fit to use on his luckless handler. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
“Seems like this was all a bit of a surprise,” observed the sage Mrs. Digby. “I won’t ask who your Mr. C. is, but assuming he’s a gentleman, you’re clean foolish if you don’t work this round to something permanent.”
My landlady mimed slipping a ring on her finger. It was all too clear that in her imagination, I’d just been upgraded from Natural-Born Spinster to Unlikely Wartime Sweetheart. Also, that I was the sort of greenhorn who sorely needed advice when it came to husband-catching. In terms of likelihood, I gave ‘Reggie Diceman makes an honest man out of Nevermore’ slightly lower odds than ‘Hitler personally phones Churchill and says the war was a misunderstanding’, but there was no way of telling that to Mrs. Digby.
I tried my best to smile. “A bit soon, isn’t it?”
“When there’s a war on, things move along quick. Albert and me tied the knot in ‘17.” She frowned. “Not married, is he? I don’t care if a man sends you the Gardens of Shalimar, the married one’s ain’t worth a fig.”
“He’s not married,” I said, certain for once that this was the truth. “But we can’t be together while the war’s on, you see. It would make things tricky at work.” Well, that was so true, you could swear on it in a court of law.
“Lot of jealous souls about. Let ‘em talk — just make sure there’s nothing they can chinwag about that’s actually true.”
“I’d probably lose my job if they even suspected,” I said, which was an understatement.
“A risk, but…none of us are getting younger, and the war’s got to end sometime. But promise me that chap doesn’t get more than than a bit of spooning ‘til he gets down on one knee.” She looked at the lovely flowers sternly. “And tell him that if he’s that cold at night, he can use a hot-water bottle.”
I thought of the cheerless garage, and the wadded-up sleeping-bag.
“I’ll tell him, Mrs. Digby.”
I left her cooing over the roses, which, it seemed, she intended to take into the Andersen shelter to ‘cheer up the air’. I couldn’t think of an easy way to explain how much I hated the sight of them. They weren’t romantic, they were a message.
______
When I was back in my room, sitting on the Digby’s second-best candlewick bedspread next to the knapsack that held my Andersen supplies, I pieced together what Nevermore wanted to tell me.
Point one: he’d found out the Abney Park job, and let me know in the most Nevermorian of ways, the extravagant gesture. A dozen roses, my landlady had said, but that wasn’t quite true. I counted them to confirm my suspicion that they weren’t twelve yellow blooms, but thirteen. A baker’s dozen. Judas’ number. I turned the torn postcard over in my hand, gazing alternately on Nevermore’s billet-doux, and the hind end of a sheep, and tried to work out the rest of what he wanted to tell me.
The most important thing was that this communiqué was definitely from him. He’d stolen that postcard from a post-office in Rhydyfelin, a strong contender for Obscurest Welsh Village, on his mission to pretend-steal the Nanteos Cup — and he’d taken care to leave the verifying half of it in the backseat before he’d bolted from Gog and Magog’s car. If he’d sent those roses under duress, no-one could have made him write the accompanying message on half a blank postcard they found in his pocket.
Point two: if this was a trap, he was in on it.
The next clue was the wide line spacing. No agent would be so obvious if they thought their message might be examined in depth, but Nevermore hadn’t wanted to be subtle. He’d wanted to be understood. ‘Won’t you keep me warm at night?’ might have struck my landlady as cheeky, but I knew better. On to point three: the message itself.
There are lots of ways to make invisible ink. Pyramidon powder in water is truly invisible when dry, but tricky to explain if found on you by someone who knows what it is. Both lemon and onion juice work, but give the game away by smell. Urine or milk will do, but a better choice is plasma, obtained by leaving a little of your own blood to coagulate (if you ever use this information, Dear Reader, you can thank me later). The disclosing method for all such ‘inks’ is the same: you heat the paper. The blackout was on, so I used the smallest light possible. I lit the candle-stub in my portable Witchfinder’s lantern, and when the top vent grew hot to the touch, I pressed the card against it. At last, all was revealed, in small, precise letters:
_________________
The Wiggle Room plays at 56, Old Paradise Street this Friday. Arrive 8.45 pm. Say you’ve come to hear Melody Weaver sing Irving Berlin.
P.S. Make sure you’re alone. If you bring company, I won’t show.
P.P.S. Gog and Magog better not have done anything naughty to the Bentley.
P.P.P.S. If you’re going to wear those stockings,Titch, now would be a good time.
_________________
Titch was a name only Nevermore would use, the stockings were something only he could know about, and I’d frankly have been disappointed in him if he hadn’t, by this time, somehow detected that Gog and Magog had found his Bentley. Which left me in quite the dilemma.
What I wanted, or course, was for Nevermore to come back with his tail between his legs, either to 58 St. James’ Street, or his obsessively neat flat on the margins of Mayfair. What I didn’t want was to meet him solo, at a place called the Wiggle Room on Old Paradise Street, late enough to have to travel through the blackout and work out where the nearest public shelter might be 2. I didn’t want to lurk about for hours, just to try getting into a place where I was liable to get stuck overnight with the sort of folk who frequented a place called the Wiggle Room. And I definitely didn’t want to do it without telling anyone at Station XX first. An omission like wasn’t just likely to land me in trouble with Top Brass. It felt actively, personally dangerous, in a way that joining the SOE never had.
I might have been a spy, but I was no field agent. I was the counter-intelligence operative who persuaded impossible people to do improbable deeds; doing them myself was not my bag. But I knew I would go. For reasons I couldn’t put into words (reasons too close to whatever had forced me to do that mindless, horrible recitation), I had to go. Agent Nevermore had whistled, and Agent Tyche would answer, obedient as a spaniel. If I hadn’t known myself to be in the employ of Station XX, I’d have thought he was my handler, and not the other way round.
Later, head under the blankets in the Digby’s Andersen shelter, I studied my London A-to-Z marked with the railway arches leased to Anthony Crowley. As I’d suspected, Old Paradise Street, home of the Wiggle Room (whatever that might be) and Whitgift Street, where the Bentley was hidden, weren’t more than 400 yards apart, separated by Old Paradise Gardens, an ancient churchyard that was now a public park. It was very possible Nevermore had other boltholes here and there, but this seemed a definite Centre of Operations. A centre to which I’d been invited, as a still-trusted SOE contact.
Invited? More like summoned. I recalled all the times Nevermore had jokingly asked me 'Have you met a special someone?', and I shuddered.
‘I wonder where hypnotic suggestion comes on Ffolkes’ Scale of Weird Phenomena,’ I thought glumly, as distant bombs thudded home, and I tried my best to sleep. ‘This is the sort of stunt that puts flowers on your own grave. At least show the note to Bunny. He can get you minders Nevermore can’t know about, people who look nothing like Gog and Magog but are just as lethal in a pinch. He loves that sort of set-up. Besides, if you get yourself killed, Mother will never forgive you…’
Mrs. Digby had followed through on her threat to bring the roses into the shelter. I lay in overscented dimness on my narrow cot, listening to the click of knitting-needles and the thump of explosions: prime material for nightmares. And by God, I had them. In my witch-hunting dreams I cornered a culprit, but as I seized her cloak she slipped out of it with a laugh, and the fabric erupted into flame. I dreamed my way into my London streetmap, wandering its paper streets until I tore through the door of the Wiggle Room and fell into the inkblot of eternity. I dreamed of a grave, with the distinct feeling that if I read the marker, the name wouldn’t be Lydia Northrop’s, but my own.
Dear Reader, I didn’t dare look.
1. A more sensible purchase than it might initially seem. Every pedestrian who considering going out after the Blackout was encouraged to wear at least one white garment, to lessen the risk of being run over. return
2. It might surprise you to learn that there was no official curfew, but the government decided that enforcing one for years would be impracticable for the already-stretched police force. Travel after dark was inadvisable and risky, and everyone knew it. return
Notes:
I forgot to say thanks to readers for sticking with this fic and its erratic updates at the end of the last chapter, but it really is tremendously appreciated. I also apologise for giving ‘A. Z. Fell’ a first name, since it’s funnier if he’s been living in Soho for centuries without anyone finding out what (if anything) the initials stand for, but…for plot and plausibility reasons, he has one. Now, for some actual notes:
Tweaks to our 3 Nazi spies:
You wouldn’t last long in WWII if you just went around London (in Crowley’s words) ‘blackmailing and murdering people’. It’s all right for one scene, but it won’t hold up in a longfic. Time for some adjustments:
1. Greta Kleinschmidt is using ‘Non-Official Cover’, an identity and a day job that align with her espionage activities and the whereabouts of Harmony (who’d need genuine magic of some sort to survive in Britain) will gradually become clearer.
2. The major tweak: Mr. Glozier. For the purposes of this fic, in spite of the fact the TV version gives him a German accent, he’s going to be a Fifth Columnist: a native Brit working for the Reich. Even in 1939, the number of hardcore Nazi sympathisers in the UK was probably in the low thousands (the couturier Anna de Wolkoff was one of them, though in reality by this time in 1940 she’d been arrested), and some were interned. There was even a dummy spy ring, run by Eric Roberts (‘Agent Jack’), with the aim of soaking up their efforts at espionage.
Chapter 9: Wiggle Room
Summary:
'Another quality needed by a field agent is acting ability. In fact, he must not merely act a part. but has to put himself mentally into the skin of the character he is representing.'
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
I had two days to prepare. Two days, a pair of nylons hastily retrieved from beneath a stack of papers in the bottom drawer of Bunny Hopkins’ desk, and (bless you, Mother) a wartime clothes-repair kit that ran long to elastic and safety-pins.
I’d heard of places like the Wiggle Room. Places reached by knocking at anonymous doors and squeezing down backstairs. Places where the signs and countersigns were almost as intricate as spycraft, and everyone had an alias and a cover story. Places where men danced with men and women with women, a pastime that happened to be frowned upon by the Law. Such places had names like the Flim-Flam Club and the Movable Feast, and they never stayed in one spot for long. Of course, there were clubs in Soho that were just as illegal, and sometimes they got raided by the police. Such raids made minor headlines, but named no names; the clientele had connections, whereas the people in the places south of the river had none. If arrested, they wouldn’t be clapped in irons (this was the civilised Twentieth Century), but they would be taken to court and convicted of indecency, and their whole community would know their secret. Such people wouldn’t take kindly to a tourist looking to slum it.
That tourist would be me, working under two handicaps. Firstly, my agent would have the initiative, and no handler wants that. Secondly, I’d be committing the worst Reconnaissance Sin: sticking out like a sore thumb. I was a conventional soul at heart, believing that if made myself useful, my reluctance to bag a nice husband (or failing that, a tolerable one) might be charitably overlooked. In SOE parlance, I was ‘a poor match for the mission’. You can take the girl out of the Church of England, but it’s far harder to take the Church of England out of the girl.
Too bad. Early on Friday, after the all-clear released me from the Andersen shelter into a chill November morning, I stood before my unslept-in bed and laid out my equipment.
First, navigation kit: one pair of white gloves, a shuttered torch with fresh batteries, a field compass, and my illegal London A to Z (map sales were forbidden in wartime), now marked not only with Nevermore’s boltholes, but enough bus and tram routes to stage a one-woman invasion of Lambeth. Second, camouflage: one back-buttoned blouse, one black skirt, one pair of low heels. One tube of lipstick, shade ‘Geranium’, one cake of spit-and-scrub mascara with a mirror the size of a postage-stamp. One pair of stockings and, since I didn’t own a suspender belt, one Frankenstein contraption of elastic and safety-pins. Full of envy for Nevermore’s knack with accents, I even tried taking my voice down a few social notches. As a comedy turn, it had potential, but as for getting in to the Wiggle Room? I’d just have to sound like I normally did.
I could get away with wearing my good shoes to St. James’ Street, and I only had the one coat, but the rest of it — clothes, make-up, and navigation kit — went into my empty gas-mask satchel. If the Führer chose tonight for his first gas attack, so be it. I’d long ago warned the Digbys that I might sometimes, due to the pressures of work, be forced to bunker down in a public shelter rather than risk a late trip back to Islington (which no more than the truth). Tonight would be one of those nights, and if Mrs. Digby suspected I’d bunked off to imperil my virtue instead, she wouldn’t be too far wrong.
Nevermore had told me to be at the Wiggle Room at 8:45 pm. Timing was paramount, because after 7:00, the Underground stopped and the deep stations filled with people seeking shelter. Buses and trams ran later, but once the sirens started you could get stuck anywhere, forced to seek what refuge you could. The rendezvous as do-able — but only just, since I still had to work. My agent might be AWOL, but as far as Berlin was concerned, he was busy setting up the next parachute drop of forged British currency, and it was my appointed task to concoct his Morse messages at Station XX. I slogged at this task until thirty-four minutes past six, then caught the bus from St. James’ Street to Pimlico, where I did my clothes and make-up in the Ladies’, broke the seal of Nevermore’s stockings, and safety-pinned them onto the ersatz suspender-belt that had been giving me the gip for hours.
Dear Reader, I know that at this point, you must be yearning for the Glamour of Spycraft. Codes! Cocktails! Chicanery! I bow my head in shame in the admission that most of the time I had to wait for Nevermore was spent nipping between various Public Conveniences in sundry bus and tube stations, and hoping I wasn’t wasting the last hours of my life lurking in a cubicle and staring at my A to Z. But pretty soon I’d memorised the distances involved, refined a shortcut across a park called Old Paradise Gardens, and calculated how many strides each section of the journey would take. I could literally do it in the dark.
I would have to.
I took the Tube from Pimlico to Millbank, then a tram from Millbank to Lambeth Palace, built when Lambeth was a town in its own right, a Tudor traveller out of its time. At Lambeth Palace I disembarked with an air of confidence and purpose, crossed my fingers, and began counting my steps. Above, searchlights skewered the darkness. I took care not to look at them for fear of losing night vision, since at ground level, one was forced to scuttle from one white-painted landmark to the next — lampposts, pillarboxes, the ‘S’ of a public shelter — like some species of cave-dwelling crab. South of the River, plenty of London’s backstreets were still cobbled, and the last thing I needed now was a twisted ankle.
As I traversed the footpath across Old Paradise Gardens, the sirens set up their inevitable wail; I followed the fishtail glimmer of my torch and kept counting my steps. When I emerged into Old Paradise Street almost ran into an ARP warden, who sternly told me to get inside. Sensible man. Luckily, the warden had somewhere to get to, and after his little pool of torchlight vanished in the gloom, I trailed a hand along the even-numbered side of the street, dirtying my new gloves, until I came to some odd chalk markings: a square whose sides were wavy lines. Under other circumstances, it might have been drawn by one of London’s few remaining children, or a door-to-door seller of wooden chrysanthemums and clothes-pegs, to indicate a kind-hearted buyer.
To someone in the know, it surely meant ‘Wiggle Room’.
Despite the racket of the sirens, there didn’t seem to be any way of announcing my presence other than knocking, so I took a deep breath, and did so. The person on the other side must have been waiting with their hand against the door, for it instantly opened eight inches. Behind was a velvet curtain, so heavy it must have been a theatrical cast-off. Peering out from it was the face of the man on door duty, and as soon as I saw him I knew I was out of my depth, because he was black. There were a fair number of black musicians playing in nightclubs around the city, some of them celebrated acts like the West Indian Swing Band, but they were all performers. There were no black doormen, for the plain and brutal reason that if one existed, sooner or later a black man would have to refuse entry to a white one. Or at least, there were no black doormen at clubs that were halfway legal. Trust Nevermore to be familiar with places that ran according to unspoken rules.
The man looked as startled to see me as I was to see him. For a few awkward seconds, we stood staring at each other in darkness, illuminated from below by my shuttered torch, like a painting by Georges de la Tour.
“I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place,” he said, as the sirens continued to ululate.
“I know it looks that way, but I promise you, I haven’t. This is the Wiggle Room, isn’t it? I’ve come to hear Melody Weaver.”
Bless the man; he didn’t slam the door in my face. He beckoned me in, let the curtain fall to, and regarded my get-up with polite resignation.
“Like I said, this is the wrong place for you — and I can’t tell you where to find the right one. I’m sorry.”
“God, it’s the clothes, isn’t it? But I haven’t got any others. If I did, would I be wearing these?”
He smiled slightly. “A fair point.”
“Miss Weaver is…an old friend. I’ve come to hear her sing Irving Berlin.”
“Not really Mel’s style — ” he began, and then broke off, and cocked his head. Faintly, through another muffling curtain, I could hear music. “Wait here.”
I wondered if someone else was being fetched to induce me to leave, but within twenty seconds the man was back again, looking considerably surprised.
“Irving Berlin, straight from the heart.” He gave a quick glance at my stockinged legs. “Seems you must know Miss Weaver after all. Wonders never cease.”
He ushered me downstairs, and filled with misgivings, but also with the curiosity of a born Nosy Parker, I descended brick steps into what Sergeant Narker would surely have called a Den of Iniquity.
Whatever else you might say about the Wiggle Room, mainly that it wasn’t far enough below ground to be remotely safe in a raid, it took the blackout seriously. Once behind the curtains that kept in a fug of warm bodies, cost-effective cigarettes, and the ripe and rustic scent of cider1, the staunchest ARP warden couldn’t accuse the place of being over-lit. A string of Chinese lanterns trickled light through the smoke and stolen glances, but otherwise the only light was at the far end, where a band was playing and a dozen people danced cheek-to-cheek. As far as I could see, only two of the couples consisted of a man and a woman; the rest were unisex.
Once my eyes had adjusted to the light, the next most striking thing was that everything in the place was either portable, or could be ditched in a hurry. The chairs were spindly folders, the drinks-tables were tea-crates, and here and there, piano shawls obscured alcoves and passages (I didn’t know what went on behind them, and I didn’t intend to find out). If there were rumours about the Wiggle Room’s existence, it would take twenty minutes for the the whole phantasmagoria to vanish, like one of those folklore palaces that could be stored in a gilded egg. The band didn’t run to a piano, or any instrument too heavy to carry. It consisted of a double bass and a snare drum, and over the top of this ensemble, an alto coiled like the exhalation from a hookah pipe. The singer had her eyes half-closed, performing soulfully to the alternating thrum and hiss —
‘Fools fall in love,
Only lunatics fall in love
— and I'm a fool.’
As she sang, Melody Weaver swayed as if hypnotised, and the crowd swayed with her. All that separated her from her audience was a ‘stage’ of crates pushed together, but even so, kohl and dim lighting made it hard to make out her face. I needed to get closer. In the course of doing so I was nudged and elbowed, my feet were trodden on (mostly by accident), and I got sidelong looks (not all of them unkind), but at last, I found myself in a seat beside the improvised dancefloor. That’s when I discovered that what I’d thought to be the two standard couples were no such thing. There was a man in a blouse and skirt, and a woman in a suit…but they weren’t dancing with each other, and they weren’t doing it for a joke.
Dear future Reader, I beg you not to laugh, but (aside from childhood excursions to the Church panto) I’d never seen such a thing in all my life. I was shocked. I’d resigned myself to hoping against hope to find a like-minded lady and live discreetly, asking no questions, telling no lies, and taking lots of rambles in the country. But here, the secret world was freely lived, and it scared the daylights out of me.
‘Fools seek romance,
Only idiots take the chance
— and I'm a fool.’
When I first joined the Special Operations Executive, I’d played hours and hours of Face Pelmanism. The SOE’s cards didn’t show the standard suits, but photographs of faces that came in pairs: one in disguise, and one not. By scoring a point for each pair you picked that were the same person, and losing one every time you muffed it, you homed in on features that are hard to change — ear shape, for example, or the distance between the eyes. By spy standards, I was average at it. But there was a second skill at which I was much better: recognising what the Germans called ‘gestalt’2. There’s no good English translation of this word, which blends outline and movement into a bodily signature, but as I watched Melody Weaver, a familiar gestalt of cocky, high-strung vanity flowed out of her like a spell.
‘I should be able to put all my feelings aside
I should be able to take one free ride in my stride — ’
This wasn’t Nevermore’s sister or cousin, I was sure of it. This was my agent, back from her heyday in Berlin. I’d never seen Lady Jay in her pomp, crowned with puppet snakes and swathed in midnight velvet, so that when the spotlight found her face, the audience saw the disembodied head of Medusa. The Wiggle Room didn’t run to puppetry, so Miss Weaver sported a feather turban, and the closest she got to Medusa was a frock of diamond-shaped black sequins. Our man at Milton Motors had been right about one thing, though: Miss Weaver had fabulous legs.
‘But fools cannot play
They get serious right away
And break the rule,
My heart's on fire when I know I ought to keep cool,
Fools fall in love — and I'm such a fool.’
The accompanists came to a halt, allowing their star to hold the last ‘fool’ for a good ten seconds. She smiled like a sorceress, then gave us ‘Get Thee Behind Me Satan’ and ‘I Never Had a Chance’, so soulfully that one could almost ignore that outside, the muffled sirens had now been joined by explosions. But the hit of the evening was ‘a little something dusted off from the US Prohibition’, fetchingly titled ‘You Cannot Make Your Shimmy Shake on Tea’, and loaded with enough innuendo to blow the Reichstag. Miss Weaver wasn’t that last turn of the night, though, nor the type to hold up the next act. She stepped off the tiny stage with professional promptness, and as soon as she saw me, her face lit up.
“Darling! Finally! You came!”
As if by magic, a cigarette-holder appeared between her fingers, and that’s when I learned I had competition for the lady’s favour. A gentleman admirer — conventionally moustached, and dressed in an actual suit — stepped between us to hand her a Craven A. I silently cursed the man and wished more than anything that he’d leave, but when he seemed to have the opposite idea, I resigned myself to making a small scene.
I squared up my shoulders. “Did you give me a choice? I could’ve been killed out there!”
Miss Weaver held a finger to her lips. Somehow, in the midst of wartime, she’d contrived to lacquer her nails matt black.
“Shhhh. I can explain everything. Preferably sans audience,” she added, with such a pointed glance at her hanger-on, I was surprised it didn’t impale him and come out the other side.
“I thought we were going to paint the town red, Mel,” he complained, in well-lubricated Home Counties tones (lucky chap; getting tipsy on next-to-no booze was now a useful skill). It seemed I wasn’t the only social interloper here. I wondered how he’d got past the doorman.
“Not tonight. Probably not any night.” Her tone was brusque.
“Well, I call that false advertising.”
“You know your wife still loves you?” She gave his collar a knowing sniff. “I suggest you spend the night in a shelter, then go home and let her do what I can’t.” The singer patted him on the arm, and he blinked as if she’d just slapped him sober.
“How the Hell d’you know I have a wife?”
“A girl who wears enough Je Reviens to rub off on her mate, when reason tells her to ration it, is a woman to be reckoned with. So stay safe and sound — both of you — and thank me when you wake up in her arms.”
She turned to me with a smile.
“Long time, no see.” She looked me up and down. “Dearest, your stockings look like eels.”
“I don’t own the proper means of suspense.”
“I should have known. Did you at least like the flowers?”
“No, and I think we both know why.”
“Flowers, eh?” Miss Weaver’s admirer put his hands in his pockets, with an air of wry defeat. “Ladies. I’m not the world’s cleverest chap, but I can tell when I’m wholly surplus to requirements. Goodnight, farewell, and adieu.”
The singer grabbed me by the arm, pulled aside one of the piano shawls that covered the walls, and ushered me down a low-ceiled corridor.
“Where the level blazes are you going?” I hissed.
“The dressing-room,” she hissed back, digging in her nails, “so keep up the act. Hopefully the place’ll be empty, but I can’t guarantee it.”
-----
The dressing-room was empty, but so small that it still felt cramped. On the left wall: a folding screen pasted with newspaper clippings of film stars (chief amongst them, Betty Grable), and a waste-basket filled with I knew not what. On the right: a mirrored dressing-table that had seen better days. Of its twelve bulbs, five glimmered fitfully, like the pearls of an electric oyster. The air smelled of greasepaint.
My new girlfriend locked the door and undid her turban — and all at once, I was looking not at Miss Melody Weaver, but at Agent Nevermore, tarted up like Mata Hari.
“I’ll give you this,” he said, in his usual voice, “you do a fantastic lovers’ tiff.”
Suddenly, I felt exhausted. Which was a good sign. For the past few weeks, I’d been running on adrenaline, wondering night and day if I’d lost my agent forever. Now I’d found him, my body was making objections.
I folded my arms. “If you’ve got an explanation, it better be good.”
“Depends on your definition of good,” he replied, perching on a stool in front of the dressing-table. “Pass me the cold cream. Second pot on the right.”
Nevermore dissolved his make-up, then scrubbed the mess off with a towel. Stripped of the face of Melody Weaver, he looked far more tired than I was. He frowned at his haggard reflection, and ran a black-taloned hand through his hair.
“I love the nails,” I said, “but they won’t go down a bundle in St. James’ Street.”
That won me a half-grin. “Blackout card and glue.” He tugged them off, and flipped them into the waste-basket: ping, ping, ping. “I should get ‘em made in celluloid when this is over. They’ll sell like hot cakes to the smart set.”
“You’ll be selling them to glamorous Fascists if you go on like this. Have you any idea of how much trouble you’re in? How much trouble all of us are in? I’m in trouble, Bunny is, so are Mr. Philpott and Mr. Curtis — ”
As I harangued him, my agent sashayed behind the changing-screen. I was forced to argue with the top of his head, where his hair — still vaguely burgundy from the dye that had turned him into an RAF man — stood up in aggrieved tufts.
“I specifically told you lot not to blame Gog and Magog,” he chided.
“On half a postcard nicked from a Welsh cornershop.”
“Nice bit of fieldcraft, that.” He ducked behind the screen, accompanied by the noise of a yanked zip. “Sorry your pet detectives are in trouble. But I’m not sorry you are. You lied to me about flowers in Abney Park.”
“I didn’t lie; I just didn’t tell you the whole truth. And if that’s your definition then we’re all liars, every last one of us. Bunny Hopkins must keep stuff from me, and I still respect him. Can’t you do the same for me?”
The dress of scales was flung over the top of the screen. Up close, it proved to be an ancient red frock, daubed with black paint through coarse netting, such a clever dodge that I wondered how many other outfits Nevermore could fix in a hurry. If he hadn’t told me where to find him, how long would I have had to keep looking?
“This lie was an insult to my intelligence,” he said pettishly. “Did you think I wouldn’t check the blessed grave?”
“I warned everyone I could think of that you’d try. Or send a confederate to check for you. If you’d like to come clean about having any, now would be a good time.”
The frock was joined by a diaphanous scarf. “Not a chance. Need to know basis.”
“Well, know this then: I told Top Brass it’d be safer to tell you,” I said in exasperation. “I was overruled, but I argued your side. I fought, dammit.”
Suddenly, I was looking into my agent’s barley-sugar eyes, peering at me over the top of the screen. There was an expression in them I’d not seen before. Regret.
“You fought for me?”
“I did. Thousands wouldn’t.”
“You trusted me. And I blew it, 'cos I always do.” He ducked back out of view again. “Bless it, girdles were invented by Beelzebub on a bad day. Pass me the talcum.”
“I can tell you two other things,” I coaxed, through clouds of scented dust. “Firstly, you’d never have been assigned to someone as low on the greasy pole as me, if you weren’t such an absolute menace. Secondly, these damned stockings are currently held up by elastic and safety-pins, so if you grant your handler half a minute’s privacy, she might be in a slightly better mood.”
“Ha! Vanity is it’s own punishment. Truce?”
“Truce.”
There was an unseen struggle, and the mutual snap of elastic. I disengaged the precious nylons from the snarl of pins and elastic, and had just stowed them in separate pockets of my coat when Nevermore emerged from behind the screen, wearing his pinstriped suit and a shirt I hoped was his own.
“I’m rare, aren’t I? Tell me I'm rare.”
“You have some explaining to do, but yes, you're rare, and if you've got a good reason for bolting, you haven’t blown it yet. So let’s hear it.”
He grabbed a comb from the dressing-table, stole a dab of brilliantine, and swept his hair into a wave. “Not in the Wiggle Room. There’s a fifty-fifty chance that tomorrow morning, the police will come knocking on the door of this place, and it would be rather a good thing if they didn’t find the two of us here.”
“Where do you suggest we go?”
“My place, of course. Milton Motors. Don’t look so surprised, I’ve got boltholes all over London — and I know you’ve been to this one already.”
“Not in the middle of an air raid.”
“First time for everything.” My agent cast an eye over Melody Weaver’s discarded outfit, and picked out the diaphanous scarf. He tied in a loop at each end and slipped his hand through one of them. “We shouldn’t get separated in the dark, though. Bit primitive, but it works in a pinch. Hold out your wrist.”
I shook my head. But I did what he told me, and slipped my hand through the loop.
“Nevermore, you’re certifiable. People will try to stop us, even here.”
“I suppose they might. But even Bohemians need their beauty sleep.”
_____
Astonishingly, the remaining members of the Wiggle Room who hadn’t departed were indeed fast asleep, some of them (presumably) in the piano-shawl alcoves, but others on the floor, making do with whatever they could. Even the doorman had unhooked the inner curtain of his sanctum, and now slumbered peacefully beneath it. Maybe living south of the river honed one’s skills for napping while all Hell broke loose outside.
Outside, where Nevermore had calmly suggested that we go. Outside, into darkness, confusion, and fire.
“This is not a sensible idea,” I protested, when the idiocy of what we were about to do crashed in on me.
“Definitely not. But I’ve got things to tell you I can’t tell you here — and unless you come with me, you’ll never find out what they are.”
He opened the front door, and stood aside like the gentleman he’d never be.
“Ladies first.”
We emerged into pandemonium. London fought like a chained bear, raking the sky with claws of light, seeking the planes that strove to bring her down. In the an air raid, every loud noise feels horribly close, but Nevermore didn’t hesitate: he found his bearings and started pulling me along by the scarf. From streets away came an almost-human bellow, like the throes of a wounded giant. It was the sound of a collapsing building, close enough for both of us to hear the ‘Crump!’ as the basement fell in.
At that point, I was scared enough to resist him with all my strength, but it was futile; my rogue agent pulled his erstwhile handler along like a dog on a leash. As I stumbled after him, his profile was lit for one frozen moment by my torch. He was grinning into the roaring, wailing midnight like a man facing a headwind at the beach, and in an instant, I realised I’d ventured into an air raid with someone who didn’t care hugely if either of us lived or died.
Panic would only make things worse. I counted the strides we were taking — longer by half again than my own, switched my torch to the hand that was tied to Nevermore’s, and when we reached the archway of Old Paradise Gardens, I used my free one to grab the edge of it with all my strength. I strove to keep my voice calm, which wasn’t easy, since I had to shout to be heard.
“I spent the afternoon memorising a map of the area,” I yelled reasonably. “If we cut through the gardens, we’ll save four minutes.”
“Göring beat us to it.” Nevermore nodded at a rope I’d almost blundered into, strung across my planned shortcut and bearing a sign: ‘NO ENTRY. SUSPECTED UXB’. There was nothing for it; we pressed on until we came to a passageway sandwiched between grim brick walls, and my mad agent began dragging me into it. I shrank backwards as if from the grave.
“I can’t go down here.”
“You can if you follow me. One benefit of stupid eyes: I can see all right in the dark.”
It had to be true, for he pulled me along until until it was all I could do to keep my footing as the torchlight swung from wall to wall, and the sirens were muffled by the brickwork that scraped my elbows. When the howls grew more expansive, I felt hope: we’d emerged from that awful passage, if only into Hell again.
“Where are we?” I gasped.
“Alley that runs next to the viaduct. One last push, and we’ll be at Milton Motors.”
“And then what? The locks are detectors and Mr. Milton has the keys. You can’t pick one of those with a hairpin. This isn’t a film.”
“Pity we’re not in a film,” he mused. “ ‘Cos if we were, I might try picking a detector lock in the middle of the night, as the bombs got nearer and you bravely held the torch. We could try it. Or, if you want to be boring — ” he delved into his jacket with his free hand, and came up with something that glinted. “We could use this.”
Jesus wept. Of course, somehow or other, this ridiculous crook would get his hands on a key. Which was difficult, even for the smart lads at Scotland Yard, but at this point, I wouldn’t have put anything past Nevermore. He had an inside man at Chubb Security. He’d hypnotised Mr. Milton and picked his pockets. He’d seen the key once, at a distance and from an angle, and could nevertheless reproduce the whole thing from his madcap corkscrew memory.
I slumped against the wall. “Let’s just get in there alive.”
_____
“How long have Wrigley and Burrows owned this set-up?” I asked, as we folded back the Bentley’s tarpaulin and my heart rate descended to something more compatible with life. Even with the door of the garage firmly shut, we hadn’t switched on the overhead bulb, and were setting up camp by lantern-light. Better safe than sorry.
“Twenty years, give or take. Satan’s toenails, this place is bloody arctic.” My agent filled his dented kettle, set it on the Primus, and lit a match. “And before you judge my business practices, plenty of people got through the Depression thanks to local hero Anthony Crowley. I won’t hear a word against him.”
There was a patter of anti-aircraft fire, and an explosion that I’d prefer to have been further away.
I shivered. “Have you considered your cost-effective residence isn’t proof against a direct hit?”
He shrugged, and began rummaging in one of his tool-cupboards. “Nowhere is, really. Certainly not those Andersen shelters — here, hold this oilcan — and not the deep ones, either. That’s why London’s being turned inside out to find more places to shove people. If you don’t put too many in one spot, most of them will be lucky. The others, we don’t talk about.”
“People are dying out there.” I stood with the oilcan like a parody of Temperance until the wash of anger subsided. Every time I thought I’d got used to the man, he came out with a callous little zinger like that.
“Yes, but the trick’s believing we are going to make it.” He handed me a couple of steel stirrup-cups3, and nodded at the oilcan. “Talisker,” he added, by way of explanation. “Mr. Milton’s welcome to his theories about my sources of income — but not to my reserve of Scotch.”
“Well, I’m not getting sloshed. Tomorrow — ” I glanced at my watch “ — scratch that, it’s ‘today’ now, the Twenty Committee will ask me why I came out here, and I’ll have to tell them you sent a coded bouquet to my lodgings and I decided to wing it, which I’ve been told to never do. Though I’ll try leaving out that you used some power of hypnotic suggestion on me. And I’ll definitely leave out my landlady’ tips on getting my mysterious boss to propose.”
“Propose?” My agent stared. Then he slapped the Bentley’s bonnet, the doors popped open as if the car was in on the joke, and I was treated once more to his incorrigible laughter. He folded himself into the driver’s seat and set the stirrup-cups and oilcan on the dashboard, assuaging my fears that he’d try to start the engine and drive off in the middle of an air-raid, and I’d have to explain the SOE had nobbled his beloved motor.
“Only seats in the house,” he remarked, pouring us both a double. “Bring in the lantern, and we’ll have a fireside chat.”
Dear Reader, never in my life had I been more in need of Dutch courage. Explaining about the car was a problem for the woman I’d be after some sleep: a few hours’ sleep, in a godforsaken garage, in an air raid. A Scotch would probably help. I sat in the passenger’s seat, and picked up the turned-steel beaker.
“All right, you resourceful bastard. But here’s no way I’m being debriefed with a sore head, and if I’m in enough trouble for three people, you’re in enough for a dozen. Go easy on the sauce.”
He smiled. “D’you know, you’re the first person in years to fret about my health.”
I could believe it. With the exception of various members of the SOE, no-one seemed to care awfully whether Nevermore lived or died, not even the man himself. He was beholden to nobody, entirely self-sufficient until, for whatever strange reason, he had decided to spy for the nation of his birth. His presumed birth.
“Penny for your thoughts?” he asked, as if he could somehow hear them churning.
“I’ll answer that question, if you’ll answer one of mine.”
He chuckled. “You can get into trouble that way — but in my experience, it’s much more fun if you make it three apiece. Deal?”
Hmm. All too soon, I’d have to face the music in St. James’ Street for this escapade, and the only acceptable propitiatory offering would be secrets extracted from Nevermore. Secrets he was, perhaps, willing to tell me. Dutch courage it was. I drank, and the Talisker was golden and bold. It settled warmly in my empty stomach, then purred through my veins like a well-bred lion.
“Deal,” I agreed. “Actually, I was wondering what I’d do if you got yourself killed.”
“Oooh. And now you have to say you’d weep buckets, even if that’s not true. I can imagine it, though — you after the war, in a hat with a veil, standing in front of a wall of names as a choir sings ‘I Vow To Thee My Country’. Your back is straight, you walk off with your head held high,” he snapped his fingers, “aaaand, Cut! Roll credits. Not a dry eye in the house.”
This wasn’t the reaction I’d been hoping for. Spies have a knack of compartmentalising their thoughts, but it’s a bad sign if they slip into fatalism, and it’s their handler’s responsibility to head such nonsense off at the pass.
“I would if I knew what name to look for,” I chided. “Anthony Crowley? Keir Hughes? There’s a birth certificate in Scotland that claims you’re Duncan Cruikshank — ”
“Mother deceased, father unknown,” he chimed in, “a poor, discarded son o’ Aberdeen. Common story. Genuine certificate.”
“No doubt. I just don’t think either or them happen to be yours.”
“A body has tae be someone,” he pointed out, in softly reasonable Doric.
“But not Duncan Cruikshank,” I said, emboldened by the Scotch. “You might well be an orphan for all I know, but that particular name? That’s not yours, is it?”
His reflection winked at me in the windscreen. “Rhetorical questions still count as questions.”
“Bloody smart-alec.”
“Look, if I admit I’m lying about my name — which’ll be a feather in your cap with the SOE — then believe I have reasons for not telling you my real one. It might be dangerous for you to know it.”
“I’ll risk it,” I told him, but got no response but the squeak of the oil-can and the fumes of good whisky.
“You’re a man with a past,” I said. “But assuming it stops short of murder, assuming you are on our side, and assuming we actually win, I’d be surprised if Station Twenty couldn’t eventually set you up with a new identity. You have energy and brains, and you’re still in your prime. You could — assuming you want to — stop being a petty crook. You could win a second chance at life.”
“A few more ‘assumings’, and I’ll be assumed into Heaven. You really believe I could start again?”, he added, in a tone I couldn’t place. Wistful? Nevermore was never wistful.
“Second question!” Now it was my turn to crow, and his to look rueful.
“Nae fair! Catchin’ me off-guard by being halfway decent. But even so…”
“It’s a tall order. But if anyone can do it, I reckon it’s you.”
There was a long and bibulous pause.
“Nevermore, think of your head.”
“Iron constitution,” he boasted. “But you might want to brace yourself for what I’ve been able to find out while I was AWOL. It’s pretty bad.”
I wanted to know where he’d been, of course, but a direct question was useless. Answering me might get people who’d helped him into trouble — there must be more of them than the approximately-honest Mr. Milton — and Nevermore wouldn’t peach on his Underworld connections. Talking to a runaway agent who’s decided to come home is like playing funfair hook-a-duck: out of a flotilla of questions, you can only choose one. Except that we were playing a game, so I couldn’t phrase it as a question.
“I’m braced for the worst,” I said.
“Don’t tempt Fate: this isn’t the worst worst. But it’s still uglier than Top Brass can imagine, since their imaginations don’t go past using the occult as a cover story.” His stirrup-cup had somehow refilled itself. “Titch, I’d bet my remaining stock of nylons that Heinz von Schall, ranking member of Der Überprüfung der Geheime Wissenschaften, is on the prowl in the South of England. And I reckon he’s looking for occult books.”
In the mirror of the Bentley’s windscreen, I saw observant eyes — and they saw me right back.
“I also think that that’s not news to you,” he remarked.
I sipped my whisky, and decided to tell him the gist of the intercepted Morse messages. Not the specific titles, nor the sign-off ‘Harmony’. Just enough to keep the conversation flowing, and Nevermore on-side. When, God willing, I got back to St. James’ Street, I’d list the divulged information to Bunny Hopkins and hope he’d back up my judgment.
“What I tell you is to go no further,” I warned him solemnly. “If Top Brass find out I’ve told you, I’ll be in more trouble than I already am.”
“I don’t grass. Not to anyone.”
“Someone out there wants rare books. And that person is also transmitting to Berlin from England, but never from the same place twice. If Bunny knows who it is, or where they are, he hasn’t confided in me.”
“It has to be Von Schall.”
“Oh, come on. You cannot, by any reasonable means, be sure of that.”
“I can, though. I’ve been to places. Talked to people. You don’t know the half of it.”
“And whose fault is that? As far as I know, you’ve spent the past few weeks prancing about London being Melody Weaver. You might also have been conducting a daring field investigation into the whereabouts of a Nazi occultist — but dammit, man, you can’t have been doing both. It’s more than one person can do. So either you come clean about having more contacts stashed away from your criminal days, or I won’t be able to believe you.”
His fingernails drummed the dashboard. “All right. I admit, I’ve got people who’ll help me move around incognito, but firstly, they’re not criminals and I refuse to get them into trouble, and secondly, I can’t call in that sort of favour often. Since I split from Gog and Magog after the Grail job, I’ve only got out of London three times, and that’s the gospel truth.”
“That's an impressive achievement. It's also spectacularly useless to me, unless I know where you went.”
"If you ever feel like guessing, or if your Mr. Hopkins divulges the transmission locations, feel free to list ‘em, and I’ll tell you if you’re right.”
I resisted the urge to sink the remaining whisky. “Fine. Here's my pitch. I'm going to name of one of the esoteric authors our mystery Morse operator listed, and you're going to name one of the books you think Von Schall is after. We'll do it together, on the count of three — ” Nevermore nodded assent — “all right then. One, two, three...”
"Otwell Bins," said I.
"Martha the Gypsy," said Nevermore. We looked at each other in silence for a few moments.
"At least we know we're on the same page," I said. "The remaining mystery being what astonishing intelligence you discovered, in these unknown places reached by mysterious means, that made you absolutely sure that the man who wants these books is Von Schall of the Reich. I am not wasting a question on this, your tricksy bastard, but if you shilly-shally, I'll dismiss the escapade as another of your fantasies. So spill it."
“The thing is, no-one, no matter who I ask, can give a good description of the man. Not his face, not his height, not his clothes: he's a walking cipher. And, in particular, they can't describe his voice. Never, ever his voice.”
“Is that it? Maybe he doesn’t have many distinctive features. The best spies don’t.” At this, Nevermore bridled, but I was ready for him. “There are exceptions. But maybe he’s von Schall, Nazi Master of Disguise.”
“Titch, the man looks like an academic and he speaks perfect English, but his accent could sink a battleship.”
“Then how come he’s risked coming here? It’d be suicide. Surely no book can be that vital?”
“Well, it’s possible that he’s an expert diabolist who sold his soul years ago in return for unholy deceptive powers. In that case, most people would hear what he wants them to hear — provided he can catch them alone. In a crowd, it’s snaggier,” he added moodily. “Too many variables. Easier just to be functionally invisible.”
“That sounds like personal experience, so here’s my second question: are you a practicing diabolist?”
For an instant, I saw what Nevermore looked like when nonplussed. His jaw went slack. His brow corrugated in ways that defied facial musculature. His whole face radiated ‘Who, me?’ but his self-control was magnificent, and he didn’t say it.
“I’ve had some wild times but believe me, that is bargepole territory.”
“At this point, nothing about you would surprise me,” I lied, since ‘Nevermore is a literal magus’ was still on that dwindling shortlist. “You believe an occult Nazi is raiding England for arcane tomes, and that this constitutes a national emergency. And in your comic-book, a character who looks awfully like you gets into one supernatural scrape after another. For lack of better ideas, I think you commissioned that thing.”
He smiled like someone who, months earlier, sent you a letter containing a not-too-difficult acrostic, which you have belatedly solved.
“Unless you drew it yourself,” I added.
“No chance — but I get on well with the artist set. You’re a tough nut. It took you ages to ask about the comic.”
“Well, now I want to know. Because I think that whatever else he might be, Heinz von Schall truly believes he wields unholy powers, and is persuasive enough to make others believe it, yourself included. I think he has a hold over you, and you won’t tell me what it is in case Station XX uses it against you. I think he recruits other people to help him — some of them highly disposable — and you went out of your way in America to make recruiting hard. He had a go at scaring you off, and he partly succeeded, because you started looking for backup. Enter the SOE.”
“No-one scares me. But other than that? Not a bad stab. And I promise you, no-one is less keen on diabolism than me. Mostly it’s a waste of time, and as for stuff that isn’t — ” his reflected features twisted “ — it has no right to work. But other people can…sense evil. Not that I asked to be able to. Bane of my existence.”
I didn’t reply, but my mind was racing. Could Nevermore be some sort of Hereditary Witchfinder himself? He’d claimed to be an orphan, cut off from all family tradition, and perhaps that part was even true. What had Tarquin Narker said? 'There are certain families with a hereditary call to fight the machinations of the Devil.' For a wild moment, I tried to imagine introducing Agent Nevermore to the Witchfinder Sergeant for formal evaluation as an REF operative. My mind boggled. It could never be.
“I can sense someone as bad as Von Schall,” he continued. “Not from hundreds of miles off, but if he’s a day’s journey away, it’s like the air before a thunderstorm.”
“But apparently, lacking the latest advances in direction-finding.”
He sighed. “Too bloody right. I knew he was near, but Gog and Magog would never have believed it. So, I bailed and hit the ground running.”
“You don’t appear to have got your man.”
“No,” he admitted moodily. “He must have people helping him too. It won’t turn out well for them.” He took a pull of his illicit Scotch. “Time for my third question: Have you met a special someone?”
The sod. The bastard. The irrepressible shit. I almost broke into cheers.
He’d used his first-move advantage in asking three questions to seize the initiative with the one I’d saved for last: namely, what was the import of that phrase, and if he actually did have some benighted power of hypnosis. I should have seen it coming, but to be outwitted was worth it. The morbid mood vanished as if it had never been, and in the Bentley’s windscreen, Nevermore’s reflection was grinning like the Cheshire Cat.
I looked through my own reflection into darkness, and a picture of the ‘special someone’ formed in my brain. A person with dishevelled curls and a camel-coloured suit, a book in one manicured hand, with the other held up in…surprise? Supplication? Warning? It could have been any of the three, for in my mind’s eye, I could see the man’s expression in detail, and he looked more upset than I’d ever seen him in life. Those occasions hadn’t been accidental, I was sure. I’d have found my way to a certain bookshop in Soho come Hell or high water, and the sense I’d had of vanished time (more time than really seemed possible?) when talking to Nevermore been no illusion either.
“It’s a pity you were gallivanting about trying to find Nazi wizards,” I told him, “because while you were at it, I met Azariah Fell twice.”
“Azariah!” he spluttered. “That’s a new one.”
“Not the strangest thing about him. It’s odd that a man like you even knows a man like Fell.”
“The Great War was odd. Odd and horrible, and I curse the day I was caught up in it. Never did have any knack with weapons — but Fell’s a born fighter. Never talks about it, but believe me, he’s tougher than he looks.” He set his tumbler on the dashboard with a thunk. “How is he?”
By my count, that made four questions to Nevermore, but I didn’t say so. Instead, I recited the recent activities of the eccentric bookman, omitting his sponsorship of the Royal Exorcism Force, but emphasising his Good Works, his devotion to the ARP, and his collaboration with Rose Montgomery on adventures of The Fantastic Mr. Fell, which made Nevermore laugh like a drain.
“Instead of putting your loyal handler through this rigmarole,” I added, careful not to phrase it as a question, “it strikes me that you could have strolled half a mile to Soho, and learned all this first-hand.”
His eyes flicked sideways. “Fell and I had…a falling-out. Years ago now. Burned our bridges badly.”
“But not enough to stop you if he’s in real trouble. Nor to stop you using someone else as your tool without so much as a by-your-leave. I’m assuming that he is in trouble.”
He topped up our drinks from his inexhaustible oil-can. “Look, I don’t know much about books, but I do know about money. And some Fell’s books are worth lots of money, ‘cos you don’t need the fingers of one hand to count the surviving copies. He would also rather die than sell to a card-carrying Nazi, which is a problem, because Heinz von Schall is looking to buy — and a bookseller in the States who wouldn’t play ball with him is at the bottom of the Ashokan Reservoir.”
If Nevermore was trying to steer me away from exactly how he’d come to know Mr. Azariah Fell, he succeeded amazingly, because as far as the British Intelligence knew, the American bookseller was only missing, presumed dead. She’d fled to the Catskill Mountains, and her abandoned car had been found a week later. I’d never mentioned her existence to Nevermore. It was possible he’d somehow got hold of a regular supply of US newspapers, had kept abreast of every news story in the States that could involve Nazi activity, and that the SOE had unaccountably overlooked this development.
Possible, but not likely.
“The SOE knows about the disappearance,” I admitted. “But the police in the States didn’t find a body.”
“They’d need to drain the lake, or drag it. But a man like Von Schall doesn’t do all his own dirty work, just the fun bits. So when I wasn’t rounding up hot nylons in the States, I spent time, cash, and favours finding out what happened to the missing lady. I didn’t find out all of it, but I found out enough. She bolted too late,” he added grimly, “and what she told him can’t have led him to what he really wanted, or he wouldn’t risk coming to England in search of it.”
“Assuming you’re right, we’ll never know what she told him. Perhaps she wouldn’t comply.”
He shook his head, and I wondered again how much of the comic’s symbolism was true; what threat would have to be wielded against a man like Nevermore, to force him to obey a man like von Schall.
“He has ways of making you talk.”
A stock line, even back in the 30’s, but delivered so bluntly that I shivered in my sensible Cuban heels.
“So do you, it seems. Are you some sort of Mesmerist?”
“I make that question three.”
“So be it. If I’m keeping an eye on The Fantastic Mr. Fell by the power of mental suggestion, I want to know why I’m doing it, I want to know how, and I want an apology, because I might have done anything and the whole business was vile. I imagine you learned it in your Berlin days.”
“Edinburgh, as it happens,” he said smugly. “And it’s not Mesmerism, it’s Hypnosis. Mesmerists believe in animal magnetism and suchlike blether. Hypnosis was founded by an honest Scot, and you can’t make someone do things they’d not do of their own volition. But luckily for me, Agent Tyche happens to be an exceptionally nosy parker.”
“Take it off me,” I said, through gritted teeth.
“Already done,” he waved a languid hand, “when you mentioned our mutual friend by name.”
“And since you know I can’t tell anyone at St. James’ Street about it, hear this: if I suspect you’re doing it again, I’ll quit the SOE. Someone else can be your handler, and the best of British luck to them.”
His face fell. Either my threat had shaken him, or he was a loss to the stage.
“Titch. How could you think anyone could ever replace — ”
“I thought I was going mad. I really did.”
“Regina Morley Diceman, I apologise for hypnotising you. It was a cheap trick and I was desperate. But I can’t apologise for your landlady thinking we’re going steady,” his eyes lit with mischief, “because it’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in ages.”
We we interrupted by a whistling sound, so close that it filled the entire archway. It got more and more urgent, until my nails were gripping the seats harder than befitted an Agent of Iron Nerve. If we both got blown to smithereens, it’d serve me right and, at least I’d be spared explaining things to the Twenty Committee…
My agent sprang from the driver’s seat.
“Our central heating!” he exclaimed cheerfully, “and right on cue. This place has all the mod cons, Titch — they just take a while to manifest.”
It wasn’t a bomb, of course. It was the kettle coming to the boil on Nevermore’s Primus, incongruously domesticated in the near-dark. I got out of the car myself. The garage felt warmer than when we’d entered it, but one still couldn’t call it snug. I’d wondered how Nevermore had passed his nights here, and now, I was about to find out. Perhaps we’d draw straws for who got the sleeping-bag, and who got the hot-water-bottle.
We didn't. The boot of a 30’s Bentley is like an old-fashioned bread bin, the cavernous, enameled sort that opens on a hinge. Nevermore reached into it with one arm and pulled out more blankets than the space could reasonably contain, along with a spare hot-water bottle. Had it all been in there before? Maybe the car was fitted with secret compartments, for smuggling illicit nylons and whisky. If Mr. Philpott had missed out on finding them, he’d be awfully cross with himself.
“Were you expecting guests?” I asked.
“An agent is always prepared. I’ll take the front seats,” he added, “and you have the back. If you let your legs dangle a bit, it’s not too bad.”
I doubted that. Despite Nevermore's generous offer, even the back seats of the Bentley made the made the Digby’s Andersen shelter look like the arms of Morpheus. Tomorrow, my dud hip would give me murder. I reminded myself that few hours’ discomfort was a small price for bringing my lost agent back into the fold.
God, I was tired. And it was Heaven to kick off my shoes. And the hot-water bottle was surprisingly cosy, the blankets surprisingly soft, and even the Procrustean threat of my legs dangling off the back seats didn't seem as awful as it might have done.
“Nevermore,” I said sleepily, “is your car bigger on the inside than the outside?”
“Honestly! What a ridiculous idea. Also, you’re out of questions, and I’m out of answers.” He leaned forward, and blew out the lantern’s tiny glow. “Go to sleep, Titch and don’t have nightmares.”
I was out like a light.
_____________________________________________
1. A less odd beverage choice than it sounds. Beer-making consumed irreplaceable grain, but England abounded in orchards. Cider had a wartime renaissance — whether or not it was legally obtained. return
2. 'Good' is always a relative term when it comes to such abilities; some people are naturals. For example, I wasn't nearly as good a gestalt-spotter as raw, untutored Mr. Ffolkes, who had identified me without difficulty from my walk the second time he saw me passing St. Brides. return
3. Dear reader, at the risk of you reckoning that everyone in the 30's (not just Saint Winston Churchill) was flirting with dipsomania, stacking sets of metal beakers for snifters were a bit of a craze at the time. They usually came in a chi-chi little leather case, and it wasn't uncommon for people to carry a set in their car. return
Notes:
1. Reggie’s journey across London in a Blitz blackout sounds wildly unlikely, but (though fraught with risk) it was actually possible. Buses and trams continued on their way even while the bombs were falling elsewhere, and the decision to stop and seek the nearest shelter was (amazingly) at the driver’s discretion - sometimes passengers urged them to press on. As described in the link, it was also possible get stuck far from home overnight. A domestic landline was a pipe dream for most Londoners, and being stranded like this must have caused a lot of anxious nights.
2. The song 'Melody Weaver' sings is a real (though somewhat obscure) Irving Berlin number. You can hear vintage glamour-puss Lee Wiley sing it here on Youtube.
3. Observant readers may have noted that chronological progression in SotB is wonky at present (this is due to efforts to pin this story to real events; fog of war and all that, but the month of October seems to have sunk without trace). I’ll probably make Operation Parsifal start in October.
4. Crowley is actually bang to rights about hypnotism: it was first formally studied as a potential medical treatment by a Scottish surgeon. Franz Anton Mesmer (who was more showman than medic) claimed that the mysterious 'influence' came from the therapist/performer, but James Braid was the first to hypothesize that it actually came from the patient's own mind, and that no therapist was strictly necessary.
Chapter 10: Unorthodox Sources
Summary:
'The agent, whether he is a spy or a counter-spy, has to make out reports at every opportunity. Such reports must be factual, accurate, and objective. There is no room in them for speculations and high-flown theories.'
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
When I awoke, the world was cold and dreary and dimly lit. I dreamily wondered if I was alive or dead.
Hang on, I must be alive, because I felt like I’d been run over — if not by a motor vehicle, then at the very least, by a determinedly-piloted wheelbarrow. I was too uncomfortable to be in Heaven, but not nearly uncomfortable enough to be in Hell. The peace I felt wasn’t proper peace, but the small-hours lull between one night’s hostilities and the next. I was cold because the pizazz had gone out of my hot water-bottle, and a peep through the Bentley’s windows told me the light came from the overhead bulb of the lock-up, quivering as a train passed overhead.
I squinted at my watch: 4.45 am. We had at least half an hour to get clear of the place before Mr. Milton arrived and understandably wondered what the dickens was going on. I crept barefoot across bone-cold concrete, in search of my shoes and Nevermore, but I didn’t have to go far to find them. My shoes were on the passenger-side footplate (sprinting over cobbles had left them in a parlous state), and from beneath the car on the opposite side emerged a pair of pinstriped legs on a mechanic’s dolly, together with snatches of conversation. Of course I eavesdropped, Reader. You know me by now.
“No funny business down below,” observed the voice, “the bastard had a modicum of decency. But under the bonnet? My poor girl, he was downright frisky — ”
I could have sworn I was silent, but Nevermore suddenly shot from beneath his car on rollers, and smiled at me. It wasn’t the mad rictus I’d seen last night, when he’d dragged me through the middle of an air raid, but it was… unsettling. It reminded me of how delighted he’d been when our scheme of wasting the Abwehr’s time on looking for codes in chain-letters had been swiped from under our noses, as if here were some connoisseur of dishonesty. He really was a tremendously odd duck.
“Agent Tyche! Come to lend a hand?”
I held mine out, and he pulled himself upright with a dancer’s poise.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Is it, though? Is it really? You have some explaining to do — you and your tame policemen. Which of them tried to spook my car, by the way? Gog, or Magog?”
That was who the smile belonged to. The snooker ‘novice’ who doesn’t know one end of a cue from the other; the pub bore who can’t throw a dart straight; the blonde ingénue who might, just possibly, have played enough bridge with Mummy to make up a four. The hidden expert who scents fresh meat. For the life of me, I wasn’t going to set this artful dodger on Curtis and Philpott.
“It was my own suggestion, Nevermore. All three of us thought you might do something foolish, like try selling it, or bolting for the coast. But I was the one who gave permission to nobble, so it’s my fault if we have to catch the bus now. Assuming there’s still a bus to catch.”
In answer, my agent held a pale, grubby object before my eyes accusingly. It was a used cotton swab.
“You didn’t think of this, Titch. I’m not officially a mechanic, but I am officially an underhand bastard, and I can tell when someone’s painted the contacts inside a distributor cap with gum arabic. Only fools nick the rotor, that gives the game away — but gum arabic’s invisible and dissolves in a jiffy. Provided you know it’s there.”
I gave up pretending. “Where the level blazes did you learn that?”
“Hang around with crooks, and you learn a lot about the finer arts of nobbling.”
“What about the missing spark plug?”
“Oh, that. The first nobbling hurdle, to see if I had spares. Which I do, of course. It’s not as if this war was a total surprise to me.” He shut the bonnet, then gave it a loving pat. “I give old Philpott eight out of ten for effort, four for ingenuity — ” (poor old Gog, I thought, at least you tried) “ — and may he never greet a superior officer without scrambled egg on his tie.”
Suspicion seized me. “How d’you know he likes scrambled eggs?”
“While I’ve had Gog and Magog lumping around my flat like a couple of labradors, I’ve studied the care and feeding of police inspectors. They like their Yorkshire tea — no saccharine, mind — and they like their buttered toast, but if you want a policeman with a glossy coat and a gleam in his eye, he needs the occasional egg.”
“You’ve been bribing your handlers. Marvellous.”
“I’ve been treating them like people. Unforgivable, I know. Besides, the butter ration’s mine, and half the eggs are powdered. It hardly counts.”
I wouldn’t mind being treated as a person myself, I thought sourly, peering at my face in the spotted mirror over the sink. The face that peered back didn’t look as rough as it might have done, given how we’d spent the night, but it was a long way from the cover of Vogue. The remains of the lipstick I’d worn to the Wiggle Room blended with soot that must have come from our rush down the alleyway. I pulled out my hanky and cleaned off the worst of it.
“Last time I came here,” I told him, “I was disguised as a lady constable, so I suggest we get out of here before Mr. Milton arrives and thinks you somehow persuaded her to spend the night with you in a lock-up garage.”
“A policewoman? You?” The notion tickled him. “Really?”
“Gospel truth.” I pulled on my abused shoes and attempted to fasten them. Not only were they scraped and missing a heel, but the buckles were out of shape. “Dammit! These were my good pair.”
“Fashion’s my manor, I’ll get you new ones.” His eyes glinted. “Just name the style.”
“Nevermore, if you value what passes for our friendship, if you have the slightest hope we might still work together, you will never again offer me anything from the black market. Please.”
“All right, you incorruptible." He shrugged. "But given our strong start in painting the town red, what should we do for an encore?”
“You already know. You’re going to use your lock-picking skills to get me into Mr. Milton’s office, I’m going to call St. James’ Street, and they’ll send cars round — one for each of us. We’ll taken to separate premises and interrogated, which won’t be fun, and if we’re lucky, I might be allowed to carry on being your handler. I give us a fifty-fifty chance, but if you didn’t want this, you shouldn’t have bolted in the first place.”
He made a lemon-sucking face. “All right — but as a saint once said, not quite yet. Last night you told me I’m in enough trouble for twelve people.”
“A conservative estimate.”
He shot back the bolts of the rolling door, and dragged it open. Outside it was dark, but not very far in the distance, I could see the glow of fires. Nothing significant had fallen in our immediate vicinity, and the raid and the sirens had stopped, but all over the city, the ARP fought on.
“In that case,” mused my agent, “being in enough trouble for say, fifteen people wont make much difference to me. And you’re a professional, grown-up spy; I’m sure you can handle twenty-five percent more trouble in your life. I suggest we go home.”
“Home? Your home?”
“Would you rather we went to yours? If I’m going to be given the third degree by Passion Pants and his merry crew, I need a wash, a shave, and some approximation to coffee. And more to the point, so do you.”
I raised an eyebrow. It might have been sooty, but I raised it, and no handler has ever been gladder to hear their agent laugh. He hopped into the Bentley, opened the passenger door, and looked at me pleadingly.
“When you ride alone, Titch, you ride with Hitler.1 D’you really want to me to ride with Hitler?”
I got in. Before we set off, he rummaged in the glove compartment for a spare pair of dark glasses, put them on, then pressed a small, circular object into my palm.
It was a penny. An old one, stamped with the head of Queen Victoria in mourning and worn with age. I stared at it.
“What’s this in aid of, Nevermore?”
“Your thoughts.” I must have looked confused, for he added, as if for a slow child, “I offered it last night, and you did tell me your thoughts, so by rights, Reggie Diceman, I owe you a penny.”
“That’s a figure of speech.”
“Mostly. But you said we might never see each other again, and any time I try giving you something worth more than two-and-six, you see it as morality test, so here’s the least valuable thing I can give you. If I have to spend the rest of the war in Inverlair Lodge, or whatever other oubliette the SOE keeps for naughty spies, perhaps it’ll bring you luck with your next one.”
That was the most thoughtful thing I’d ever heard from Nevermore, and I was genuinely moved. I tucked the penny in my top pocket, and we drove off to face the music.
-----
I would like, at this stage in the narrative, to apologise to Inspector Philpott, alias Gog. Both he and Curtis had been on night duty at Nevermore’s flat on the margins of Mayfair, in case our rogue agent returned. At six the next morning, he opened the door to my knock, only to see the Bentley he’d sabotaged parked outside as if nothing had ever been wrong with it. The man genuinely looked as if he’d seen a ghost. To do him credit, he said not a word and whisked us into Nevermore’s compact sanctum, where everything that wasn’t dove grey was jet black, and neat as a new pin. Even the king’s ransom in jazz records was in alphabetical order. I’d never seen a tidier bachelor pad.
Thus it was that after a wash in Nevermore’s tiny, immaculate bathroom, and a dry-off in a Turkish towel so big it was probably illegal (the downside was having to get back into last night’s clothes), I sat in Nevermore’s neat kitchenette, between the hulking forms of his minders, as we guiltily guzzled the treasures of his pantry. Toast with scrambled eggs and actual butter; tea for the policemen, while Nevermore and I drank some esoteric coffee brewed by pouring boiling water straight onto the grounds in a mug, then sinking them with a splash from the cold tap. My agent even managed to make coffee like a heretic, but as a condemned person’s breakfast, it had its points. Whoever said crime didn’t pay?
British Military Intelligence, that’s who.
At 7.15 am, Nevermore emerged from his own ablutions clad in charcoal flannel, simple of cut but with the sort of drape you only get from Savile Row, black brogues, and his infamous scarlet socks. He offered Magog (the only other smoker) a Craven A from a cigarette-box on his basalt mantelpiece, and was just stubbing his own out when two vehicles drew up outside. One looked like a taxi cab, but could only belong to the SOE. The other was a dark-blue Daimler driven by a hoary old chauffeur — the sort of car a chap from the Upper Ten might send to retrieve his scapegrace daughter from some bounder who ran with the criminal set. With a sinking feeling, I realised that that was my role in this whole charade, and so it proved. The chauffeur creaked out of the driver’s seat, and opened the back door for me with a sarcastic deference that would have done credit to Jeeves himself.
The taxi was for Nevermore. Magog got in first, and settled himself in the backseat. Where would the SOE take my agent? Trent Park in Enfield? The Cage in Kensington? The first possibility was nasty, the second, really frightening, and they probably had worse places that even I hadn’t heard of. I would have been quaking at getting into that car, but then, I wasn’t Nevermore.
“See you soon, Titch,” said my incorrigible optimist. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
He straightened his collar, gave me a wink, and went quietly. As he folded his long legs into the backseat, next to the substantial bulk of Inspector Curtis, I saw the glint of a pair of handcuffs. They weren’t taking any chances with him this time. It was only after he'd departed that I really noticed my chauffeur.
Even by the standards of rural retainers, the Daimler’s driver cut a curious figure. At their most hirsute, male servants of the era might sport a brisk moustache, but this fellow had an impressive Verdi beard, and exuded the scent of Old Navy shag. Only when you looked closely did you realise that he wasn’t all that ancient, and his eyes were full of uncomfortable judgments.
Bunny Hopkins. Of course it would be him. He’d even trimmed the old face-fungus for the occasion. He looked at me like a wizard who has already decided to turn you into something embarrassing, and is pondering whether the transformation should last a week, a month, or a year.
“I hope those bloody nylons were worth it,” he said.
-----
The tweedy sage of St. James’ Street was both very pleased with me, and enormously put out. On one hand, I’d retrieved Nevermore, but on the other, I’d blundered into the field without clearance, inadvertently humiliated him in front of his superiors, and worried him out of his mind. Not that he admitted to the latter weakness. Once we were back in our fusty backroom lair at St. James’ Street, adorned with his photographs of people passing through Abney Park cemetery, his lists and his maps, he started with the simple, mortifying fact that he’d known about the stockings. He’d known almost from the very start.
“A little over four months ago, Agent Tyche, a packet of black-market nylons appeared in the bottom drawer of our desk.” He paced past me, leaving a cloud of aggrieved smoke in his wake. “Since they were not in my size, I inferred that a small bribe, calculated to be compromising, had been proffered to you by Nevermore, and duly rejected.”
I sat silently on my bentwood chair, like a schoolgirl caught shoplifting.
“When the packet stayed put, I concluded that though you’d scorned the article in question, you couldn’t quite bring yourself to dispose of it, but were holding firm in your scorn of back-handers, or possibly back-footers. But when said article — along with my most sensible agent — was suddenly nowhere to be found? Now that was very interesting. Not to mention, out of character. ”
“Bunny, I really am sorry.”
“No you’re not. Not until you’ve heard me out, and know what you left me to work with. Firstly — ” He held up one yellow-stained finger, “ — Nevermore is absent without leave, I thought, and yet Reggie has chosen this particular moment to kick over the traces, accept the bribe he offered months ago, and go missing herself.”
“How did you know I was missing? I’ve been only been gone overnight. It's the twenty-second of October.”
Bunny sat down and pushed forward his desk calendar for my inspection: one of those long, triangular brass ones, with a little wheel at the side.
“It’s the twenty-third. You’ve AWOL for twenty-four hours. This little shit couldn’t have slipped you drugs, could he?”
I shook my head, but remembered, uncomfortably, Nevermore’s oil-can of Scotch: he absolutely could have. Best to say nothing about that.
“Or at least, none that you knew about,” observed Bunny shrewdly. “In any case, he doesn’t seem to have noticeably harmed you, which is just as well for him. My second thought was that Nevermore’s the sort of chap to go to ground among the theatrical set. Now for some speculation. You aren't the sort of woman who dresses like she expects a casting call, yet he offered you hosiery of an aggressively glamorous nature. Not perfume; noses differ. Not lipstick; one shade of red is much like the next. On the other hand, seamed nylons are next to impossible to get in this country, and impossible to mistake for anything else, so any woman wearing them would be easy for Nevermore’s people to pick out.”
“That’s exactly what happened, as soon as I got to the Wiggle Room. I’m not sure I’d have got across the threshold without them.”
"I knew it. I knew it! But it's still nice to get confirmation." For the first time, the handler's handler favoured me with a millimetric smile. “Now try to think at if you were me, not you. At the time, I couldn’t write off one other explanation: what if Nevermore isn’t on our side at all? What if he’s heading for the coast, but remembered that clever Agent Tyche knows some miniscule detail that might let us work out where he’s going? Well?”
I had nothing to say to that. Bunny sucked on his briar, every inch the sorcerer lecturing his cack-handed apprentice. “Reggie, when the police say someone’s disappearance was very out of character, could you refresh my aging memory about what tends to happen a week or so afterwards?”
“They turn up dead.”
“I’ve spent months telling Top Brass you’re the most level-headed person I know. How would it have looked if you’d got yourself murdered? Spare a thought for the dregs of my career.”
“Nevermore told me to come alone. And — I know this sounds foolish, and I don’t necessarily expect you to believe it, but — ”
“You reckoned his fieldcraft was better than the SOE’s?” snapped my mentor.
“No! But if he suspected I’d brought company, he’d have asked me. And I don’t know how he does it, Sir, but he always knows when I’m lying to him. Always.”
“Reggie, I always know when you’re lying.” I hoped that was at least a partial boast.
“Not like Nevermore does, Sir. I wish it wasn't the case, but it is.”
That was part admission, and part challenge. Bunny was by far the cleverest person I knew who was prepared to wargame against me, mind to mind, regardless of my sex and of my lowly position in St. James’ Street. I badly needed his experience, his hard-boiled diplomatic skills, and his decades of dealing with people of odd temperaments. I needed his willingness to entertain every possible explanation.
“Hmph. Is our agent a psychic?”
“Perhaps we should test him. He’d probably go along with it.”
Bunny’s pipe had gone out. He glared at it.
“Perhaps he would. Well, since you’ve returned to us in one piece, I hope you’ve brought back the goods. What splendid information did he bestow on you?"
Ever since I’d availed myself of Nevermore’s state-of-the-art water heater and Mysore sandalwood soap, I’d been thinking like a machine about what additional information about him I could offer Bunny Hopkins. In theory, of course, everything. In practice, not quite. I told him that Nevermore had confessed that Duncan Cruikshank wasn’t his real name. Not a shattering revelation, and we still didn’t know his real one. I relayed Nevermore’s report that the missing lady bookseller in the States — who'd fled the unwelcome attentions of the Überprüfung der Geheime Wissenschaften, and by Nevermore's assertion, of Von Schall himself — had ended up in the Ashokan Reservoir. Fascinating if true, but to confirm it, we'd need to persuade the New York State police to drag for a body on the basis of intelligence we couldn’t tell them about. And as Bunny pointed out, it was possible that Nevermore knew the lady was in the lake because he put her there himself (I hadn’t thought of this grim explanation, but I ought to have done so; nothing a double agent tells you can be taken at face value).
What I wanted — what I needed — to tell my superior about was the existence of A. Z. Fell.
Nevermore had gifted me so much info about the man that he was surely invoking the SOE’s help to protect his ‘friend’. Or, not to be coy, his probable old flame. It would hardly shock Bunny or anyone else in St. James’ Street if, at some point during the last War, this equal-opportunities flirt had taken a male lover. The startling thing was not that the old flame was a chap, but that he was this particular chap: scholarly, domestic, and to all appearances, scrupulously law-abiding.
It was the ‘to all appearances’ that threw a spanner in the works. Mr. Fell might be innocent as a nun’s fart, but if he was a former associate of Nevermore, it was just possible he was the world’s most literate crook. Inconveniently for me, he also happened to be the sponsor of the Royal Exorcism Force. I urgently needed to know more about what I was near-certain was an REF project to forge obscure works of old prophecy, with the assistance of Narker and Ffolkes, but forgery-for-profit was a police matter. If I mentioned it to my superiors, the investigation of A. Z. Fell would be whisked out of my hands, Ffolkes and Narker would get into trouble they probably didn’t deserve, and I’d never find out any more about my father’s life as a Witchfinder. I couldn’t do that to them — or to myself. I’d have to lance that boil personally.
So I did tell Bunny about A. Z. Fell — but I left out the bit about Royal Exorcism Force. Then I mentally crossed my fingers and hoped my pipe-smoking confessor couldn’t detect lying by omission. If he could, he didn’t let it show. Instead, he homed in on the next most awkward detail: that I’d encountered Mr. Fell before I’d consciously known about his connection to Nevermore. Bunny didn’t like that much, and nor for that matter, did I.
“The thing is, I went to Ron the Barrowman’s, not to A. Z. Fell’s,” I pointed out. “I’ve been to plenty of places to buy flowers for Lydia Northrop’s grave, and never the same one twice. Sooner or later, I was bound to end up somewhere in Soho.”
“All right, but why that specific part of Soho? Why there?”
“Because Columbia Road had been hit by a UXB, and I spun the ARP warden on duty a sob story about getting yellow flowers to cheer up my bombed-out aunt, and he told me about Ron the Barrowman. There was a chain of reasons why I ended up outside A. Z. Fell’s bookshop, and all of them were commonplace.”
“Individual reasons are commonplace, Reggie, and so are daisies. But the thing about a chain of either is that someone has probably made it. Somehow.” His eyebrows bristled like caterpillars. “Should I confide something to you? It’s not as if you deserve it. You didn’t trust me when you sallied forth to risk your silly neck in some godforsaken spot called the Wiggle Room — so why should I go out of my way to trust you?”
I couldn’t think of a reason, so I had to I wait while Bunny emptied his pipe onto a sheet of waste-paper, extracted a pipe-cleaner from his top pocket, and dragged it laboriously through the tar-clogged depths. It went in clean and businesslike, and emerged looking like a question mark that had seen unmentionable horrors.
“In the near future, Agent Tyche, I expect an intelligence report from an unorthodox source. A source it took me two weeks to wheedle into advising me, since his beliefs are technically illegal. In my state of overwork, the next time we meet, I may leave his distilled wisdom tucked beneath my desk blotter. After an hour, I am likely to recall my oversight, and retrieve it. I expect to find the room empty when I do.”
“Understood, Sir.”
I silently wondered who the 'unorthodox source' could be. If it turned out to be Sergeant Narker (God, please no), I resolved to pretend to have a crise de nerfs regarding Nevermore, quit being a handler, and take up the most boring, predictable desk job I was offered. I’d risen to leave when Bunny spoke again.
“You’d better understand one more thing. When the call came through that Agent Nevermore was back in Mayfair after a night on the tiles with Agent Tyche, and Top Brass were trying to decide if this was a stroke of genius on your part, or softening of the brain, I wasn’t the one who took the lead defending you. That was Lt. Col. Robinson. He pointed out that when Nevermore wanted to return to the SOE, you were the chosen contact, and his worst criticism was that you seemed to have missed your vocation as a field agent. He was the one who pulled your irons out of the fire — but I doubt even that man can do it twice.”
As it happened, the next intelligence report I read arrived several days later via a most orthodox route: the letterbox of my lodgings in Islington. The stamp had been franked in Shrewsbury, and the envelope had been typed on the same typewriter, somewhat the worse for wear, that I’m sitting in front of now. I knew too well the way the letter ‘a’ sat slightly high, and the ‘c’ sat slightly low, and they always made my heart sink. The letter was from my mother.
A missive from my surviving parent meant one thing: advice, and lots of it. In this case, advice on the right and wrong way to solicit donations for the Church. Mummy was not pleased.
It transpired that after my second visit to A. Z. Fell & Co., the vicar of St. Egwin’s in Kensal Green had received a telephone call from a lady who worked for Woolworth’s department of childrens’ books. It had come to the notice of that Universal Merchant that St. Egwin’s was seeking books to cheer and edify its young evacuees, and by a stroke of luck, Woolworth’s had some damaged stock. Could she, by any chance, be put in touch with…she’d been told a Mrs. Diceman might be able to help? The nice lady was told that Joan Diceman was in Shrewsbury, running a temporary childrens’ home for evacuees whose placements had come unstuck. A few days later, a hamper of books turned up for Mrs. Diceman’s charges. Even my mother couldn’t be put out that homesick East End kids got free Tales of Adventure (most of the starring a certain Mr. Fell). Instead, she entertained suspicions that I’d been begging books from all and sundry…and surreptitiously reading a few myself.
And that might have been true, if I was thirteen. But as you know, Dear Reader, I was buying my tales of derring-do from A. Z. Fell and Co, like any respectable adult. I put pen to paper: Dear Mother —
But my interest was piqued, because if Rose Montgomery hadn’t been a writer of Woolworth’s fiction, I’d have called that episode a background check. Was she defending the supposedly-unworldly Mr. Fell against the inquiries of Yours Truly? I sometimes gave people the impression of being a journalist; perhaps Rose thought I was a rival for copy about London eccentrics. It struck me, uncomfortably, that I’d disliked Miss Montgomery mainly on the basis of Mother’s disapproval of Perfect Visions. In truth, the woman wasn’t any more brusque than I could be, and seemed at least as inquisitive. What an interesting and potentially useful person.
At any rate, it was another A. Z. Fell-related thing unrelated to the possibility that he was a forger of old books, so I decided to take my mother’s missive to Bunny. The next morning, it was on the desk in his office and we were both studying it, and before the day was done, the wizard of St. James’ Street had come up with an angle of inquiry. Do you recall the SOE’s Top Secret propaganda department? The one Sefton Delmer had been snaffled from the BBC to run? It was doing rather well for itself, which provided a cover story for Bunny’s letter: Miss Montgomery had the gift of the gab, and the SOE wanted it.
British Military Intelligence, he wrote to some august personage at Woolworth’s whose name I forget, was looking for clever young folk with writing talent (which was perfectly true), and the name of Rose Montgomery had come up (well, that was also true). It had been noted that she’d already ghost-written a series of adventures for the Mighty Midgets series. The ability to deliver vivid, simple copy on time was an asset in certain hush-hush matters. Could they possibly spare her for the War Effort?
Obviously, not every candidate proved suitable, and they would hate to deprive Woolworth’s of budding literary talent, but in the interests of National Security, could they provide a short résumé of Miss Montgomery’s life and times? Of special interest would be her education, any additional languages, her marital status (due to long hours, the post was unsuitable for married women), and her family connections. Had she ever been politically active? Had she traveled abroad? Overall, how would her current employers rate her intelligence, memory, and temperament?
The pitch was real, and so were Bunny’s credentials as a member of the SOE. If Rose Montgomery turned out to be the right sort of nosy parker, we really might end up recruiting her to Sefton Delmer’s Propaganda section after all. I hadn’t initially warmed to the woman, but she seemed more than capable. Stranger things had happened.
After we'd hammered out our letter of inquiry, Bunny left me alone in the room 'to get it typed up'.
I knew what that meant, but when I lifted his blotter to see if there was anything under it, my hand still shook a little. My supervisor proved to be as good as his word: beneath was a manila folder containing sheets of paper torn from a school notebook, close-written in a hand I didn’t know. The style was the same dry tone I’d encountered in plenty of expert reports to the SOE, but the area of expertise was so outré that although I never made a copy of it, I reckon the following reconstruction, hauled from the vaults of memory, is substantially accurate.
Bunny’s mysterious report concerned the existence of magic. More specifically, it concerned the possibility of diabolism as a ritual practice, the question of whether a man’s life could be supernaturally prolonged, and a sober, detailed analysis of whether or not Nevermore had psychic powers. To my indescribable relief, given the subject matter, the report wasn’t from any known member of the REF. It would have been surprising if it had been, because the first thing its author asserted was that he was a devout and practicing witch.
-----
Highcliffe-on-Sea
Hampshire
Innominate Sir,
I was intrigued to be taken off Home Guard duties to interview Our Nameless Friend, delighted to be informed that doing so required my exemption from the Witchcraft Act of 1735, and disappointed to learn that this reprieve from bigotry would end the moment I submit this report. Until that time, I am your respected consultant, and may assert that the Old Religion is as respectable as any other. Afterwards, I dwindle into your obedient crackpot, and my beliefs into trinkets again. I submit my report signed and in holograph, so the future may know that even a witch may also love his country.
Query the First - Does ONF really believe Britain is under attack from ancient diabolists?
ONF is, in his fashion, a devout believer, and his belief that Heinz von Schall is a practitioner of the dark arts is as sincere as his belief that the man constitutes a threat to the war effort. For the record, I agree with him. A diabolist’s path is fraught with dangers, and the few who survive long are formidable, if not very clubbable. Incidentally, the idea that it’s possible to make pacts with Hell fails to strike me as odd. If I claim that ‘power at any cost’ is a depraved motto, but clearly has its devotees, I don’t suppose you would gainsay me, so we are essentially quibbling about the degree of formality involved.
As for his claim that von Schall is over six score and ten, I wouldn’t discount it either. The alchemist Federico Gualdi fled Venice in 1690 after Doge Morosini investigated his boasts of being over a thousand, and found the man was and no more than a hundred and twelve, though appearing barely forty. The Doge wanted his method, but Gualdi declined to tell him, vanishing until the eighteenth century, when he resurfaced, dubbed himself Cagliostro, and at last died imprisoned in an oubliette in Rimini. Whatever his secret, he so feared revealing it that neither a Doge’s pelf nor a living tomb could drag it from him. A person of small imagination might dismiss this, but it strikes me that what has been done once may conceivably be done again.
Query the Second - Could Our Nameless Friend conceivably possess the ability to psychically sense someone else’s presence? Even in a moving car in a blackout?
I used an arcane ruse with which you may be unfamiliar: I asked him how he did it. He wouldn’t play ball, and insisted he just knew. Second sight. A hunch. The old pricking of the thumbs that announces the approach of cloak-swirling evil. Such claims are not always bunkum, so I decided to test his psychic abilities.
I got out a pack of Zener cards, and some Tattvic ones used by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn to develop clairvoyance. Both consist of five sets of five different symbols, making a pack of 25. The tester deals a card out of sight of the subject and focuses on its symbol, which the subject then tries to divine. Zener cards were new to ONF, but at the sight of the Golden Dawn pack he laughed, and asked if I belonged to the Temple of Isis-Urania like a London snob, or that of Amen-Ra in Edinburgh, like a man of sense and taste. I confessed that I’d yet to join up, at which he swore that after the war, he’d get me in with the Amen-Ra crowd. If he turns out to be on our side, I may take him up on this.
Now for the funny business. Whether I used Zener symbols or Tattvic ones, ONF’s extra-sensory ability was…appalling. Out of a set of 25 cards, the man never guessed more than three correctly, when by pure chance, he might be expected to manage between three and seven.
Understanding this requires some grasp of the odds. On a single run through a 25-card pack, around 27% of people will get three or fewer cards correct. If you do it twice, that number goes down to 7%, and if the test is iterated four times, that goes down to around one in two hundred. After four consecutive tests, alternating between Zener and Tattvic packs, ONF was that rarity. I prevaricated, said he was an outstanding performer, and asked if he’d like to continue.
He smiled. He would.
Test five: two correct cards. One in a thousand.
Test six: no correct cards. Below one in ten thousand.
We pressed on to test eight. His chance of getting three or fewer cards right was about one in thirty-three thousand, not counting the sheer unlikelihood of getting none right at all. When, for the second time in an hour, ONF managed this feat, my palms began to sweat — but fortunately, I carry rosin in my pocket for such eventualities.
Nine iterations: his chances of guessing three or fewer cards correctly were now under one in a million. At this point, the infuriating man got nine cards right, then seven, then thirteen, and after eleven rounds of testing, I was forced to call it quits.
If it were possible for someone to be negatively psychic to the extent that he jinxes efforts to find out how negatively psychic he is, ONF appears to be that man. And did he know what I was up to, as I dealt my cards and chatted about astral travel, all the time trying to work out the odds? I’d bet a thousand pounds he knew, and that my antics amused him. No sane individual would trust the fellow, but he’s surely better on our side — if kept on a leash that’s honest and reliable, for he respects such unfashionable virtues as a sportsman respects an old opponent.
I remain, Sir, your most obedient crackpot,
Gerald. B. Gardner
-----
Astute Reader, you have doubtless worked out that given the heft of the text you’re reading, I was not taken off Nevermore’s case after the Wiggle Room debacle. Apparently, Station XX did not have more honest and reliable leashes for him than your narrator, Gog, and Magog. What that says about the overall quality of SOE personnel, I decline to speculate.
Fifty years after these events, you may have an advantage I lacked, and recognise Gerald Gardner as a founder of modern witchcraft, which is nowadays called Wicca. But the Witchcraft Act was not repealed until 1951, and during the war, claims of supernatural prowess were risky. Even dressing up war gossip as clairvoyant knowledge — a tempting option for self-styled ‘mediums’ — could get you prosecuted, since it was as much of a security risk as any other sort of rumour.2 As far was the world knew in 1940, Mr. G. B. Gardner was an old Borneo hand, retired to the south coast for the sake of his malaria. Tracking down this expert on the occult and persuading him to interview Nevermore would have been tricky, but potentially worth the trouble. Even if Nevermore’s reasons for bolting were deeply eccentric, he might be cleared for further duty if, on balance, they seemed to be sincere.
In such unusual circumstances, it was a pity I couldn’t offer Bunny the talents of the Royal Exorcism Force, but I could see no way of disentangling their professional activities from the mystery of Mr. Fell. Then I reflected that I had one further source of information, at that time accessible only to me. I didn’t like dignifying ‘Diabolical! Hot Off the Press’ with the term ‘source’, but there was no doubt that I’d begun to treat it like one. I wasn’t sure when I’d decided that a comic, in theory no more than a series of flimsy pages, should be checked for updates as if it were a dead drop. Sergeant Narker would have denounced such furtive proceedings a skirting dangerously close to bibliomancy. Worse than that, he’d probably have been quite right.
________________
A piece of alarmingly protean literature
But did I check it? Of course I did, in my blanket nest in the Digby’s bomb shelter, reading by torchlight. And to my excitement and consternation, there was another installment of infernal antics that I’d overlooked. Even given the cheapest possible printing, it wasn’t plausible that there should be more than three or four stuck-together pages in one small magazine; I was now up to ten or twelve, but I attempted not to think about this too hard.
On their previous encounter in New York, the demon had been on the back foot when the diabolist had cornered him at the party (one point to Von Schall), but he’d also saved the one innocent soul there from going on Von Schall’s sacrificial shopping list (one point to the foul fiend, though I did wonder how things were going with the other two ingredients: the traitor and the lover). This time, we were back in Europe, and the demon was in pursuit of the diabolist. I was obscurely pleased to note that the foul fiend had taken the initiative, but it seemed to be in vain. His opponent would not be dissuaded from his grim ritual, and even worse, he was arming himself for combat. If, in real life, there really was a secret that could leave Nevermore ruined or even dead, then it seemed that Von Schall knew it, and was more than ready to use it.
VON SCHALL CROSSES THE POND
{Panel 1: An ocean liner steams across churning waves.}
Caption:
The SS Europa, 1939, en route to the port of Bremerhaven. The pride of the Norddeutscher fleet, and just a few notches below the most luxurious.
If you don’t need a four-poster in your cabin, the SS Europa will do nicely — and she’ll whisk you from New York to Germany in five days.
- - -
{Panel 2: Two men are arguing outside a cabin door: one is in the uniform of a chief steward, and the other is Heinz von Schall. The diabolist is in his nightshirt, and he is angry. Between his fingers, he holds up something invisible.}
SCHALL: Was I not clear? I will accept brunet stewards, or blond ones, or those who ancestors were slaves on your plantations. Young or old, tall or short, if they can change bedlinen and speak English, German, or Italian, all is good. But I specifically requested no redheads!
CHIEF STEWARD: It’s like I’ve been trying to explain, Sir —
SCHALL: Among your available servants, who is worst? Who brings cold toast and warm hock? Send them. I will not complain, I will tip well, and twenty dollars for your own pocket. But not one with hair of red! Understood?
CHIEF STEWARD: Sir, if any were that bad, I’d be out of a job, and besides —
- - -
{Panel 3: The door slams in the Steward’s face with a BANG.}
CHIEF STEWARD: [Puzzled] — we honestly have no redheads on staff.
- - -
{Panel 4: Above a city of dormers and turrets, a man sits on an altar tomb, smoking. Next to him is a spade, and in the branches above him, the moon outlines the suggestion of a long, sinuous shape.}
SCHALL: A return to form, Nak-Hayauda? I hope it’s close enough to the ground to sting. I would offer you a cigarette, but —
[No answer, but a RUSTLE so quiet it might have been the wind.]
SCHALL: I know you have been following me. Bremerhaven to Hamburg, Hamburg to Berlin. And here you are in Nuremberg, to observe my work with old Pharamund Rhumelius. But I am no longer angry with you. I have done much research into your hatred of soul contracts, and now I understand.
- - -
{Panel 5: He gets no answer. But above his head, two points of light appear in the darkness.}
SCHALL: I read my grimoires over and over. Some hexenmeister wrote that you were ashamed of how little you could give for a soul, but this was to hide their embarrassment at failing to bind you. Rhumelius knew better, and said you would serve no master but one. And now, I can guess that master’s identity, and he is —
- - -
{Panel 6: The points of light grow brighter: they are definitely eyes now. Eyes whose pupils are a pair of panicked slits.}
SCHALL: — yourself! To have Free Will, nicht wahr? Demonic blasphemy. A fine experiment in the diabolical arts.
- - -
{Panel 7: Above his head, the points of light contract. The listener is still there, but no longer so agitated.}
SCHALL: [chuckling] It cannot quite be possible. But serve me, and once the Fuhrer has his dynasty, it will be my pleasure to see how far we can get. Never again will you have such a chance. I am the best German diabolist since Rhumelius himself — but in two years’ time, I will be in Hell. Unless you renew my contract, of course.
DEMON: [unseen] H͜Į̯S̸͕̞̬S͈ͅS̳͔̿̉S̨ͯ̅͛!̾
SCHALL: I will take that as an expression of interest. But choose the other way, Serpent of the Elamites, and I will find means to induce significant regret. Even in you.
- - -
{Panel 8: Twilight in the Alps. A hooded pilgrim, staff in hand, navigates a narrow path, heading for a monastery. The bell in its tower is ringing: TING, TONG, TING, TONG.}
Caption:
The Brenner Pass, on the border between Italy and Austria. Pine-fringed meadows and steep villages,
punctuated by tiny vineyards, nimble cows, and the occasional House of God.
- - -
{Panel 9: The monastery door CREAKS open. An aged monk stands on the threshold, holding up a lantern and peering at his visitor. His visitor is Heinz von Schall, lean with travel, and every inch the ascetic.}
MONK: Buonasera, stranger. You have come far to knock at the door of the Abbazia di Novacella. What do you seek?
SCHALL: Bread and sleep, for two or three days. After that, the recommendation of an abbazia no more than a day’s travel away. My needs are simple, my remuneration, generous — and I never outstay my welcome.
MONK: Un pellegrino? In these times? And where might you be going?
SCHALL: I am going where all roads lead, good soul. I am going to Rome.
- - -
{Panel 10: An ancient cloister, lit by slanting sunlight. Von Schall sits opposite an unhappy young man in a Deacon’s habit. Between them is a table with a flask and a bag on it. The bag looks heavy.}
SCHALL: I bring what was promised in my letter. Have you done the same?
DEACON: There is none holier in Rome. Drawn from the well of San Lorenzo in Fonte, and blessed by hands we will not name. Not to be given away lightly, and if I had my will, not at all. But in difficult times, a donation like yours is not easily refused.
SCHALL: Your poverty, but not your will, consents? Just so. But I could not do one-tenth so much good with the money as you can in your hospital. And you sell no poison, but a blessing. How can there be sin in that?
DEACON: Truly, Signore? I do not know that I even wish to know. Now take your water, and go in peace.
- - -
{Panel 11: Von Schall is a distant silhouette. The Deacon has turned aside. With his left hand, he takes the diabolist’s money. With his right, he is crossing himself.}
1. The slogan of a poster campaign to conserve petrol via car-sharing: it showed an oblivious solo driver with a ghostly Fuhrer in the passenger's seat return
2. You may be familiar with the case of Helen Duncan, the last person imprisoned for witchcraft in Britain. What’s sometimes left out of her sad tale is that she was a medium of what Ffolkes called ‘the cheese-cloth ectoplasm sort’, with a history of using puppets and tricks to fleece the bereaved. Some time in 1941, she became aware of the loss of a British battleship, the H.M.S Barham, that naval intelligence was attempting to keep secret, and foolishly tried to capitalise on it. She might not have deserved a circus trial at the Old Bailey and nine months in gaol, but she was still the definition of a fraudulent medium. return
Notes:
Dear Reader, I have upped my chapter count, like the traitor I am. I may even do it again.
As a thanks (or possibly, a penance) for sticking with this fic — I am a horribly janky updater, my apologies, but I do intend to finish this — have some notes, most of them on the real-life people shanghaied into this unlikely tale:
1. 'When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler': the poster is here on Wikipedia. During WWII, it was everywhere.
2. RE: Helen Duncan, Reggie's take on her is a bit harsher than mine here. But not by much. I don't see how it's remotely possible that Duncan believed she really had psychic abilities, and while her case should never have gone to trial, let alone imprisonment (she was in poor health, and no real threat to national security), she almost certainly did dress up war gossip as Whispers From the Beyond.
3. Gerald Gardner is someone I knew little about prior to writing this, and frankly, I still know relatively little about him apart from what Wikipedia offers, including the fact that he was the first person to call their magical journal a 'Book of Shadows'. He was a secretive and complex person, and as to Wicca, which I do not practise, I don't think anyone can be judged its One True Founder.
4. Pharamund Rhumelius: I apologise to the shade of this Renaissance German alchemist for libelling him as a dabbler in the Dark Arts, for he was a 'natural scientist' (a forerunner of modern chemistry, with a hefty side order of woo), and no more inclined to mess with demons than his more famous English counterpart, Robert Fludd. But his name is just fantastic.
Chapter 11: Portrait of the Handler as a Young Squirrel
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
How far can a squirrel jump, if it really, really has to?
Don’t worry, I haven’t lost my marbles. As I type, with a gin-and-tonic fizzing at my elbow and Classic FM burbling Stravinsky’s Valse des Fleurs, I’m looking out of a thatched dormer into a clearing in the New Forest (no point in having a garden here, deer and wild boar scoff the lot). A young squirrel capers in the trees outside, almost in time to the music, calculating if some green hazel-nuts are worth a leap from a particularly exiguous branch…There! Made it. The process bears some resemblance to a handler’s task during a war, attempting to bridge the gap between Top Brass and the curious creatures they use as agents.
High in the firmament, if you crane your head, an occasional eminence skims past on falcon wings. That would be someone like Frank Nelson, at that point chief of the SOE, though I wouldn’t have known the man had I passed him in the street.1 In treetops beneath, rooks bicker and scheme: those would be top-level strategists like Passion Pants Robertson, in charge of major operations like Station XX. But keen-sighted and cunning as they are, these winged beings can’t penetrate the treetops to where the real action happens, in thickets and tussocks, and even underground. Weasel assassins slide through this tangled world, radio operators squeak like bats, foxy saboteurs plot mayhem, and moles undermine their oblivious foes. And between such wildlife and the strategists dashes the squirrelly handler, trying to look as if she’s never lost her balance in her life.
As the dust of the Wiggle Room debacle settled, Dear Reader, I began to fancy myself quite the experienced squirrel. It had been a leap of faith to go after Nevermore alone, but hadn’t I demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that if anyone had his personal trust, that person was Reggie Diceman? I’d pulled it off. Quietly, I was proud of myself. But every time my agent went off the rails, the acrobatics needed to bring him back again never got easier. For some reason, I thought a lot less about that.
________________
Back to the dog days of 1940, and if you were peering in on my life, Dear Reader, you’d be looking through a frosty window into my shared office in St. James’ Street, where young Reggie Diceman sat alone, Bovril steaming at her elbow, leafing through Bunny Hopkins’ file on Rose Montgomery. Bunny had been as good as his word, and investigated the possibility of recruiting her, but he’d passed the results on to me because, as December wore on, he’d become increasingly enmeshed in the HARMONY conundrum. You recall the mysterious radio transmitter in the South-East of England, the one that our friends in the Wireless Department could never properly triangulate? It was still out there, somewhere — and so was its operator, transmitting sparingly, and never from the same place twice, signing off as ‘Harmony’.
It wasn’t the job of the Special Operations Executive to pursue Nazi spies in Britain (that was down to ‘Military Intelligence, Section 5’, or MI5 to you and me), though of course we were interested if any could be used as double agents. For months, their catch had proved disappointingly low-grade. Only one in every five was worth trying to turn; Berlin simply wouldn’t believe it if the others started making major intelligence ‘discoveries’.2 But whoever was operating the HARMONY transmitter was far from low-grade. Apart from their iffy encryption, a common issue for field agents working under stress, they must be someone of exceptional skill and nerve. We still had no idea who they were or how they were getting about, at the most inclement time of the year. But for months, the intelligence link between HARMONY and Nevermore had amounted to no more than Harmony’s transmitted list of prophetic tomes, and Nevermore’s insistence that the Nazis had a unit dedicated to occult warfare. Suggestive, but tenuous.
Then something came up. The Unmentionables — the clever unknowns at unknown Bletchley — broke another of HARMONY’s transmissions. Of course, I didn’t get to know the content. Officially, I didn’t even know they’d broken one at all, but it was a safe inference, since the breakthrough was important enough to drag Bunny Hopkins to Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, where MI5 had moved to be safe from air-raids. Instead of an additional boffin, MI5 had summoned a man with limited knowledge of cryptography, but an incredible facility for correlating details, particularly if they were strange; someone familiar with Nevermore’s beliefs, but with a higher security clearance than little Agent Tyche. Using my mentor’s own methods, I concluded, from what I was not being told, that Top Brass was giving the magical angle more weight than heretofore. And whilst I was temporarily deprived of Bunny, he generously left me his findings on Mr. Fell’s lovely acquaintance.
Rose Montgomery: a Potted History
Bunny’s letter to Woolworth’s had borne fascinating fruit. It turned out that Miss Montgomery did indeed work for that renowned merchant, in the department of childrens’ books. She’d done so since 1938, having cut short her stay at an Alpine finishing school to return to Britain rather than risk being stuck in Switzerland if war broke out.
More surprisingly, her life story could have come from some newfangled tale of derring-do aimed at a female readership. Rose Montgomery, it turned out, was a plucky heroine who even outclassed me in the field of tragic childhoods. Orphaned in infancy by the Spanish Flu of ‘18, she’d grown up under the guardianship of a maternal aunt. The aunt eventually packed her off to the Institut Schätzli, one of Switzerland’s more cost-effective finishing schools, to be taught French, plus as much German and Italian as she could manage, and polished up for matrimony. As Europe’s political prognosis had gone from bad to worse, Miss Montgomery had shown initiative. Ignoring the wishes of her ailing aunt, who threatened to disinherit her if she left the Institut and spoiled her prospects, she took the train from Geneva to France, then a ferry back across the Channel. On arrival, she found the aunt had died after carrying out her threat. Alone and penniless, with war increasingly likely, Rose dusted herself off and sought gainful employment.
No doubt looks had helped her get a place at Woolworth’s, but she also turned out to be a competent writer. Their in-house publishing department told us she was a dab hand at working up a few choice details into a short but gripping tale that appealed to young readers, and that the notion to incorporate real-life Home Front Heroes into fictional adventures had been hers; she’d already done a series of four. She was even trusted to make the occasional field trip, which meant the car I’d seen her arrive in at A. Z. Fell’s almost certainly belonged to Woolworth’s too. If National Security needed her talents, Woollie’s wrote to Bunny, then so be it. But they would be truly sorry to lose her.
For the first time, I felt a twinge of fellow-feeling for Miss Montgomery. A finishing school was marketed not to its attendees, but to their parents or guardians, to dust nuptial charm onto girls who weren’t very bright, but could attract the sort of swain who banked at Coutts’. But Rose was both pretty and intelligent. Had she wanted to marry into money, she wouldn’t have needed step-by-step tuition from the Institut Schätzli. It was more likely that her Aunt had left her no choice in the matter. But when the political winds changed, she’d astutely fled Switzerland when many still hoped war could be avoided. Not only that, but she’d gone home to join the coming fight, called the bluff of her overbearing relative, and taken the consequences on the chin. Bravo.
By opening up employment to young women, the war had given Rose her freedom. Now she was making the most of it, armed with red lipstick and a skirt suit, and almost as alone in the world as Nevermore. More alone, frankly, than I’d ever been. In her position, and with her gifts, I would have done the same — and what was jealousy, if not the first foul fiend in the Bible, driving apart people who should be allies? I decided to back up Bunny’s assessment to keep Rose Montgomery on the recruitment watchlist for the SOE’s propaganda department. And if I got a chance to meet her again, I intended to take it.
In the meantime, there was work. No, better than that. If you peered extra hard through the window’s freezing grime, Dear Reader, you’d notice that on the hat-stand behind me hung a sturdy waxed jacket, far too big but lent to me for a few days by Bunny. Because, thanks to Nevermore’s not entirely grown-up pleadings to the SOE, there was fieldwork.
________________
A Gift from the Abwehr
“And they say that money doesn’t grow on trees.” My agent ran a hand through his hair, dislodging pine-needles that someone other than me could sweep up. “I hereby rename myself Agent Porcupine.”
“Coming on this expedition was a privilege, not an invitation to play Tarzan of the Apes,” I replied, blowing on my fingers to warm them. Who was the blithering idiot who, after l’affaire du Wiggle Room, had reckoned she was capable of a little fieldwork? Who had been over the moon to be informed that Nevermore, apparently trying to make things up to me (and using his uncanny ability to divine what you secretly wanted, provided it was unwise), had requested that I should go along to the next drop site of the Abwehr’s banknotes? What absolute nitwit had never, in a million years, expected that Station XX would say yes? Oh. That had been me.
Nevermore looked at Gog and Magog, who were manhandling a lumpy parcel over the parquet by torchlight.
“Tarzan? Pah. An amateur yodeller who never had to freeze his bollocks off for King and Country.” He did a little jog on the spot. “Surely I deserve a little in the way of thanks? If it wasn’t for me, we’d still be chasing fivers across the frozen heath. Ever since the Wiggle Room, haven’t I been good as gold?”
That was true. It was the reason the Twenty Committee had agreed to my presence — not because I was good at field shenanigans, but because Bunny and Passion Pants Robertson both agreed that Nevermore, for some obscure reason, behaved better when Agent Tyche was around. Things move fast in wartime, the SOE couldn’t keep Nevermore on the naughty step forever, and the mission was closely-supervised and something he’d done before. Berlin had picked a drop site in the Essex marshes. Our team was directed to secure the cash and bring it to SOE Station XV, otherwise known as Briggens, which dealt in the detection and manufacture of forged documents.
Things had not gone wholly to plan.
By the time our two-car convoy crawled along the pitch-dark lanes to Briggens, it was three in the morning, and the house’s reputation for being cold and austere was to prove all too accurate. St. James’ Street had seen better days, but its shabby-genteel corridors were abuzz with activity, and the Thatched Barn, where Nevermore had been disguised as an RAF medic for for his Grail mission, still had its creature comforts. But Briggens was a proper Bleak House, porticoed, pilastered, aristocratically free of amenities, and as warm in winter as your average igloo. In its blacked-out great hall, in the small hours of a December morning, the deer-heads on the walls looked down on us with a judgemental glitter in their eyes.
The SOE crew at Station XV were hardy souls, some of them refugees from Poland, some of them with criminal records, and more than a few who could tick both boxes, headed by an eccentric Scotsman who’d worked at the Royal Mint. They’d sallied out keenly, despite the ungodly hour, to receive our ‘Gift from the Abwehr’: an oilskin holdall stuffed with eight thousand pounds’ worth of parachute-borne counterfeit. Gog and Magog solemnly handed over the holdall to men in bulky overcoats and fingerless gloves, who naturally wanted to know why it had a rip in it mended with Duck Tape.
Thereby hung a tale.
After the disgrace of going AWOL, my agent had been on best behaviour. He’d studied the messages we’d used to cover for his absence, so he knew exactly what we’d told Berlin he’d been up to. He’d learned it was possible to imitate someone else’s Morse fist, and spent hours in his Mayfair flat practising with a dummy key until he could do it himself, driving poor Inspector Philpott and Inspector Curtis, aka Gog and Magog, clean around the bend. He’d been retested in the field, visiting a selection of English cities as a full-on spiv, accompanied each time by a pair of ‘bodyguards’ (actually his minders), to meet the sort of businessman who’d pay 100 pounds for 500 pounds’ worth of banknotes. On three occasions, our aspiring shovers had ties to organised crime: their reward was a taster of real banknotes with their numbers duly recorded, followed some weeks later by arrest. The rest never heard from the dapper criminal again, but went on several watchlists.
The next step was to give Berlin the impression their agent was distributing so much counterfeit that he needed more supplies. Nevermore had improved so much, both in mood and reliability, that we’d started to hope the interview with Gerald Gardner had convinced him the SOE was taking black magic seriously. But another Nevermorian quirk was less amenable to persuasion: his presence was associated with mishaps. Our two Tillies had reached the Essex drop site without incident — quite an achievement, considering the area consisted of marshy fields and none of the lanes were signposted. We’d lit the lanterns, and waited with baited breath for our ‘Gift from the Abwehr’ to descend, only for it to snag on the only pine-tree for miles around. By the time we reached it, five-pound notes were escaping from a rip in the oilskin and fluttering into the night like moths. Four of our party had departed in pursuit, leaving Gog, myself, and Nevermore to guard the swag, all in the sort of mood only reachable after hours of functioning on the gritty white tablets of pharmaceutical caffeine that the SOE called ‘Wakey-Wakey pills’.
At this point, for reasons known only to God, our Nazi boodle had come unsnagged, and only Nevermore’s reflexes had stopped it plummeting to the ground and bursting asunder. He’d grabbed the dangling parachute and been hoisted into the air like Harold Lloyd as the bundle of banknotes dropped safely into our arms. Ignoring our pleas for sanity, he’d then swung himself higher into the pine-tree, detached the torn parachute by hand in pitch darkness, slung the remnants over a handy branch, and slid down the silk in the wavering torchlight, landing as lightly as a Folies Bergère girl as the parachute folded at his feet.
In my write-up for Lt. Col. Robertson and the rest of the St. James’ Street high-ups, I would later report that my agent had acted with commendable presence of mind. In reality, he’d acted like an overcaffeinated lunatic hopped up on derring-do, but I reckoned that in wartime, one was almost as good as the other.
-----
Unlike St. James’ Street, where space was at a premium, Briggens still had its library, complete with rolling ladders and the sort of mantelpiece that Victorian gentlefolk prized, all dark oak and niches for odd saints. In better times, the fireplace would have hosted a crackling blaze. Now it had a paraffin heater of the sort used to keep the frost off greenhouses, and in front of it a man sprawled sideways in a leather armchair, red-socked feet a-dangle, reading by the light of a hurricane lantern hooked over a candle-sconce. It was getting on for four in the morning.
“Nevermore?”
“Agent Tyche, why aren’t you getting your beauty sleep?”
“Probably for the same reason you aren’t. Wakey-wakey pills and a bunk like an ice-box.”
He laid his book beside his dark glasses. It was poetry: the Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton. What his life must have been like, to make him hide every remotely gentle trait behind the grinning bastard in the flash suit?
“You’d think His Maj could at least stand us a hot-water bottle. Where are Gog and Magog?”
“I expect they’re still with the forgery squad. Why d’you ask?”
He sniffed the air and sighed.
“Because this is a set-up to pump me for more personal information. Obviously. Because you don’t smoke, but Magog does, and you currently reek of Woodbines. And because apart from our Wiggle Room outing, we’ve never had a chat without at least one burly bloke within clobbering distance of yours truly. Not that I blame the SOE for that. Plenty of other things — but never that.”
I didn’t bother denying it, because he was bang to rights: Inspector Curtis was sitting a little way down the corridor, and Inspector Philpott was keeping watch outside. I took the armchair opposite, and he shimmied upright, pleased to have got one over on me, but worried nonetheless.
“I bet we share another reason for staying up,” I guessed. “You’re fretting about Azariah Fell.”
“Aren’t you?”
“Of course. And if he’s in danger, I must inform the SOE. It’s my moral duty, and you know it.”
He looked nonplussed. “Haven’t you done that already? I dropped enough hints.”
“Come on, ‘Mr. Cruickshank’. You know I must have tried.”
“But even so, you still can’t?” He rubbed his chin. “Right. Perhaps I should have thought of this.”
“Well, now you’ve thought of it, make it bloody well stop.”
“Heavens! I’m not influencing you any more. I swore I wouldn’t, and I keep my word.”
“All right, suppose I believe you.” I thought about Mr. Fell’s weird knack of always getting what he wanted without actually having to demand it. “Could our mutual friend be doing it instead?”
Nevermore went very still.
“What makes you think he could?”
How interesting. Now we were getting somewhere, but I’d have to choose my words with care.
“Only that his hobby is stage magic,” I said, “and he could persuade a bottle of beer that it was Bollinger.”
That earned me a Nevermorian cackle; the highest possible praise. I pressed my case.
“For what it’s worth, I like him too. He’s clever, he doesn’t mind being ridiculous, and he must have personally helped out half of Soho. But if he fell in with a nasty crowd, I don’t think he could easily get out again. And if he was in real danger, he might not even know it.”
Nevermore leaned forward in his chair. The amber eyes narrowed.
“Is he in real danger?”
“I can’t tell you that, because I lack the means to find out. But you know who can find out? The SOE. More than that, they can take steps to protect him. You’ve intercepted enough fake cash to earn your keep a thousandfold; Bunny Hopkins can persuade the Twenty Committee to give you this. But you must understand that I’m just a handler. Alone, I can’t do much. Things would happen so much faster if I could discuss things with Bunny,” I cajoled. “He has field experience, and much more clout than I do.”
Nevermore steepled his fingers.
“Unlike me, Fell’s a decent person. If you honestly mean to help someone — whether or not that someone happens to be him — I’m sure you can say the needful. Why not try it and see?”
I took the plunge.
“But how is he doing it? For that matter, how are you doing it? What is he to you? If I’m going to take this any further, I need to bring answers. And they better be good.”
He smiled, or at least, his teeth glinted in the lamplight.
“Perhaps you don’t need to bring all the answers. I hope you're not stupid enough to tell your superiors you might be unusually susceptible to mesmerism.”
The bastard had me there. I shook my head.
Nevermore took out his combined cigarette-case and lighter, the one that ‘Melody Weaver’ had lent to the owner of Milton Motors as proof she was a personal friend of ‘Anthony J. Crowley’. Gog or Magog must have returned it to him, but surely, that one had been monogrammed? The light was frustratingly poor, and it was possible my agent’s long fingers were over the spot where the AJC would have been. He lit a Craven A, and the contraption disappeared into his pocket again before I could be sure.
“Would you believe me,” he began, “if I said that Azariah Fell is a war hero, and would absolutely hate you to find out?”
-----
When a mental wraith first started stalking the soldiers of the Great War, no-one cared to name it. Death or severe wounds released you from the frontline in a way that no-one could dispute, but on both sides, the idea that mental injury might allow ‘honourable escape from the battlefield’ was forbidden by government edict. Nameless or not, the wraith proved hard to banish. The first response was to mock it: by 1915, one of the few things the British and the Germans agreed on was that mental breakdowns were an ailment of the French.
“Then the shakes and yelps started affecting officer material,” Nevermore took a drag on his cigarette. “The Top Brass of the day reckoned that looked bad, so they set up a clinic at the Red Cross hospital near Étaples, down the coast from Calais. Mental cases even the courts-martial agreed weren’t faking it — the ones who perked up when they were condemned — got sent there. Not all of them, of course. It was just a research operation, and a secretive one at that.”
“You’re no doctor. How did you get in on it?”
“I’ve never met a horse that liked me, so by 1915, I could ride a motorcycle. Better than that, I could drive a car. Not many enlisted men could, and I was willing to drive anything anywhere, so I got ambulance duty. They didn’t go easy on me, though. It was still dangerous work.”
I doubted very much that could be the whole story (to be frank, I was wondering if this younger Nevermore had been a getaway driver for armed robberies), but I let it slide.
“And that’s how you met Fell? At the hospital?”
“You’re running ahead of me. At the clinic, there was this mind-doctor called Charlie Myers. He was the one who came up with calling it ‘shell shock’. A cold fish, but the Tommies loved him, ‘cos he generally took their side and did his best to patch them up. He tried lots of ways. Did mental experiments.”
“You learned Mesmerism from this Dr. Myers? Did you want to become a doctor? A psychiatrist?”
“Yes to the first, fat chance to the second. Who’d trust their secrets to a ex-con?
“Judging by mental practitioners the SOE has on its books, you might be an improvement.”
That earned me a raised eyebrow.
“Do I look like someone who can to bluff his way in medicine? But I’m sure you can work out why I might want to win friends and influence people.”
I could, all too easily. “And Azariah Fell was the doctor’s colleague? His assistant?”
Nevermore sucked on his Craven A until the tip glowed fiercely. We were getting to the difficult part. I looked up at the carved-oak saints on the mantel, and silently invoked their assistance.
“He was a patient, Titch. That’s why I asked in advance if you could believe he was ever a hero. When it comes to that sort of stuff, people can get the wrong idea.”
“Fell suffered from shell shock?” The follow-up was risky, but I risked it. “Good Lord, what was the man like before?”
Nevermore laughed. The bookseller was definitely his weak spot.
“Exactly the same prissy sod. But when people are in danger, he loses all sense of self-preservation, goes on until there’s nothing left. Hard to believe, I know.”
I thought of a bookshop turned into a fortress of good cheer, and of the ARP kit waiting by the hatstand. Beneath his beautful manners, Mr. A. Z. Fell was semper paratus.
“I find it easy to believe. I find it less easy to understand how both of you managed to get this hard-nosed scientist to teach you Mesmerism.”
Nevermore got a glint in his eye that I didn’t quite like.
“The way to get something out of people is to have them need you. Myers needed me. He knew he had no bedside manner, and fakers only made him worse — but I’m good at sniffing out fakers, so I weeded them out. He didn’t ask me how; he just told me to show no quarter. Later, he wanted to know if his mind-methods could be used by people with no medical training, and I turned out to be a fast learner.”
“And Fell?”
“You’d have to ask him that,” Nevermore smiled, and the cynical glint vanished, “but I can tell you that he was one of Dr. Myers’ golden cases. Catatonic when they brought him in, made a complete recovery, and eventually returned to the front. I can also tell you that if you can do a thing better than most, he’ll ask and you’ll teach him, whether it’s how to lie under interrogation, or how to make Schwarzwalder Kirschtorte. He can learn anything,” added my agent proudly, “apart from looking out for Number One, apparently. That’s why I’m worried about him. Even now, he wants to do his bit.”
“Most men in his position would thank their stars they’re too old to be conscripted.”
“Too old at the moment,” observed my agent grimly. “Not him, though. He makes plans. Worse, he tries to put them in motion. Normal human beings would run a mile from sinister sorts looking for occult tomes. But Az— I mean, Mr. Fell? He’d launch a private investigation.”
That was rather on-the-nose for what I suspected my REF patron might be up to.
“And that’s as bad as it gets?” I asked. “That a double agent would risk everything to protect a former war hero who might be in with the wrong crowd?”
My agent blew out a sardonic curl of smoke.
“Conventionally, that script only works when my part is played by a woman.”
“Believe me, the SOE doesn’t give a conventional damn. Top Brass would be far more worried about the fact you’d clearly risk your life for this man.”
“Would it matter if I did?”
“Of course it would! Firstly, you’re an irreplaceable asset. Secondly, it’s as close to a pure motive as you get in a game like this. Have you any idea the sort of people Operation Double-Cross sometimes deals with? People who’ve ratted out entire networks. Known traitors who deserve to hang. I’m pretty sure we’ve got more than one trigamist — ”
He looked at me reproachfully.
“Titch, are you giving me the Hot Dinners talk?”
“Come again?”
“You sound like a blessed nurse. ‘Dearie, I’ve seen more Nether Regions than you’ve ‘ad ‘ot dinners’,” he chirped, in creditable female Cockney. “In my criminal days, wild horses wouldn’t have got me to admit I cared about anyone. As of this moment, you’re the only one who knows, and I hate it. I know you’ll tell your blessed Bunny about this, and that I’ll hate that even more. I know Top Brass will end up solemnly debating whether Fell and I have fornicated without consent of the King, and how this affects my ability to stick it to Hitler — ”
“Perhaps, but mostly, they’ll just be glad to know you have something resembling a past. People have spent a lot of time trying to work out what makes you tick, you know. What you might ask for, in return for your service. Forgive me, but you’re not a man who comes over as a pure-souled patriot. They wonder what you want.”
Barley-sugar eyes gleamed in the lantern-light.
“They can spare themselves the trouble. My price is Fell’s safety.”
“The SOE will do its utmost. I can’t guarantee we’ll succeed. I can’t promise that if Fell is doing something highly illegal, he won’t be charged. But I swear to you, my lot will find out what he’s up to. Cross my heart and — ”
“Stop right there!” He sat bolt upright, palm outstretched, before I could finish the rest of it. “Remember, I’m a superstitious sort. Humour me.”
“All right. But I promise that if he’s in danger, anyone who wants to harm him will have to get through us.”
“Your lot.” He smiled again. “Your lot, my girl, are as impressive a collection of ding-dongs as you’d find outside a very large belfry. But it’s not as if I have a lot of options.” He held out his hand. “Shake on it?”
I did so. For all his complaining of the cold, his palm was hot and oddly dry, as if his frantic energy was forever evaporating through his pores.
“Good night, Titch. Make sure Gog and Magog get their cocoa — and don’t get writer’s cramp.”
-----
Briggens might be bleak, but someone there seemingly had warmth in their heart, for when I found my way back to my room in the former servants’ wing, the bed turned out to have a hot water bottle in it after all. I fished it out, wrapped myself in a blanket, sat at the spindly washstand on a spindly chair, and wrote and wrote. I was the possessor of irreplaceable intelligence, and I needed it on paper as fast as humanly possible.
I worked at it until I’d written down my whole conversation with Nevermore, though (as he’d rightly guessed) I spent as few words as possible on Dr. Myers’ skills as a mesmerist. I couldn’t leave that out, of course. It might turn out to be important — and if the SOE reckoned that Nevermore was going to be the Svengali to my Trilby, and therefore I must be taken off his case, then so be it. But I dwelt lovingly on the sweetest bit: the thing my agent had told me by mistake. Because if you spend your whole life keeping the most important person in it a secret, and finally let yourself talk, you might make the sort of slip your sympathetic handler set you up for:
— “Good Lord, what was the man like before?”
— “Exactly the same prissy sod.”
I’d bet any money that ending up as a driver for Dr. Myers’ clinic was no coincidence, I thought, as I squeezed the dregs of the hot-water bottle’s warmth into my fingers, and sharpened my dwindling pencil. You used every means in your power to be sent to where Azariah Fell was…because you already knew him. How, I have no clue. Perhaps it’s an upstairs-downstairs thing, and you worked for his family when you were younger. Perhaps it was a chance meeting. At outside odds, perhaps he really is a brilliant forger, and your match in criminality as well as brains. But you know him of old. A link that goes beyond sex, and perhaps beyond love. The sort of connection that can only be forged from loneliness. The sort with hooks you can never pull out.
Of course I didn’t put all that romantic speculation in, dear Reader. Just the bare facts. Then I made a fair copy for Bunny, and another one for myself. I wrote until it dawn broke, and as out little convoy crawled back to London through gathering flurries of snow, I carried my notes next to my heart all the way back to St. James’ Street. My treasure beyond rubies. The most valuable thing any handler can possess: their agent’s hard-won trust.
If only I could have felt happy about it. Instead, I knew that as soon as I handed over my report, my position as Nevermore’s handler would be running on borrowed time. It would have been much simpler if it hadn’t been for my entanglement with the Royal Exorcism Force, and the fact that I personally knew Azariah Fell. But Fell knew me as a Witchfinder, and now that Nevermore had formally asked the British Intelligence for help — help that I was morally obligated to help him get — it was pretty certain that sooner or later, my eccentric hobby would be laid bare. In trying to uncover who my father had really been, I’d tried to serve two masters. No explanation of how I’d been drawn into Narker and Ffolkes’ weird club would ever satisfy the SOE. I might carry on working for British Intelligence in some capacity, but my days at St. James’ Street would be over, and so would my evenings in the basement of St. Brides’, learning recondite legends and drinking the world’s worst tea.
So be it. If and when that happened, I would have to tell Ffolkes and Narker that their unworthy ‘Captain’, who after all had never properly come up the ranks, was leaving. In compensation, I’d leave them my father’s bell — and his pin. They would undoubtedly be disappointed in me for leaving my post at a time of dire need, but at least they’d both get a promotion out of it.
______________
By the time I’d got back to my lodgings in Islington, I’d been awake for forty-eight hours and could have eaten a horse if you gave me enough mustard. Instead I discovered that Mrs. Digby, inspired by the indefatigable Lord Woolton,3 had concocted war-effort dumplings from oatmeal, dripping, and homeopathic amounts of liver, then left my portion in the meat-safe overnight. By the time I pulled it out, the thing looked like the fist of a boiled goblin and would undoubtedly give me nightmares, but I ate it anyway. Nightmares were your brain’s commendable effort to sift through your misgivings while you slept, and perhaps even provide you with insights. I could do with insights, because I had misgivings aplenty, and the time in which I could find out more about my father was likely to be limited.
With my notes on Nevermore’s time with Dr. Myers in one hand, I went back to the threadbare compartments of my father’s Communion case: to the empty flasks for water and wine, the last fragments of a Host he’d never had time to administer, still in their dented case, and his exorcist’s handbell, presumably in case the Angels of Mons had turned out to have infernal counterparts. Under a strap in the lid was his well-used Book of Common Prayer, and at the end of it, in the blank pages for notes, was what I was after this time. Ink sketches of people. The military has always frowned on diaries, and my father had been a scrupulous rule-keeper, so few of the sketches were portraits. Instead, they were distance studies of people at work, or occasionally at prayer, glimpses of what, barely a decade ago, we had still been calling The War to End All Wars.
About half-way through the sketches, they featured fewer Tommies and standard-issue officers, in favour of something new: doctors, nurses, and figures on crutches, but perhaps not to many of the latter as you might expect for a medical facility. There were no identifying background details. There certainly wasn’t anything as obvious as a depiction of Nevermore or Azariah Fell (that sort of thing only happens in films), though if you suspect I scoured them for a rangy figure in silhouette, or a curly-headed reader in a camp chair, you’d not be wrong. But some of the drawings had dates, and the ones of medics clustered around three months in 1915. They could have been drawn in any of the medical facilities the British set up in northern France. So why did I have the strong feeling they’d been done in Étaples?
During the Great War, a series of fishing towns and windswept resorts along the French side of the Channel swelled into a chain of camps for half a million British soldiers. Étaples, the biggest, dirtiest, and most notorious of the lot, could billet eighty thousand men, most of them for a matter of weeks before they were sent to the front. The only people who stayed any significant time were medics, the wounded, and the unloved officers in charge of training raw recruits.4 In 1940, it was a safe bet that two men you knew who’d served in the Great War had both passed through Étaples at some point — but unless one of them had pulled strings to make sure they met, as I suspected Nevermore had done with Azariah Fell, it was wildly unlikely that they’d encountered each other. But wildly unlikely happenings were becoming my speciality. Besides, my father hadn’t been a standard officer, but a military priest. For morale purposes, he might have stayed in a camp like Étaples longer than most.
Nevermore, I thought, as my digestive system did battle with Mrs Digby’s dumplings and the Andersen shelter shook with more distant explosions, did you ever meet the Reverend Reginald Diceman? I find it hard to believe that your adhesive memory would fail you upon meeting that vicar’s adult daughter, with her almost-identical name. Of course, there might be a reason for you not to mention it: a pre-existing personal connection between a handler and their allotted agent would get you reassigned to someone else. But that would mean that, knowing nothing about the person who should have been born Diceman Junior and joined the Church, you were — even before you set eyes on them — dead-set on that person becoming your handler. You particularly decided on Reggie Diceman.
You particularly decided...on me.
1. Being the Head of the SOE was a rough job, not least because the Foreign Office wanted to incorporate our unruly outfit into the Secret Intelligence Service (now better known as MI6), which didn’t actually want us. From 1940 to 1943, three men held the post in quick succession. return
2. Do not conclude from this that Fascism automatically makes you bad at espionage. The problem for Hitler’s spymasters in 1940 was twofold: first, the Führer wanted to press his advantage against Britain faster than field agents could be trained, and second, that such agents either needed to be Germans with bilingual English (not easy to find), or capable of infiltrating Britain in the guise of refugees. They had understandable trouble finding capable and willing volunteers in occupied countries. return
3. A forgotten titan of military logistics, in charge of keeping his nation fed on a shoestring. A formidably wholesome vegetable pie was named after him, and for the entirety of the war, he had to order it every time he went to dinner. return
4. You may be familiar with Sassoon’s poem ‘Base Details’, which depicts the ‘fierce, bald Majors’ of Étaples with lacerating accuracy. return
Notes:
Author's notes:
MI5 / Military Intelligence, Section 5: Look, I can understand why Aziraphale just calls it 'British Military Intelligence' in the Blitz section of S1 ('MI5' sounds far too 60's James Bond). But by the time WWII broke out, the UK's counter-intelligence bureau had been colloquially known as 'MI5' for the best part of twenty years, and a spy-handler like Reggie (whose supreme authority would be MI6) would definitely have known it by that name. Wikipedia has a great link on the many 'MI-' services that sprang up during WWII.
Dr. Charles Myers was a real and fascinating person, and pretty much the personification of the trope 'Good is not Nice'. I don't think a more tender-hearted man would have been capable of dispassionately, scientifically arguing the case that shell-shock was a real medical phenomenon, at a time when the idea couldn't have been less popular. Crowley's description of him is based on this article.
Totally unrelated note resulting from a belated viewing of S2, and discovering my Undead payback for writing this so slowly:
Apart from "Gabriel faces some sort of reckoning" (which was surely on most peoples' S2 bingo cards), I'm not sure what I reckoned would happen in the second season, but it surely wasn't "Harmony, Glozier and Greta return as literal 🧟♂️🧟♂️🧟♀️ and go off to shamble about war-torn London; Aziraphale and Crowley are fine with this arrangement, put their feet up and uncork a bottle of the good stuff". At least it'll give an opportunity for the Witchfinder Army to earn their tins of condensed milk, and put another stripe on their dress pins.
Chapter 12: The Bells of St. Brides
Summary:
"In novels about spies, the MI5 agent always has plenty of time at their disposal, and only one case on which to concentrate. In real life, especially in wartime, things are not quite so easy."
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Time for a snap check, dear Reader, to see if you’ve been paying attention. Do you recall the snippet of typeset ‘prophecy’ I’d taken a hasty impression of while Private Ffolkes had his back turned, then made legible with pencil-lead? The one which was all I had of the REF’s mystery printing project? The one that ran, in antiquated blackletter:
{1348} for 1939:
Shippes will goe lyk Gulls upon the Storm-clowd,
& Cannon tread lyk Oliphants the Earthe,
The River moveth underneath the Mounteyn
& carves a Cradell for an Empyre’s Birthe.
Since the night I’d nabbed this doggerel, I’d ruminated on it like a cow trying to digest the Times crossword. I’d concluded, as you doubtless have, that the first couplet described aerial warfare and tanks, but the ‘River underneath the Mounteyn’ bit was Greek to me. Supposing Britain lost the war and Hitler won it. Even in the aftermath, which spies like myself would be spared because we’d have long since been shot, was the Third Reich really going to be a subterranean empire?1. The man for such riddles was Bunny Hopkins, but that would involve awkward questions about how I’d come to have such a close association with St. Brides’ Printworks, and possibly even with the REF. That day was coming, and would mean the end of my career as a handler — but, as the young St. Augustine once prayed, not quite yet. One last solo mission, I promised myself, and then I’d come clean.
The meaning of the snippet could wait. What I needed to know was why, in the middle of a war, Tarquin Narker and Peter Ffolkes were typesetting a text that read as if it were three centuries old. Of course, I had my suspicions, brewed on the fact that Mr. Fell had been foraging beneath the oaks of Abney Park cemetery, in search of the galls that, in earlier times, formed the basis of printer’s ink. I more than half-reckoned the REF’s sponsor might be Britain’s nicest counterfeiter, though perhaps, like Robin Hood, he only stole from people who deserved it. Nevermore, on the other hand, feared that Fell might be running with Fascists who’d heard, via the antiquarian grapevine, that he was an authority on magical texts; perhaps they were the people he wanted to con. But whether Fell proved a patriot or a mercenary, there was a world of trouble at the spot where Nevermore’s reckonings and mine intersected — and that spot was St. Brides’ Printworks.
Could the other REF members really be fraudsters? Ffolkes, with his down-to-earth dislike of liars, whose worst crime was probably staying up past his bedtime? Narker, who had occasionally hinted that Mr. Fell might be more formidable than he seemed? Surely not. If someone was making a fortune by faking occult tomes, then selling them to unfastidious bibliophiles as books ‘lost’ from collections being moved out of London, it wasn’t my fellow Witchfinders. They both thought they were doing the right thing. I just needed them to tell me what that thing was.
I needn’t have spent so much time plotting. As often happens in espionage, what eventually forced the release of key intelligence wasn’t a fine calculation that this was the optimum moment, but factors beyond my control. Specifically, that due to the importance (all the more vital in wartime) of celebrating Christmas, the next meeting of the Royal Exorcism Force had been pushed back to the afternoon of the 29th of December, 1940: the day that was to go down in history as the Second Great Fire of London.
Christmas had come and gone, adding to my woes by stimulating Nevermore to get us gifts from the Black Market2, and freezing everyone’s tits off. The winter of 1940 was less savage than the one of ‘39, which had stomped across the country like a frost giant, but only by comparison. Even though we’d scheduled the meeting earlier than usual, picking one’s way though the backstreets around St. Brides in the gloaming was a tricky business, and knocking on the door of the printworks sent ice pattering onto my boots.
“Aroint,” intoned a young voice attempting to be solemn.
“Avaunt,” I replied politely.
“And defy the foul fiend. Welcome, Captain Diceman.” The door of St. Bride’s Printworks was opened by someone I didn’t expect to see. At least, not for a calendar year.
“And furthermore, Season’s Greetings,” chirped a skinny, bespectacled Santa from behind a beard of cotton-wool. He was wearing a hooded red dressing-gown trimmed with more of the same, and less festively, fingerless gloves from which a set of bluish fingertips protruded. I hoped it was ink, and not the freezing weather.
“Very impressive, Ffolkes, but firstly, it’s the twenty-ninth, and secondly — not to disparage your acting — aren’t you a bit young for this?”
“These are old Narker’s togs. He’s been Santa-ing his heart out for a fortnight. Does it every year, and the Reverend Taylor's always grateful. I’m just the understudy.” The young Witchfinder let me into the printworks, unhooked the beard from his specs, and hung Santa’s robes on a peg. “I thought something silly might cheer you up, though.”
Bless the lad for trying. Christmas lights had been packed away for the Duration, St. James’ Street wasn’t a hub of seasonal cheer, and the politest thing that could be said about my landlady’s carrot pudding was that it was full of fighting spirit. I never thought I’d miss a London Christmas until the Luftwaffe stopped me from window-shopping: Hamley’s toy wonderlands and Debenham’s mannequin soirées had vanished, replaced by cramped little cabinets garnished with tinsel. The bastards had even bombed John Lewis.
“You succeeded,” I said. “One of the silliest things I’ve seen for ages. And behold — ” I rummaged in my gas-mask satchel, “I’ve brought supplies!”
He inspected them by torchlight, like Howard Carter peering at the treasures of King Tut. “Gosh. Is that…tea?”
“Tea, a tin of powdered milk, and six sugarlumps.” I didn’t enlighten Ffolkes about the origins of this bounty, and being a sensible fellow, he didn’t ask, but I’m sure you can guess.
“That’ll do Mr. Narker no end of good. Our press room’s finally been requisitioned by the ARP — there’s room for eighty people in there. He knew it was on the cards, but those machines were like old friends to him. Dismantling them has really brought him down. And we’ve had to shift our base of operations.”
“Nil desperandum,” I said. “What are our new digs?”
“The safe-room off the foundry. Snug as a bug, provided you mind your head. Follow me.”
St. Brides’ printworks dated from the 1890’s, a time of inventive lettering and artistic piracy. Traditionally, if you coveted the new typeface of an esteemed Victorian colleague, but said colleague declined to lend you the moulds, an artisan had to expensively re-create them, letter by letter. But electroplating meant that duplicating your rival’s fancy alphabets — the big, flashy stuff that got you commissions from theatres — became simple. All you needed was an inside man at his printshop, inside whose clothes a tin box of clay could be smuggled in, and smuggled out again within the day, impressed with a few letters of the prized font. The consequence was that only the most trusted setters were allowed to handle such treasures, which were kept in lockable rooms.
This one was certainly snug. There was only space for four presses, and three folding-chairs squeezed into the space between them, illuminated by a hissing pressure-lamp that stank of paraffin. Not wholly to my surprise, one of the survivors was the 17th Century oak press with a big brass screw and a motto hand-cut into its crossbeam: FONS SAPIENTIAE VERBUM DEI • B&S • 1647. When I’d first encountered Ffolkes and Narker, I’d been told it was too difficult to dismantle — but someone must know how to do it, for you couldn’t have got it through the door in one piece. I thought again of the SOE’s clandestine photos of our sponsor picking up oak-galls in Abney Park. Whatever Mr. Fell had put the REF up to, the work wasn’t over yet.
“Why keep this one?” I asked, as we shimmied past the relic. “It must be an endangered species.”
The youth gave me a sideways look.
“I know you’re not much for superstitions, but they call it the Luck of St. Brides’. The first press the Foundation ever owned. Tradition says it was bequeathed by a condemned forger, and anything it prints will be successful — provided you don’t make a profit. I used it to make these.” He handed me a stack of paper held together with a rubber band. “Happy Christmas.”
He’d made a set of bookplates. Twenty-five gummed slips emblazoned with my name, framed with a bygone flourish of the typesetter’s art. The sort of thing that Oliver Cromwell himself might have used to stop permanent loans from his library.
✤✤✤✤✤✤✤✤✤✤✤✤✤✤✤✤
»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«
{ EX LIBRIS }
REGINA M. DICEMAN
»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«»«
T H E . W I C K E D . B O R R O W,
& . R E T U R N . N O T . A G A I N
✤✤✤✤✤✤✤✤✤✤✤✤✤✤✤✤
“St. Brides’ apprentices make them for each other — though some are on the rude side. They’re not much, but — ”
“They will be immediately used on my finest volumes.”
What a pity I‘d nothing to give him in return. Hang on — yes I had. I fished about in my jacket pocket and extracted the old penny Nevermore had presented me with ‘for my thoughts’ at Milton Motors, before we’d handed ourselves over to the SOE. Victoria’s portrait was worn to ghostly flatness, and nothing remained of the motto but REGINA·FID·DEF3 . Nevermore had played a joke on me in Latin, and I hadn’t even noticed.
“A friend once gave me this as a luck-piece. I suspect I’m too much of a sceptic for it, but perhaps it’ll work for someone more…open-minded.”
“A paranormal experiment! How interesting.” Ffolkes pocketed it. “I’ll certainly give it a try.”
* * *
Sergeant Narker arrived stamping rime from his shoes, in a state of brooding suspicion only partly mollified by the jam-jar mugs of tea Ffolkes conjured up on a meths stove. Once again, his suspicions involved rats. Reports of rodentine incursions were not only getting more frequent, he informed us, but bolder and more destructive, and increasingly focused on churches. According to the Witchfinder Sergeant, this was a clue to their true nature. Ffolkes, as usual, preferred to start with the mundane, and work his way upwards.
“If you ask me, Sir, it might be the cat shortage4,” he said. “I’ve got cousins in the country. Perhaps the REF could recruit some kittens. No black ones!” he added hastily. “Only tabbies need apply. And the occasional ginger.”
Narker’s expression turned thunderous, and he set down his jam-jar with a thunk.
“No cat, whatever its tint, can be an REF associate. Think of their reputations!”
“Rats don’t have the best publicity either,” I objected, which was a mistake. In theory, as descendant of the Diceman line, I was a Witchfinder Captain and a portent of National Peril. In reality, I was less experienced than either of them, and Tarquin Narker wasn’t going to let me forget it.
“And yet, in matters of religious corruption, the rat can be an agent of judgment. There are several attested cases from Medieval times — as a Hereditary Witchfinder is surely aware.”
Dammit. Not for the first time, I hadn’t the foggiest what the man was on about. Ffolkes gave me a nudge.
“Remember Bishop Hatto?” he whispered to me. “The one who got his bones gnawed clean?”
Happily, my childhood Treasury of Moral Verse came to my rescue, with its enthusiasm for plots involving the Wicked, or sometimes, the merely Naughty, getting Apposite Comeuppances. God bless Robert Southey, who’d written such ballads by the score.
“Like Bishop Hatto?” I said brightly.5
The Witchfinder Sergeant nodded. He knew I’d been prompted, but the important thing was that we’d established just who knew the most about Supernatural Phenomenae.
“Just so, Madam. And on that note, our junior member has informed me he’s made progress with the case of the Kentish church hassocks.”
Ffolkes shuffled his notes, and pushed a mimeographed map into the pool of light from the pressure-lamp. It showed the southern county of Kent, with pencil notes against several villages. In all the time I’d known him, I’d never seen the Witchfinder Private disconcerted by any occult phenomenon, but he looked disconcerted now.
“The phenomenon has picked up speed. More than that, it’s moved on from Saint Grimbald’s. Over the past month, the thing has plagued St. Mary’s in Porcroft Green, All Saints’ in Weath, and St. Vincent’s in Dottisley. And it’s true that someone was teasing vicars by moving the hassocks around, but now it’s got interesting. Not to mention, worrying.”
“Worrying?” Something about the map got a notion running up and down my spine, cold and whiskery like the spectre of a rat. “Worrying, as in, they’re getting nearer to London every time?”
“Oh, yes. But that’s just the start of it.” As was his habit before making explanations, Ffolkes polished his specs on his sleeve. “We REF operatives might be too attuned to the paranormal, but gen. pop. tunes out all but the most blatant supernatural happenings. That makes sense: it’s safer to ignore a ghost than gas leak. And C of E clerics these days believe it’s their duty to combat superstition, not stoke it. Your modern vicar is well-nigh impervious to spookery.”
“But these ones are…spooked?” I asked.
“Very. When I explained the REF might not be able to visit for a month, they almost sobbed. All three of them begged us to investigate a case of — oh, this sounds silly! — not a ghost or a curse or a revenant, or anything as concrete as that. But all of them described it that same way.”
Narker, who’d listened to Ffolkes’ explanation in silence, fingers tapping the table, leaned forward, his slightly protuberant eyes gleaming.
“Go on, lad.”
“Evil, Sir. Evil with the power to go unseen, even if you know it’s there. Evil that knows you know it’s there, and is amused at your predicament. The vicars at Porcroft Green and Dottisley found enough stout-hearted parishioners to make sure that every corner of their churches were observed at once. Both got the same result: there was always an unaccounted spot. The stout-hearted parishioners got angry, and started accusing each other of watching someone else’s position. At St. Mary’s, there was almost a fist-fight.”
“The very watermark of the Devil’s power,” muttered the Sergeant darkly. “The thing could be grinning in your face, and you ne’er would know it.”
At that, the chilly little notion settled on the nape of my neck and made a nest there, for what had Nevermore said to me about his hunt for Heinz von Schall? ‘No-one, no matter who I ask, can give a good description of the man. Not his face, not his height, not his clothes: he's a walking cipher.’ Perhaps there was more than one way of passing unseen, I thought — and was about to ask Ffolkes whether or not the vicars of Porcroft Green and Dottisley had taken the trouble of counting the members of heir search parties, when there was a thunderous knocking at the door. The assembled might of the REF leapt to our feet.
“Must be the Reverend Taylor,” said Ffolkes. “No-one else knocks like that.”
Sergeant Narker let in a Church of England vicar, of the no-nonsense type with a knock powered by decades of bell-ringing, and a profile like a flying buttress. His dog-collar was awry, and one hand was swathed in a makeshift bandage, but he still doffed his homburg politely.
“I hate to interrupt a meeting, gentlemen — and lady, of course. But I believe St. Brides is on fire.”
* * *
As the people who lived through it die off, and their memories with them, the Blitz is becoming a setpiece. The result is that you youngsters imagine whacking great bombs, at least the size of duffle-bags, going wheeee through the air with us Londoners bravely hunkered on the Underground and, in the most egregious examples, singing about The White Cliffs of Dover. You learn that when the sirens wailed, Winston Churchill would mount to the roof of 10 Downing Street to watch, and conclude the man must have been a) full of piss and vinegar, b) well-dosed with brandy, and c) madder than a box of frogs.
That’s not wholly wrong. If you were within the blast radius of a SC-1800 — four thousand pounds of explosive, lovingly nicknamed ‘Satan’ by the Germans — when it hit the ground, you stood an excellent chance of being blown to Kingdom Come (though not a certainty, as some already came with time-fuzes, specifically to kill bomb-disposal squads). But a startling number of people had to be on the surface in an air-raid, most of them engaged in a dangerous hunt for incendiary devices. Incendiaries resembled tall magnesium bottles full of thermite, and their job was to land on the rooftops of London, and burn it to the ground.
A single incendiary could be tackled with sand or an asbestos blanket (water could only be used on fires it started, since the white-hot magnesium in the incendiary itself would explode if wetted). But before attempting any of these fixes, you needed to knew where it was, which meant that every evening, observers with binoculars had to climb up to lonely attics, or the tops of warehouses. Other volunteers, armed with sand-buckets and stirrup-pumps, would wait to smother what they spotted, and douse the remaining fires. Sheet-lead roofs on wooden rafters, a specialty of London’s churches, were a special hazard. An unseen fire-bomb could melt a hole in the lead, then drop into the gap beneath — which was exactly what happened at St. Brides. The Reverend Taylor had locked up after Evensong, and by the time a printer knocking off his shift in Fleet Street raised the alarm, flames could be seen within the tower.
Led by the vicar, Narker, Ffolkes and I emerged into a mass of people bearing ladders, asbestos blankets and stirrup-pumps, for on the rare occasions newspapermen stop arguing, they are a formidable force. When journalists feel the need for God, St. Brides is the place where they marry, and where memorials are held for those killed in the field, and they had turned out in droves to fight for their church. The noise was terrific — bells, explosions, bellowed instructions — but beneath it, you could hear the suck of a newborn inferno. Scorning the ongoing raid, the journos had joined forces with the able-bodied adults in the new air-raid shelter to salvage what they could: candlesticks passed from hand to hand, and a brass eagle lectern was borne off with fire reflected its wings. Sergeant Narker, who knew them the best, hurried over to confer.
A dark figure caught the Reverend Taylor by the elbow. His sooty features were runnelled with sweat, and only by his badges was he recognisable as a senior fireman.
“Rev! Stirrup-pumps are here,” he shouted over the din. “Twelve of ‘em!”
“Very good, I’m sure, but…where is the hose?” The Reverend Taylor roared back, but he looked distrait. “You told me a fire-engine was coming.”
The fireman’s shoulders slumped.
“No much cop without water — and the mains’ve been hit all over. The Krauts had this well-planned.”
“God forgive them,” yelled the man of God, “but what about the Fleet?”
“Pumped dry. And St. Pauls,” the fireman gestured in the direction of the cathedral, “is to be saved at all costs. Counting myself, I’ve got eight men, plus all these civvies. With water, we could give you two hours.”
“Two hours…” The vicar stared at St. Brides’ tiered steeple, which resembled the cake at some incendiary wedding. Of all people, it was Narker who got him to snap out of it, fresh from a conference with the journalists on the salvage team.
“Padre, the Men of the Press are asking whither to bear your brass eagle. With luck and dispatch, they believe they can save the greater part of the pyx and plate, and perhaps even the aumbry. Their blood is up and in the name of St Brides, they will carry out any orders you give them.”
The vicar set his chin.
“There’s a cistern,” he said. “My predecessors built it for rainwater when the Fleet grew foul, but to the best of my knowledge, no-one’s raised the slab since the Eighteenth Century. It won’t be enough for a fire-engine, but we can use it for the pumps.”
The fireman hefted his crowbar.
“Lead me to it.”
“Permission to join the salvage chain?” asked Ffolkes. “I won’t be much good solo.”
I suddenly realised that he was deferring to me, not Narker, and not just because I was notionally Captain. The older Witchfinder was clearly minded to tell his near-sighted junior to get to safety, but behind his thick specs, the eyes of Peter Ffolkes burned with the desire to Do Something, Dammit. I could sympathise with that. The chain passed goods from hand to hand, along the line of some railings; it was surely as safe as anywhere.
“Good plan,” I said. “No sense wasting a third pair of hands. Narker and I can work a stirrup-pump.”
Narker for once didn’t argue, took an the asbestos blanket from the stack, and passed another to me. After lugging our sloshing pump up three flights of stairs and a splintery ladder which snagged the Sergeant’s trousers, we emerged on the summit of the printworks. Our Victorian forbears had given the roof gentle slope and a parapet, and for several loud and frightening hours, illuminated by flames which made the scene almost as clear as day, we hunted embers until the cacophony from below grew more insistent. Looking down, we could see the remnants of the salvage gang scattering in all directions, as the updraft bore to our ears shouts that neither of us could believe.
“Can that be right?” I yelled, over the roaring fire. “The bells are melting?”
But when we climbed the ridge, it was true. Sergeant Narker and I had a grandstand view as bronze ran from the louvres in spurts, as if the church were a bleeding creature. With one last gasp, the burning roof heaved inwards, bulged outwards, and as we gazed in horror, collapsed forever into the blazing nave. At least, I gazed in horror, for to my consternation Tarquin Narker appeared to have lost his marbles, shaking a defiant fist and roaring fire and brimstone.
Then I understood. He wasn’t screaming, he was quoting — and of course, he was quoting the Bard.
“You sulfurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head!
And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o' th' world!”
For a moment, I saw the Witchfinder Sergeant transformed, against a burning sky. It didn’t matter that instead of a mane of white hair, he sported a crazed combover, or that he was five foot three, or that when the trousers of his suit had torn, they’d revealed a pair of sock-suspenders. Standing on the roof of his beloved printworks, bellowing at a dying church, he was King Lear, brought bang up to date: the company-founder booted him from the board by his loving daughters and his smooth-talking son-in-law. He hadn’t gone mad at all. He’d simply reached a point where only Shakespeare could do justice to his feelings, and as if the City agreed with him, the latter part of Lear’s speech was joined by the long, plaintive howl of the All-Clear.
“That was astonishing,” I said, as we lugged our stirrup-pump back across the roof. “Were you ever on the stage?”
“I was. ‘Tis a tale with a curious ending, for what I had in ambition, I lacked in stature. I consoled myself that the great Garrick was only five foot four — but rare is Thespian who does not, in his secret heart, think himself born to play the Dane.”
“I always thought of Hamlet as a warrior of the mind, not the body. His own mother calls him fat.”
The one-time actor gave a harsh laugh. “The exact argument of some smart fellows who attended a tiny theatre to see my Caliban, then laid their flattery on with trowels. If the Prince can be fat, they argued, why might he not equally well be no Colossus? And in the meantime, they could get me an audition for Laertes. In my defence, I was one-and-twenty, and my Laertes was praised — mind your fingers on the ladder! But when my sponsors sent me press cuttings, I knew that I owed them a favour.”
“One you couldn’t refuse?”
“Six months later, a bookman in Soho refused to sell them his shop. He rarely let in customers, but it was notorious that he couldn’t see a soul in distress without rushing to help. My task was to feign a fit in the street. When he came out, two of the gang would slip in with matches and petrol; the fire brigade would arrive in time for the building, but too late for the books. The shop would be sold at a knockdown price, and I would have discharged my obligations. I would be free.”
“What went wrong?”
“My fit could have fooled Harley Street, yet Fell divined nothing was wrong with me and helped me to my feet. As to my confederates, I cannot say what happened in that bookshop. But out they ran, white and gibbering, just as a police van drew up at the kerb.”
“Annoyed at being nabbed, they testified against you?”
Narker opened the roof-hatch. “Fell was in court to see me get three months. How I loathed the very downturn of his lip! But when I got out, he was waiting outside the gates of Wormwood Scrubs with a bag of new clothes and an offer of employment. Were it not for our sponsor, Madam, I would now be some species of cadging scoundrel. He would be vexed to know I told you this, for he’s as close about his goodness as other men are about their crimes.”
“Then I’ll tell no-one," I promised.
But the story was more than curious, I reflected, as we manhandled our pump back downstairs. The Witchfinder Sergeant was in his early fifties, and so, to all appearances, was Azariah Fell. But when Tarquin Narker emerged from gaol to scrape up the dregs of his early promise, he would have been barely twenty, and his well-connected saviour would have been much the same age. I tried to imagine a man with the self-possession to do something like that at the age of twenty.
It was technically possible, and as Bunny was fond of reminding me, ‘technically possible’ means ‘someone will give it a whirl’. Perhaps Fell had been tutored in adolescence, so that by the time he attained his majority, he’d developed powers of persuasion that only a few possess. Besides, he had one of those faces to which age is kind; he might be ten years older than he looked, conceivably fifteen. But however I tried to imagine it, I couldn’t imagine twenty-year-old Azariah Fell waiting at the gates of Wormwood Scrubs with an offer or employment that could well be misunderstood, and a change of clothes in a duffel bag.
* * *
Even as a ruin, gutted from weathercock to crypt, St. Brides’ was a testament to its builders. The bells might lie in a melted heap, but the walls still stood, with ladders propped against them. A fire-engine had been connected to the mains, and fire-fighters moved among the debris, directing a hose at anything that smoked. I’ve smelled worse things before and since, but I’ve never forgotten the smell of the burned-out church, as the olfactory ghost of centuries — rafters, Bibles, and the flags of ancient guilds — went up into a peach-coloured dawn of low-hanging smoke.
In the ashes, something glinted. A coin from the collection-box? The silver-trimmed hem of a chasuble? I stooped, and found it was a pair of spectacles, crushed flat. As I straightened the frames, what was left of the lenses dropped out: heavy at the edge, like the bottoms of milk-bottles.
My heart lurched. “Sergeant, do you know where the salvage crew went?”
“Rather than attempting to return to Fleet Street, I counselled them to sit it out at the shelter. Why?”
I held out the frames. There wasn’t as much variation in specs back then as there is nowadays, but only one person we knew wore lenses like that. Narker and I looked around us in growing horror. The old cistern had bought time to rescue some of the treasures of St. Brides, but the vicar’s recall of its location had been inexact. The firemen had prised up many slabs before they found it, leaving a series of holes. The Witchfinder Private’s poor eyesight would have made him a liability trying to navigate the debris and ladders, let alone these additional pitfalls. Dammit, hadn’t everyone agreed he should stay on the salvage chain?
“Ffolkes!” Narker set down the pump, and was all business. “He still might be in the shelter. I will investigate, and summon the might of the ARP. You stay where you found the glasses, and move neither to the right nor to the left.”
“But what about you?”
“Forgive me, Madam, but you never picked your way through a midnight trench in Picardy. Farewell.”
Narker set off with surprising nimbleness across the shambles at the base of the church, torn trousers flapping in a way that would, under other circumstances, have been comical. He’d given me sound advice, and since I had no more training in rescuing people from collapsed buildings than the average Blitz-frazzled Londoner, I should have obeyed it. But I couldn’t shake the fear that while I stood waiting for a rescue party, time might be running out — and my gas-mask satchel contained a torch with fresh batteries. Gingerly, I made my way to the yawning hole beside the nearest raised slab. It was about six foot deep and carpeted with debris, so I found a length of church curtain-rail and had a prod. No Private Ffolkes proved to be beneath it, though I called out his name nonetheless. I tried another hole with the same result, but on the third try, lying prone better reach, I banged my hip on a flagstone and loudly commended everything to damnation.
“Damnation seems excessive,” objected a hollow voice behind me. “I mean, unless I’ve done something terrible, and then completely forgotten about it. Though it’s aways possible that John Calvin was right, in which case, I suppose we must console ourselves with joining the majority.”
“Ffolkes?” I scrambled to my feet. There was nobody within hailing range, though in the distance, I could see Mr. Narker gesticulating to some men in uniform.
“Captain Diceman?” replied the reedy voice. “Are you dead as well?
“I’m covered in muck, I could sleep for a week, and I hurt all over. If this is Heaven, I want my money back — and if it’s Hell, they’re not trying very hard.”
A pause. “Perhaps it’s Limbo, then. But I think I’m sitting on…bones? Even in Limbo, why would there be bones?”
I found another pit, shone my torch into darkness, and the foreshortened form of Peter Ffolkes blinked up at me like a subterranean owl. He was indeed perched on a pile of bones, which under other circumstances would have been gruesomely remarkable.
“Ffolkes, I’m alive, you’re an idiot, and Limbo is a Popish heresy of which Cromwell would disapprove. What persuaded you to leave the salvage gang?”
“Things got chaotic when the bells fell. Lost my specs, had the idea of feeling my way along the railings, then found someone had helpfully installed an oubliette.”
“Are you alright?” I asked anxiously. Even accounting for a coating of pulverised masonry, the boy didn’t look well.
He winced. “The thing is, there’s something heavy on my leg and even if I could move it, I’m not sure I should try. I’m afraid I might have a gift from the Führer down here.”
“A bomb?” I’d thought my glands were out of adrenalin, but a jolt of fresh terror rocketed through me. “How big?”
“About five or six feet,” said the Witchfinder, with forced brightness. “Seems an odd shape, but I’m no expert.”
“Perhaps it’s part of a bell.”
“No sharp edges, I’m afraid. Trouble is, it’s still so beastly dark down here — ”
Far below, a small object skittered off a larger one with a metallic tippity-tap.
“Don’t move, Private!” I snapped hypocritically. “That’s an order.”
I fastened to torch to my bashed curtain-rail and lowered it down so he could inspect his prison. He was indeed sitting on a pile of disarticulated skeletons.
“An ossuary,” he diagnosed, without turning a hair. “Must be from one of the Victorian hygiene drives.”
“Fascinating,” I said. “How’s the leg?”
“Can’t feel it.” The chalky face grimaced again. “And I can’t get out until this thing’s off me. Could be ticklish.” He shone the torch on a long, grey cyclindrial object, covered in ancient mortar. “That’s the thing I was talking about — so do get clear and put me on the rescue list. I can wait.”
The Blitz had been going for months, and we all knew that crush injuries couldn’t wait. The longer the pressure was kept on a limb, the worse things went when it was released.
“Good God, nothing about this can wait.”
The brave idiot smiled up at me.
“God must be busy right now. But perhaps there’s someone else I can ask. You'll have to go away and do it for me.”
“I’m not leaving you alone with a UXB and a bunch of bones.”
“The honest dead mean us no harm. What I’d like you to do, as soon as Mr. Narker gets the firemen to put up a cordon, is call 432 836, and ask to be put through to Mr. Fell. The Sergeant would tell you to do the same.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s not in Soho,” I objected.
“True, but I’m pretty sure Mr. Fell isn’t, either. Not after a night like this. I know it sounds odd, but he swore up and down he’d always answer that number — and that it should only be used in severest emergencies.”
It might have sounded odd to most folk, but not to me. This must be Azariah Fell’s idea of a coded signal — though I couldn’t for the life of me imagine how it might work.
“432 is London’s main exchange,” added Ffolkes proudly. “H-E-A for Headquarters. I looked it up.”
The poor boy must be feverish. The probability that our sponsor was, for some bizarre reason, manning the boards of a telephone exchange were miniscule. Nevertheless, I was reluctant to refuse him.
“Has anyone ever called it?”
“If Mr. Narker has, he’s never said. Now please, for the love of God, go.”
* * *
Brrrr—brrrr—brrrr—
The lantern over the telephone booth next to the church was shattered to smithereens. I’d had to feel my way down the alleyway to call the operator.
"Is your call of urgent national importance?" inquired a woman’s clipped and weary tones.
“Life or death,” I said. “HEA 836, please, and ask for an A. Z. Fell.”
“I don’t know about that,” returned the operator doubtfully, “it looks like one of our internal test numbers. Do you have the remotest notion — ”
She must have put me through, though, for the phone began ringing and was instantly picked up again.
“Greetings! Name and rank, please!” exclaimed a new female voice, in tones of such joy that I considered the possibility that my mind had chosen this moment to come untethered, and go zooming into madness like a loosed balloon.
“Hang on, who am I through to? I’m the one making the call.”
“So you are! Gosh, things must be pretty bad down there,” mused the second voice, without answering my question, “but fear not! I can absolutely, definitely do this.”
“Are you a switchboard operator?”
“Oh, yes. A highly-trained adept of the switchy-board thingummy. Name and rank, please! And your organisation, since you’re a civilian. I presume you do have one.”
Either I could hang up, or I could see this lunacy through. I chose the latter course.
“My name is Captain Regina Diceman of the Royal Exorcism Force — that’s the R.E.F — and I’m calling a Mr. A. Z. Fell. Azariah Fell, bookseller. Has a war record, I think, but I’ve no clue about his rank.”
“The REF? Ooh, that one’s obscure. And don’t worry about his rank, they rarely change.” For the first time, the voice was tinged with regret. “Hang on a tick, and…there we go! Principality. I’m getting good at this! Putting you through right now.” 6
“But…”
For ten seconds, my receiver emitted the sound of a finger being dragged around the rim of a wet glass — and then, in defiance of probability, someone picked up. In the background, I could hear hoarsely-shouted orders. We were back in London.
“Miss Diceman?” said a familiar voice. “What seems to be the trouble?”
I made my explanation brief. Mr. Fell took the news calmly.
“You did the right thing, Captain. Now, what I’d like you to do is put the receiver on top on the telephone — pray be so good as leave it off the hook — and make sure no-one tries rescuing poor Ffolkes until I get there.”
That wouldn’t be difficult, I thought glumly. Heroic they might be, but the bomb squads must be stretched beyond all human limits.
“But Mr. Fell, where are you?”
“Oh, quite close. Very, very close. Close enough to make all the difference, if I get a wiggle on. Now remember — off the hook, on top of the ‘phone, and back into the fray without looking over your shoulder. Pip pip.”
Dear Reader, I obeyed him. All right, I obeyed him two-thirds of the way, and it is at this point that the promised Elements of the Supernatural enter this tale in earnest. For I did look over my shoulder, and despite the Biblical warnings about what happens to women who do so, I didn’t turn into a pillar of salt, and can tell you what I saw. Not that I saw everything, for despite being an incurable nosy parker, I retained some sense of self-preservation — and some visions are not for mortal eyes.
* * *
To start with, I saw very little. But I could definitely hear something: a voice humming a hymn, distant at first, but slowly and surely gathering force. The tune was the one familiar to church organists as ‘Repton’, and known to countless choirs as ‘Dear Lord and Father of Mankind’. You know, the one that exhorts God to make humankind more sensible, repeating the last line twice for good measure:
"Dear Lord and Father of mankind,
Forgive our foolish ways!
Reclothe us in our rightful mind,
In purer lives Thy service find,
In dee-per re-ver-en-ce, praise —
In deeper reverence, praise."
“Tum tuumm-te, tum-te-tum-te tum,” hummed the unseen voice, cheerful as if its owner was en route to a village fete, and clear as a distant bell. “Tum tum te, tum-te tum. Praise be, the rhythm’s the same after all these years. Now for the tricky part,” there was a grunt of effort. “And a one! And a two! And an Abracadabra —”
At that moment, some part of me stopped being a sceptic, for I ducked back behind the corner in holy dread with sweat pouring down my back. The implication of what was about to happen could not have been clearer, more down-to-earth, or more completely insane. But at the same time, I was overwhelmingly certain that the humming thing whose approach so terrified me was also a being of wild magnificence, the sort of splendour that people queue for hours to see. I now know, for personal experience, how Lot’s wife came to grief, for I had a sudden, overwhelming urge to look. I gave it ten seconds before risking my sanity, life, and eyeballs, until there was a small and meaningful ‘pop’.
And what did I see? I saw the light.
It wasn’t a Damascene light. It was a dim glow pointed at the ground, which meant the bearer had a shuttered lantern strapped to his chest to light his way. It was mostly the ARP who wore them that way, and so it proved. The reflected glow revealed an overall-clad figure walking down the alleyway in full rescue regalia, a rolled-up rope-ladder bumping on his back. The interval between the end of our conversation and his arrival at St. Brides had been less than thirty seconds, and my sole remaining thought was that this person mustn't know I’d seen him. I scuttled back over the wet flagstones, feeling as significant as a woodlouse who has just comprehended the scale of a California redwood, and scrambled behind a charred beam so fast I put my already-aching hip out in earnest. I can report that when you’ve seen a major supernatural event, the sort of thing Private Ffolkes would rate as at least an 8 on his 10-point scale, your hands really do shake and nothing on Earth will brace them.
“What ho!” cried the new arrival, “did somebody call for the ARP?”
A small, weary crowd fronted by Sergeant Narker surged forward to explain the situation, giving me time to rub my hands over the burned beam and smudge my face with soot. Sooner or later, Azariah Fell would call for me, and I would have to face him; he absolutely must not see that I was as white as a sheet.
“That was quick, Sir,” said the Witchfinder Sergeant (though like everyone else, he didn’t say: Sir, that was astonishingly quick, impossibly quick, almost the blink of an eye — Sir, how on earth did you do it? )
“One does one’s best,” replied the modest bookseller. Crouched behind my beam, I watched him duck under the warning-rope and make his unflustered way to Ffolkes’ oubliette. He took his powerful lantern off his chest, and unshuttered it so the light flared around him as he peered into the pit. What he saw appeared to delight him, for his backlit silhouette did a little dance on the spot.
“I bring good news!” he called through cupped hands. “There is no UXB — this is a different annoyance entirely. Vicar, could you muster as many hands as possible? Mr. Narker, would you be so good as to find Miss Diceman — she must be around somewhere. I will require the assistance of both of you.”
I judged it the right moment to reappear, and limped over as pathetically as possible, grateful for once that my old injury was causing genuine pain. “I’m here. But Mr. Fell, what on Earth are you going to do?”
“Use my ARP training, of course.” He knotted one end of his rope-ladder to the railings. “Mr. Narker can make sure this doesn’t shift, and you can direct the lantern.”
Secured and illuminated, Mr. Fell climbed down more nimbly than his appearance suggested, until he stood on the pile of old bones next to the casualty, and what we’d feared to be a bomb, now lit more brightly. The Germans had dropped a lot of stuff on London, including a few marine mines, but surely nothing that had…handles?
The boy opened his eyes.
“Mr. Fell? I somehow knew you’d come. Are we going to get blown to bits?”
“The way to phrase that in wartime, is to ask if one is about to be blown to bits right now.” He began clearing bones off the long metal object. “And the answer is no, we are not. We are going to get you out of here.”
“Not to be rude, Sir, but what are you doing?”
“I am trying,” another grunt of effort, “to see if it’s possible to get ropes underneath this thing. You’ve had a very fortunate escape, and it won’t do to waste it.”
“Are you — um, are you sure that thing doesn’t have a tilt fuse?”
“If it was going to pop, young Ffolkes, it would have done so years ago. It’s not a bomb, though I admit it’s somewhat unfortunately cyndrical. It’s a coffin! An iron coffin, to frustrate the Resurrectionists of old London Town. But since I only intend to raise its occupant a matter of inches, I don’t suppose they will have objections.”
Ffolkes gave a strange laugh.
“Either you thought that was possible before you looked in, or you’re stupidly brave.”
“Some risks must simply be taken, and I have no dependents,” observed the bookseller, as the end of a rope thunked softly at his feet. “Aha! If I’m not mistaken, the Reverend Taylor has already found us some lifting apparatus.”
It was true. As soon as our patron (and ARP officer) had identified the mystery object as harmless, the firemen had allowed St. Brides’ salvage squad back into the courtyard. Miraculously, they had found two coils of stiff, heavy bell-rope, carried out during the fire, which they let down into the pit.
“Now, if I shift the femurs of our departed friends a trifle, I can wriggle this loop around the other end of the coffin, and our living friends above can haul away. I’ll just keep things balanced. It’s so tricky to get these knots tight.”
He looked upwards at a ring of tired but enthusiastic faces, then knelt on the pile of bones and laid his palms on the coffin.
“Ready, lads? One, two, three…and Heave! One, two, three…and Heave!”
And without any fuss, he lifted the coffin eight inches into the air.
To this day, I reckon that with a platform to stand on, and not a pile of old bones, and proper handles to grip, rather than a few handfuls of rust, a circus strongman could have raised that coffin a few inches. But of course, Mr. Fell didn’t do it like that. He was touching it, but not gripping it at all, and just before each ‘Heave!’, he lifted, almost in time with the hauling team. Once the coffin was lowered again, well clear of Ffolkes’ leg, the rescue party used the ropes to let down a stretcher, into which Fell lifted the wounded Witchfinder. Time was now critical. Once the pressure was off, it was a matter of getting Ffolkes to the hospital with all speed.
“How bad does it look, Mr. Fell? I’ll have to know sooner or later.”
The bookseller put a hand on Ffolkes' dusty forehead.
“I’m no doctor, dear boy — but perhaps you can try wiggling your toes?”
Remarkably, Ffolkes found that he could, which meant that although the leg was broken, its circulation hadn’t been irreversibly cut off. The tense mood improved considerably, and the Witchfinder Private was hoisted from the tomb like Lazarus into the arms of waiting rescuers. Loud cheers rang out as Mr. Fell ascended his rope-ladder and emerged triumphant on the surface, to favour us with one of his beaming smiles. But I couldn’t help noticing the lines about his eyes where a little sharper, and the dips above his nostrils a little more pinched. Even he’s dog-tired, I thought. Even this being who can discreetly do the impossible, and whose mere existence is terrifying in his implications, is now absolutely done in. There was something moving in this overlap between thaumaturgic might, and ordinary human weariness. It was moving and terrifying all at once, which I suppose is as good a definition as any for the emotion of awe.
* * *
After Ffolkes had been put into an ambulance, attended by Sergeant Narker who assured me he’d follow the boy to the hospital, I found myself wandering the perimeter of Brides’ Court in a daze, having what I could only assume was an epiphany. I must have looked dreadful, for a mug of tea was thrust into my hand by, of all people, the Reverend Taylor. I expressed my commiserations on St. Brides’.
“The walls still stand,” said the man who’d just seen his life’s work incinerated, “and a church can rise again. No-one has been killed or injured, and for that, I am thankful.”
“We’ve Mr. Fell to thank for that.” I later discovered I’d scalded my tongue something fierce on the tea, but at the time, I didn’t feel it. “I don’t know what we’d have done without him.”
“The estimable Fell? The fondant fancy in human form, who secretly tops up the Roof Fund, and slips a crown into the collection-plate when he thinks no-one is looking? I don't know what a great many of us would do without him — but I have to warn you,” he added, with an unexpectedly worldly twinkle in his eye, “I suspect he’s not the marrying kind.”
I made my best disappointed-spinster moue.
After scrubbing myself into presentability with a wet handkerchief, I should have topped epiphanising, come back to Earth, and headed to St. James’ Street. But I didn’t. I needed, more than anything in this world, to get back to my lodgings in Islington, where my father’s Communion kit reposed in the Digby’s Anderson shelter, in a waterproof duffel bag alongside a little publication called Diabolical: Hot Off The Press. But first, I went back to the new REF headquarters, where I pocketed Ffolkes’ annotated map of Kent’s haunted churches.
This is what happens when you have an epiphany: at first, the facts whirl in your mind like gulls in a storm. But as the storm abates, coaxed by the winds of revelation, they assume a particular shape. You may already have guessed the shape mine took, as I wended my way homewards on a succession of buses, none of which could progress more than half a mile before it was necessary to disembark at one debris-strewn street, and trudge on foot to board another. I spent the journey with my nose in my notebook, scribbling like a prophetess.
Exhibit the First: the Coffin. Mr. Fell had lifted, at a conservative estimate, about four hundredweight’s worth of cast iron, simply by touching his palms to it. And no-one else — not even Sergeant Narker, tuned to paranormal threats of all descriptions, or Ffolkes, who right next to him at the time — had noticed. Only me.
Exhibit the Second: the Alley with the Telephone. There hadn’t been anywhere for Mr. Fell to come from. After an interval of barely half a minute, the man had strolled coolly out of a dead-end passageway. Even if I posited that he might, in sober sooth, prowl London’s rooftops at night and descend a four-story building like The Shadow, that was incredibly fast.
Pray be so good as leave the telephone off the hook…
Without knowing why, I’d obeyed this instruction (and only up to a point). But now, thanks to a hoary old vicar who saw things more clearly than he knew, a potential reason for the request presented itself.
In human form, the Reverend Taylor had said jokingly. The fondant fancy in human form.
That was what I’d been stubbing my mind against: Azariah Fell, bookseller-at-large, possesses a human form. Fair enough, so does everyone. But as soon at you’re literal about it, as literal as if you’re scanning aerial photos for a fuel dump disguised as a dairy, the only reason you’d say someone was ‘in human form’ was if they were really something else.
A mad notion, but let us entertain it. Supposing, just hypothetically, that I was ‘something else’, what would I do, in my search for cover? I’d do what secret agents have done throughout history, and join a society — neither overly large, nor unduly efficient — tangentially related to my cause, perhaps even opposed to it. If some such eccentric outfit already existed, all the better. Like, for example, the REF.
Exhibit the Third: 432 836. the number that, in ‘severest emergencies’, would get a member of the REF in touch with Mr. Fell. On the face of it, there was nothing special about 432 836. It contained no portentous sequence of digits. But despite Ffolkes’ insistence that the area code was for GPO Headquarters (the largest telephone exchange in the city, but also the immediate area around it), I got the feeling I’d got through to…somewhere else.
Time for another dunk in the history vat, long-suffering Reader. By WWII, London telephone numbers consisted of two parts: a three-letter mnemonic corresponding to the area code, followed by a phone number that was usually three digits long, sometimes two, and rarely as many as four. The area mnemonic was converted into a number by means of an alphabet on the dial. A similar alphabet system was in use in the States, permitting such gimmicks as a number that spelled DENTIST or DIVORCE, but to spell a complete word this way in Britain was a rarity. I reproduce below the numbers-to-letters system as it stood in London in 1940. You can see that area code 432 did indeed transcribe as HEA: the start of the word HEAdquarters — and by the time you’ve finished getting your head around it, I’m sure you’ll have worked out that 432 836 did, indeed, spell a particular word.
1 = no allocated letter;
2 = A, B, or C; 3 = D, E, or F; 4 = G, H, or I;
5 = J, K, or L; 6 = M or N; 7 = P, R, or S;
8 = T, U, or V; 9 = X, Y, or Z; 0 = O or Q
432-836, I pencilled in my notebook: HEA-VEN. I stared at it for a long time, like a crossword fiend wondering how they could have been such a simpleton.
The first thing you learn in counter-intelligence is that if you think you’re the first person who’s noticed an oddity, you need to be careful, for it could be a set-up. The second thing you learn is that discrepancies must be reported to someone higher up the command chain. I honestly would have done this, had I known of any higher-ranking members of the REF, instead of being the inheritor of a mantle I’d done nothing to deserve. For the life of me, I couldn’t think of anyone I could go to and say, ‘I think one of Soho’s ARP Wardens might, in addition to a keen sense of whimsy, possess magnetic strength and the ability to materialise out of telephone receivers. These are useful features in an Air Raid Warden, and I’m as certain as I can be that he means us no ill, but I think the chap might really be — ”
“Angel!” called my final bus driver. “Anyone getting off at The Angel, Islington?”
Which left the problem, I reflected as I headed for my mundane mid-terrace lodgings, of someone who knew Azariah Fell better than any of us. Nevermore, who bent the rules as a prism bends sunlight, but whose charm failed curiously on dogs and horses. Nevermore, whose frame had as much padding as a deckchair, yet could transmogrify into a good-time girl with a contralto like liquid sin. Nevermore, who could see in the night like a cat. A trickster in whose company I had dropped out of the calendar for an entire day. A personage who shared his friend’s knack for emerging from fortuitous alleyways, as if the Blitz were an inconvenience, and pandemonium his natural state.
At that point, my Witchfinder ancestors rose up in my mind, pointing out, with the pedantry of the dead, that all needful answers were in the Bible. For unlike vampires and similar riffraff, some paranormal beings, regardless of their personal morals, have the power to walk the Earth by both night and day. They pass among us freely, they go (with a few notable exceptions) wheresoever they hist, and as the Good Book saith, we oft-times entertain them unawares.
Oh.
Oh.
Oh, Bloody Flaming Hell.
1. At the time, I was blissfully ignorant of the nascent Manhattan Project and its British predecessor, the MAUD Committee, as was everyone else who wasn’t an atomic boffin. Had I known, I would surely have got the shivers. return
2. A dozen no.8 torch batteries for me, three pairs of lambswool socks each for Gog and Magog, and for Bunny, rather pointedly, a bottle of Trumper’s Extract of Limes. After much soul-searching, it was decided it was in the National Interest to keep them. return
3. In full, the motto on an old penny would read ‘Victoria Dei Gratia Britanniarum Regina Fidei Defensatrix’, but if you whittle it down to the three last words, it’s literally ‘Queen [Regina], Defender of the Faith’. return
4. As the prospect of meat rationing loomed in 1939, the question arose as to whether we could afford to keep dogs and cats — and the Government’s answer, at least to start with, was ‘no’. At first people balked at this, but when the Blitz began and things felt life-or-death, thousands of pets were sadly put down. return
5. Southey’s poem is called ‘God’s Judgement on a Wicked Bishop’, and like ‘The Inchcape Rock’, which has a similar theme, it used to be indelibly stamped on every schoolchild’s memory. return
6. Yes, I have spent hours pondering who I was actually talking to. I conclude there are some things one is better off not knowing. return
Notes:
While writing this chapter, I've referred so many times to this sketch (by the artist Muirhead Bone) of St. Brides destroyed after the fire, with St. Paul's reprieved in the background, that I'm going to bung it in the endnotes:
1. St. Brides' church really does possess an interesting underground network of chambers and catacombs, and also an anti-resurrectionist security coffin, though I've take some liberties with the latter; unlike some models, which were curved or mummiform, the actual coffin is your traditional elongated hexagon shape.
2. Most of the Blitz details come from two magnificent links, courtesy of the blog A London Inheritance, one about St. Paul's Cathedral Fire Watchers and their paraphernalia, and the other on the Second Great Fire of London in general. If you're interested in the topic, they're both well worth a peruse. The details on how to tackle incendiary bombs are from this incredibly 1940's pamphlet in which everyone looks an order of magnitude calmer than I'd be in similar circumstances.
Two Easter eggs, one short and sweet, the other long and nerdy --
* Yep, Aziraphale's magic number does indeed put Reggie through to the eternally helpful angel Muriel.
* The press carved with B&S, 1647: in Book GO, The Nice and Accurate Prophecies are printed in 1655, just a few doors down from Aziraphale’s bookshop, by a firm called Bilton and Scaggs. As befalls anyone in a Pratchett plot, not only does Aziraphale have no clue that he’s missed his chance to snag a copy of this soon-to-be legendary tome, but Master Bilton and Master Scaggs suffer a series of comic business misfortunes, after which Scaggs eventually turns to counterfeiting. Book GO claims he spends his last few years in Newgate Prison, but in reality, a man convicted of counterfeiting would have been hanged (female forgers got to be burned at the stake…though they’d probably strangle you first. Yay).
But for most of the latter C17 banknotes were astoundingly rare, written by hand to cover the costs of running an army, and functioned pretty much like a cheque. It would be 1725 before they were printed in set denominations, and even then, most people could pass their lives without seeing any. But there’s an interesting period in between when they were partially printed, and filled in by hand with the payee and the amount, again similar to a cheque; the earliest such note in the possession of the Bank of England is from 1699.
So, could Good Omens' Master Scaggs have ended his life in disgrace as a forger of banknotes? OK, juuust…provided he was quite young to be joint Master of a not-very-successful printshop — say in his early thirties — and only turned to crime in his seventies.
Chapter 13: Defy the Foul Fiend
Summary:
“Once you suspect a man of being a spy, you must go to all lengths, however fantastic they may seem, to make sue you have checked all the possible places where he may have concealed evidence that would convict him.”
Notes:
After attempting to stuff the remaining plot into 2 Exploding-Closet-style chapters, I gave in and upped the estimated chapter count.
There has been a hiatus. A hia[hia[hiatus]tus]tus. Hiatusception. Something like that. I read every comment in the interim and responded to hardly anything, which is wrong of me. I confess that the more enthusiastic the comments when I'm not writing, the trickier I find it to respond to them; I know I'm not alone in this, but it's still a very silly thing for a brain to do.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Dear Reader, strap into your Suspenders of Industrial-Grade Disbelief.
Prepare to have them destruction-tested.
I know nothing about you. You might be devout; you might be a Houdini-grade sceptic. You might be a dedicated occult scholar like Gerald Gardner, or as open-minded about the paranormal as Peter Ffolkes. It doesn’t matter, because I’m pretty sure you’ve never faced the possibility that someone you think you know, someone you’ve argued with and given pep talks to, someone you’ve seen shiver, get drunk, and scratch where it itches, might be a fiend in human form. There’s a place for people who believe that sort of thing, and it has padded walls.
Under the tuition of the Royal Exorcism Force and ‘Diabolical! Von Schall of the Reich’, I’d made great strides in credulity. Private Ffolkes, who scoffed at the Gothic but believed in vampires as moral monsters, had argued me into to accepting that if you could boost your lifespan by sacrificing other peoples’ lives, the practice would have devotees. Diabolical! had convinced me that one of them could be a Nazi agent; that somewhere in the South of England was a man who fought for the Thousand-Year Reich because he intended, with the aid of a demon servant, to live through at least its first century.
That belief wasn’t so improbable in itself. Hubris exists, and so do madmen.
But I bet you a pound of platinum to a pound of flesh, cut next to your beating heart, that you’ve never had to work out the chances of the madman actually pulling it off.
Suppose you’re Hell’s demon in the field, manifesting as a spy with no past. It’s a fine disguise because people like this do exist — men like ‘Sidney Reilly’, star British agent of the Great War, who buried his identity so deep that when the Russians shot him in 1925, all we knew was that he was no Irishman1. As long as no-one on God’s earth suspects you’re not human, espionage is a piece of cake. You reflect comfortably that although skilled spies are rare, skilled occultists are even rarer. An expert in both fields, crazy enough to pursue an undercover demon, is for all practical purposes a non-existent bird.
But when the luck of the Devil runs out, it runs out in style, for Heinz von Schall is that rara avis. He deduces your existence, locates your lair, then forces you to read the small print in his contract. He must be a supremely bad man, since there is in fact a loophole, allowing him to wreak woe and postpone damnation for several lifetimes if he can complete a difficult rite. Even worse, he’s done his research when it comes to demon servants and doesn’t want Hell’s famous names. He reckons you’re under-appreciated stock, and your handlers Down Below are unlikely to give you any other instruction than to sign him up (again), and do your worst.
You are fucked. When an angel needs a human agent, they can pick and choose. But you? What lunatic would help a devil in distress? What’s worse, your requirements are tight. Von Schall is a Nazi spy: you need an operative with access to Allied counter-intelligence. Von Schall is a diabolist: you need someone who can be made to believe in Heaven and Hell, not the religious way, but as two opponents in the Greatest of Great Games. Oh, and apart from the occasions when you use trances to learn what they’ve discovered, you need this person to serve you of their own volition, with the wits that nature gave them.
A supposition: the Witchfinding vicar you cultivated in the Great War inconsiderately died on you. Instead, you track down his daughter, who might, with the luck of the Devil, prove to be a hereditary Witchfinder too. She turns out to have no faith, but never mind. If you can’t put the fear of God into her, no-one can.
Like any good handler, you don’t throw the kitchen sink at a novice. Instead, you wait to see what she does about a comic with an indefinite number of pages and a protagonist with the same name as a known member of the Überprüfung der Geheime Wissenschaften. When it’s obvious that she must be reading it but saying nothing, you introduce minor miracles — occult chickenfeed — until she no longer balks at them. With diabolical finesse, you introduce the ideas of your true nature, the things Heinz von Schall could potentially make you do, and the gradual, inevitable conclusion that as a Witchfinder and a member of the SOE, it is her duty to try stopping him.
Then a certain person blows the gaff by materialising from a telephone receiver in a blaze of glory, but perhaps he’s done you a favour. Sooner or later, every recruiter has to reveal to a potential agent what power they will actually serve. There’s just one problem, I thought, as I let myself into my lodgings to find last night’s meal left out on the kitchen table, covered with a willow-pattern plate.
I fully believe Von Schall is out there, plotting his grim gamble with Hell. But apart from that, Nevermore, everything you’ve induced me to believe could be a lie. For all I know, your story about meeting Azariah Fell in the Great War has some truth to it, but no affection. For all I know, you’ve no objections to serving old Heinz and are playing hard to get. For all I know, the requirements of the ritual in Diabolical! are false, the rite actually needs the blood of an idiot, and the needful fluid flows through the veins of Regina Diceman. Because if I’m right, then you’re a better liar than anyone alive. Not even Passion Pants Robertson could wheedle the truth out of you.
-----
I was wolfing down cold potato pie when Mrs. Digby found me.
“Gentleman caller for you. Says a bomb went off next to your Bureau, and they need you there urgent.” She gave me a speculative look, clearly remembering Nevermore’s roses. “Nice car, he’s got.”
Hell’s bells, had the demon got here already? But when I peeped nervously into Matilda Street, there was no Bentley. Instead, there was the Daimler in which Bunny had picked me up after the Wiggle Room Incident, so dusty it now looked ash-grey, and standing next to it was a thickset man in what had once been an overcoat. He looked as done-in as I felt, and took me a few moments to recognise him as Inspector Curtis because his brush-cut was so clogged with mortar, it looked as if he’d gone grey. Under his ruined coat, he was wearing the siren suit that did most of us for pyjamas. He saw me twitch the net curtain and tapped his watch. I opened and closed my fist: five minutes.
Five minutes, to don the armour of a God who was surely an award-winning bastard.
I doubted 58 St. James’ Street had been hit by a bomb. What had ‘gone off’ was almost certainly Agent Nevermore, and I needed ammunition of my own. Ignoring the state of my own clothes (poor Magog seemed to have got it worse), I ran to the Andersen shelter in the back garden, where all the Witchfinding paraphernalia I owned was jammed into my father’s Communion case. I grabbed it, then shoved my English-German dictionary, with ‘Diabolical!’ stashed between its pages, awkwardly into my gas-mask satchel, next to the annotated map I’d pinched from poor Ffolkes at St. Brides. I made a record dash back to Matilda Street, scorning the Daimler’s passenger door which Inspector Curtis was holding open, and catapulted myself into the backseat, leaving my baffled landlady open-mouthed in my wake. Only when we were under way did I find out the extent of the cock-up.
“He gets up a lot in the small hours, but this time was different,” explained Magog, as we pulled away from the kerb in a car that reeked of smoke. “Philpott was keeping watch and I was trying to nap in the Morrison when our man bolted out of bed, yelling that Agent Tyche was in mortal danger and we had to find you immediately.”
“Without knowing where I was? In the middle of an air-raid?”
“Such were our objections. Philpott keeps a blackjack tucked inside his waistband. I could see him reach for it, but Nevermore looked him in the eye and said ‘Let’s see who’s quicker,” and then he was out the door and into his Bentley. This sounds daft, Reggie, but we couldn’t stop him. We had to get in that car.”
“I believe you,” I said, as we swerved into the Caledonian Road. “Where did he go?”
“All over the shop. We raced an ARP van down Fleet Street, which happened to be on fire at the time, and passed it on the pavement. Then our hero turned on a sixpence and drove to Barts2, where he went haring through the wards looking for you. What he found was a boy with his leg in plaster, and a short man feeding him soup. I’d thought he was angry before, but what he actually was, was mildly put out.” His knuckles tightened on the wheel. “You’ve never seen him angry.”
Oh, Christ. Nevermore had sworn not to hypnotise me again, and he’d kept his word. Instead, he’d put some sort of protective beacon on me — and I’d given it to Peter Ffolkes. At least the absolute worst couldn’t have happened, I reasoned, or no-one in the vicinity would have survived.
“Did he, by any chance, ask about a penny?”
“This runs deep, then,” said the shrewd policeman. “Actually, he screamed — Philpott's not here, so pardon my French — ‘Right, you lucky fucker, where’s the fucking coin? Never seen him so furious, but the lad just smiled and said, ‘You must be Reggie’s friend’.”
Fantastic. I’d summoned an angel to save Peter Ffolkes, then sent a pissed-off demon to his sickbed, which even for the Witchfinder Army must be a turn-up for the books.
“I don’t know how he knew that was the right thing to say,” Magog continued, “but it shut Nevermore up better than you’ve ever done. As soon as he knew you were all right, the fight went out of him. And when he found out about how the boy had been rescued, he started laughing. Laughing like he might puke. Then he swore worse than I’ve ever heard in my life, banged his head against the wall hard enough to split his forehead, and after that, he was right as rain, apologised to everyone, got his cut dabbed with iodine, and drove us back to St. James’ Street. We’ve put him in the Rumpus Room.”
A Rumpus Room: SOE slang for a room under concealed armed guard. Potato pie rose in my gorge. I braced myself against the door as Magog took a hard left.
“God Almighty," I whispered, but Curtis of the Yard had well-trained ears.
"He acts like it. Asked for coffee and the morning papers. Says you and him need a little chat.”
So this is how it feels, I thought. This is how it feels when a field agent hears The Knock, or when a passport officer asks for another look at their papers, or they see two men in plain suits nod to each other in a crowd. This is how it feels when you’re dead.
There was no way I could, or should, avoid Nevermore’s ‘little chat’. If I was right, he was so dangerous that the SOE had to know his true nature, even if forcing the disclosure killed me. But no-one at Station XX knew what I knew about him, and without extraordinary proof, no-one would believe it. Even so, I briefly considered the merits of bashing Inspector Curtis around the ear with my English-German dictionary, dumping him on the pavement, driving to the nearest railway station, and heading for Mother’s evacuee home in Shrewsbury. Of course, even if I managed this feat I wouldn’t get far; the SOE would have me within the day. But with any luck I’d end up in Inverlair Lodge, their dumping-ground for unusable agents, or in prison, or possibly a madhouse. Any of the three was better than being alone in a room with a demon.
“Stop the car,” I told Magog. He didn’t, but he did slow down.
“I’ll need good reasons.”
“Inspector, I can’t tell you everything, but this is an unexpected development and I need to think. More than that, I need to list my questions. Nevermore wants to chat? Good. But I’ll only get one chance to debrief him, he’s a tricky customer, and I can’t afford to make mistakes. Between ourselves, the man scares me.”
“I can understand that. But me and Philpott will be on the other side of the door — and no messing about with coshes this time”, he added. Both men were crack shots and under other circumstances, that would have been reassuring, but if my fears were correct, we’d only seen a fraction of my agent’s abilities. Depending on what Ffolkes and Narker had said at the hospital, Nevermore might suspect I’d worked out Fell’s true nature, or he might be hoping I was in the dark. He might or might not stand by his vow not to send me into trances, but a demon surely had other ways of getting into one’s head.
He mustn’t get that far.
Magog made a pretence of checking the rear mirror, but I saw the sideways flick of his eyes; I must have looked a wretched sight. Mercifully, he pulled up. “All right. But be quick.”
I considered my position. Bunny Hopkins almost certainly knew about the Barts debacle already. It wouldn’t be long before my tweedy mentor introduced himself to Narker and Ffolkes, neither of whom could withstand the prying of a trained interrogator. They wouldn’t even know this bumbler from an obscure government bureau, in search of his lost secretary, was an interrogator. ‘Poor girl, she used to turn up late some days, and I thought she was being lazy’. That’s how old Hopkins would play it. My membership of the REF would be blown, but the event I’d feared for so long might now be a boon. Bunny would boggle at what my fellow Witchfinders told him, but he’d also do his research. In three days he would eliminate the impossible, and after that, he would believe them. My job was now to brief him — even if I had to do so from beyond the veil.
Using the communion-case as a lap-desk, with Magog’s mirrored eyes upon me, I pencilled my list. But I didn’t write a list of questions for Nevermore. Instead, I wrote this:
FAO Mr. Tarquin Narker, and/or Mr. Peter Ffolkes,
at St. Brides’ Printworks, off Fleet Street.
1. If you are reading this, I’ve made the sort of mistake that people don’t usually come back from. I have also kept information from you, and I apologise for it.
2. The people who bring you this letter can be thoroughly trusted, are tough and able, and know how to keep secrets. They have little experience with the paranormal, but they’re fast learners.
3. Here’s the information I denied you: I believe that the explanation for your ‘haunted’ churches is that a Nazi diabolist called Heinz von Schall is based in South-East England. He has chosen England as the site for a Faustian ceremony, requiring that he murder three people on holy ground to gain a demon slave (this will doom what passes for his soul, but remarkably, this is his second demonic pact and I doubt his soul troubles him). As a member of London’s REF, I object to such deeds on our territory.
4. If he fails, he won’t be our problem any more. But if he succeeds, he will wield a demon’s power in the service of the Reich.
5. The reason I kept this from you is that I am sure you would insist on picking out likely churches, hoping to confront von Schall outright. I cannot convey how bad an idea this would be, or how dangerous I think he is.
6. That said, he has two weaknesses. One is that until he can command the demon, he remains so wary of it that he spends as much time as possible on holy ground. He must have ways — some of them occult, others more practical — of avoiding human notice. The other is that his time to complete the ceremony is running short. The best ways to stop him are to a) make sure he can’t reach any suitable church, and/or b) find and protect his intended victims. That’s now your job, and the people who bring this letter will help you.
7. Three possible things might happen to me. I might vanish without trace, I might turn up dead, or I might, just conceivably, turn up alive.
8. In case of the third outcome, here are your orders: you are to teach the people who bring you this letter the rite of exorcism, and all of you are to be kitted up to do it at all times.
9. If I do turn up again, no matter how much like my usual self I may seem, any trained person is to use the rite on me, and not stop until the question of possession is settled one way or the other. Bell, book, and candle. As much Holy Water as possible. The works.
10. AROINT. AVAUNT. & DEFY THE FOUL FIEND. Sincerely yours, Regina Morley Diceman.
There. I’d done it. I’d written an ‘If you are reading this’ letter, like someone in a pulp detective tale. As we resumed our journey, I quietly tore the sheet out of my notebook and tucked it into my satchel, next to the dictionary and Diabolical! Von Schall of the Reich. Then I considered my Witchfinder’s armamentarium.
Von Schall had armed himself with Holy Water before first confronting Nak-Hayauda, and when the Snake of the Forsaken continued to defy him, he’d gone to Rome for…Holier Water? Were there degrees of aquatic holiness, so that a grand cru, blessed by saints, was better than a priestly eau de table? It wouldn’t have hurt to get the Reverend Taylor to bless a bottle of whatever was left in St. Brides’ cistern. But as Providence would have it, thanks to my father’s communion kit, I did own something holy — a solitary Host, over twenty years old and bashed to pieces. But since it was in an equally beaten-up pyx, ready for instant use, my father had surely blessed it at some point. In New York, where von Schall had cornered the demon at the charity ball, hadn’t he threatened him with the Host too?
Nak-Hayauda, I carry Holy Water in my pocket, and the Host in a case on my watch chain…
I pried the pyx open, and prodded the contents with a fingertip. As we pulled up at 59 St. James’ Street, I emptied the crumbs into my cold, damp palm, and closed my hand over them. Did blessings go stale?
You’d be proud of me, Reginald, I thought wildly, as I followed Inspector Curtis down the corridors, attempting to seem calm and businesslike. I’m going to fight a demon. Well, not fight, as such. I’m going to try getting him to drop his guard. I can’t imagine that’ll turn out well, but either he’ll have to come clean, or the results will be so dramatic that other people will know what he is. And if I don’t make it, perhaps we’re going to meet (then again, maybe not). I don’t know what I believe any more, but the one thing I know for sure is, you’re a man of faith. I believe in you, Dad. I do.
Rumpus Rooms were a speciality of SOE buildings, each one different in style from its fellows, but but identical in purpose. The one in St. James’ Street was a former study connected on one side to the room where Bunny and I had attended a fraught meeting with Lt. Col. Robinson, and on the other, to a servant’s staircase so that back in Georgian times, milord’s sherry could be unobtrusively topped up. Only the door into the corridor was obviously a door; the other two matched the panelling exactly, and swung on hidden hinges. The purpose of a Rumpus Room was that armed men could enter it from several directions at once.
I left my satchel on the peg outside the door, commended the contents to God or whoever was manning His listening stations, and prepared to face the music.
The Rumpus Room had oak panelling and a trompe l’oeil ceiling of nine well-upholstered Muses, floating serenely in the painted heavens. Through the tape across its windows, I could see the cramped back garden. A squirrel hunted for acorns on roof of a gazebo; inside it, a couple more SOE men where doubtless on guard. The room was stripped of furniture apart from an incongruous floral three-piece suite (chairs can be wielded, but it’s tough to swing a chintz armchair around your head), and plonked on the sofa with his feet up and a sticking-plaster on his forehead was my agent.
“Titch.” He put down his paper, and got unhurriedly to his feet. “Glad to see you’re in one piece.”
“Likewise.” I let the door fall to behind me. I heard the latch click.
“I’ve made a bit of a mess again.”
“I forgive you. Mostly.”
I held out my crumb-laced hand, and more fool both of us, he grasped it.
“The Host?” His eyes widened in shock. “It's Reginald’s? Oh, fuck.”
Things happened fast. My palm felt like hot needles had been driven though it, but I was better off than Nevermore, who shook off my grip and spun away in agony as his right hand broke out in sores. He swore at it as if it wasn’t part of him, then raised his left hand and snapped his fingers. It sounded like a gunshot, and I waited for rescue — but in vain. My agent leapt for the door, but as soon as he grabbed the handle, he stuck to it.
“Fuckityfuckityfuck!” With a superhuman effort, his voice dropped to calm. “Ironic, considering I really am on your side, but I can stop this if you didn’t mean to properly harm me. I know you didn’t, Titch, but I need you to ss-say so.”
He said this while vibrating like a corpse on a live rail, but somehow still trying to open the door and converse over his shoulder. I tried to scream and failed.
“Fell went all-out last night,” reasoned the juddering demon, “enough for you to twig he’s an angel — and that I’m this. I knew you were s-s-smart, just like I knew you were a Witchfinder. Ss-s-say you didn’t mean this, and I’ll tell you everything. Better the devil you know, eh?”
Something black began dribbling from his sleeve. Was he dying in front of me?
“Aziraphale!” The coaxing tone evaporated. “The angel’s called Aziraphale and you have to save him. Reggie, for God’s sake!”
That did it: information I didn’t know, given in extremis. That convinced me Hell’s wide boy felt, in some alarmingly human way, affection and loyalty for the angel of Soho, and while he’d told me lies aplenty, that part at least was true. I gave a millimetric headshake. Apparently, that was enough. Nevermore braced his feet against the doorframe, gave a cartoonish grunt, then ripped off his ruined hand, leaving it stuck to the handle like a mitten. He fell to the floor with a thump, stood up painfully, and grinned.
“Time for that chat. No rush.”
He jerked his remaining thumb at the window, and I saw why. In the winter garden, the squirrel was frozen in the act of leaping from the gazebo, leaves suspended in its wake. I strained my ears for London’s hubbub, and heard not a sound. Outside, no time was passing — or perhaps the opposite, and inside, time was passing impossibly fast. That was when I realised that I hadn’t believed my own logic. Not really. I’d known the facts, but if I’d truly believed what I was up against, I never would have done this and I certainly wouldn’t have taken a demon at his word.
I scrabbled for a weapon, for a shield, for anything, and found a sofa cushion, carefully chosen by Station XX to be useless in combat.
“Ssso, you didn’t mean it,” hissed Nevermore. His eyes were too big for his head and glowing like uranium glass, and in a moment of crawling horror, I saw their pupils were slitted like a snake’s.
The thing took one off-kilter step towards me. Then another. Where its right hand had been, there was something that darted back up its sleeve before I got a good look at it, but I knew in my soul it was him. Part of his true form. I should have listened more to Narker and Ffolkes, sensible men who believed in demons as most people believe in king cobras — you might not have personally met one, but you know not to poke it with a stick. Instead, I’d be remembered as the woman who had to be scraped off the walls of an SOE Rumpus Room, killed with extreme thoroughness by an agent who vanished without trace. Or I’d vanish without trace myself, leaving both the Twenty Committee and the Royal Exorcism Force wondering what on Earth had happened to me. I backed away until the demon had me cornered.
A forked tongue tasted the air in front of my face.
“Scared — but also annoyed. That’sss my girl.”
I raised the cushion. Pink cabbage roses were the last thing I was going to see.
“I blame myself,” said the thing. “You’d have been no use to me unless you were nosy. I should’ve come clean long ago. But promissse me one thing — if you ever think you’ve run into another one of my lot, never test them halfway. Any other demon would’ve sskinned you one-handed.” He looked at his empty cuff. “On that note, I could use your help.”
“Yrk,” I observed.
“Nothing bad. I just need dark emotions. Loathing. Scorn. I'm despicable. Lay ‘em on me.”
Unless I dug through the panelling with my shoulderblades, I could get no further away from him. Now the adrenaline had worn off, I was shaking.
“Can’t heal on fear. Never had the knack.”
“You mustn’t exist. You can’t.”
His eyes shrank enough to roll in their sockets. “I don’t need denial, I need scorn. I’ve used you, Titch. I tracked you down because, as I’m sure you started deducing, I knew a Witchfinder called Reg Diceman in Étaples, and I hoped his daughter might have inherited the knack. I’ve used you to keep tabs on my Adversary, and trained you up to hunt one of the most dangerous men in Europe. When you clocked I was putting you in trances, I slipped you a talisman of protection, but I still played fast and loose with your Free Will. I’ve done everything short of possess you — ” he stopped, and peered so intensely into my eyes that I shuddered, “ — which, if I’m not mistaken, is something you’ve considered.”
I squinched my eyes shut. After nothing happened for what felt like an eternity, I opened them a chink to see Nevermore with his sleeve tucked into his jacket like Napoleon.
“But I will not harm you, Regina Diceman, nor let harm come to you that’s within my power to prevent, and this I swear it by my Fall. Same vow I swore about your dad.”
“You lie,” I spat. “He was a holy man. You miserable bastard, he was good!”
I could feel the hatred being drawn out of me as Nevermore’s snake side wrestled shapeless horror into whatever dimension it lived in, and then his human aspect wrestled down the snake, and the glow faded from his eyes. He pulled his hand from his jacket, bony as ever, but now as pink and manicured as A. Z. Fell’s. Not manicured, I thought, freshly shed.
“I didn’t say I swore it to his face. Were you really planning to go out fighting a demon with a cushion?”
It might be possible to feel stupider, but I doubt it. I put it down.
“Maybe your lot will win this thing after all. And you’re right, Reginald was good. Too bloody good to live. I wasn’t as honest with him as I’ve been with you. He didn’t get a magic hint-book when we met and bless him, I’m sure he thought I was some sort of back-street saint.”
I hadn’t been tutored by Bunny for nothing. A lot of disparate facts were slotting into place like a reverse explosion — but in particular, why Nevermore had been so forthcoming about his time in a Great War hospital. Of course the SOE would never find a trace of him under any male name we looked for, because when Nevermore staffed Charlie Myers' shell-shock ward, she'd been someone else.
“You were a woman, weren’t you?” I said, as we stood before the window, gazing at the floating squirrel as our breath left twin clouds on the glass. “Male nurses weren’t rife, so before going to Étaples, you took female form. That’s why you were such an asset as a driver — and so useful at rooting out fakers. When you weren't pointing them out to Dr. Myers, I'm sure you played the ministering angel.”
“Reg actually called me that. I was pretty,” he added with a wink. “All right, I was a redhead with tiny perky tits.”
I summoned all the politeness I could field.
“And did it work?”
“Did it my arse. I said to Hell, ‘Lo, I shall trouble the Witchfinder-priest with Thoughts of Lust. Easy-peasy’. When that failed, I switched to ‘I’ll make him doubt God’s love’, which got him working twice as hard. I slipped him a lucky penny for protection, and guess what, Titch? He gave it away. Next time, I waited ‘til he was out of holy biscuits, and miracled the luck on something he’d take into the field with him. Came in handy when he took a bullet.”
Well, that explained the dent, but…
“In base camp? How?”
“Talking a shell-shock case out of eating it. The madman turned the gun on him and shot him right in the pyx. Then, after everyone was over the shock, he fell to his knees and found Jesus, which operationally was a bit of an own goal.”
“Dear Lord,” I said, moved to pity for a fellow handler’s disaster.
“Doubt’s a bust, I told Hell, but I’ll get him with Spiritual Pride. Then the selfless nitwit volunteered for a hospital train, caught a case of typhoid, and carked it.”
“How vexing.”
“I’m not saying I’d never have got Reginald,” mused the demon, in the way a counterintelligence man might reflect on a poor interrogation. “But I could’ve cooked up heaps of trouble in the time I wasted on him.”
That, I realised, was as close as he could get to a moral compliment. Time was short, and I decided to spend as little of it as possible thinking about a redheaded nurse batting her eyelashes at my progenitor.
“Thanks for that,” I said. The demon fiddled in his breast pocket with his new hand, pulled out a pair of dark glasses, and perched them on his nose.
“I should’ve considered he’d keep the pyx as a souvenir. Pranged by the power of a doubter's belief in her Dad,” he added ruefully. “I should also have considered that a hereditary Witchfinder might, just possibly, fall in with other Witchfinders — and give one of them the Luck of the Devil it was a royal pain tricking her into taking in the first place."
I stared out of the window at the suspended squirrel. At a secret I could never un-know.
"Nevermore...gosh, I suppose I should get used to calling you Nak-Hayauda, Serpent of the Forsaken. Unless you've got any other monikers?"
He smiled like someone with several, not all of them fit for human ears. "My friends call me Crowley. Whatcha wanna know?"
“Is stopping time easy for you? It might be the most dangerous skill a spy could possibly have. Is it just another trick?"
“I wish. It's bloody hard, I don’t know how I do it, and ten minutes is about my limit. Less with a passenger. We should go.”
He snapped his fingers. What was left of his old hand turned to dust as the door opened itself, revealing Inspector Curtis, a cloud of breath frozen on his lips.
If you commanded a demon who could stop time, for just a single minute, you could laugh at security protocols, photograph documents, plant time-bombs, and kill without trace. If your servant could also travel down phone lines and override Free Will, no command-chain was safe from the pair of you. No wonder Heinz von Schall had pursued such power; I suspected there were people in the SOE who’d consider the deal.
The demon checked his watch, which clearly still knew the time somewhere. He stuck his head into the corridor (what was he checking for? Were some people miracle-proof?) then beckoned me forward.
I made a stealthy grab for my satchel, with its incriminating note, only to find it wasn’t there. In the space between shutting the door and shaking Nevermore’s hand, someone had made off with it, and I had a shrewd notion who. Ye gods, Bunny was going to find out everything. My goose was not just cooked, but set in aspic with a parsley garnish.
“Where are we going?” Gosh, I sounded calm and reasonable. I was getting to be a pro at this.
“You know what von Schall wants from me. You he forced me to tell him how to bind me to his service. So I suggest we go to your mentor’s lair, and see how close Heinz is getting to London. Last time I got some info, he was somewhere around Dottisley.”
“Last time? How often have you done this?” In the strangest way, the knowledge that a demon had had the run of the place for months, and apparently had informants (I suspected they were smaller than most, and furrier), made me trust him more. If he’d wanted to blow Station XX wide open, he’d had chances aplenty.
“Only twice,” said the modest creature. “Downstairs don't really know about it, and time-stops are murder on the miracle budget. And like I said, no-one loves a headache.”
But you do, I thought, as we stepped into silence. You do love your headache, and his name is Aziraphale.
-----
Some time around my ninth birthday, The Church Widows’ Fund fund took a bunch of deserving kids (and myself) to Madame Tussaud’s. I pretended to be impressed, but privately wondered why everyone giggled and shrieked over things things that had hair and eyelashes and occasionally even human teeth, but weren’t in the slightest bit alive.
Why had I craved more realism? Motionless people turned out to be the most uncanny thing I’d ever seen, and looking at their expressions an invasion of privacy. My agent had no such qualms, taking the corridors at a fast jog and nipping by inches past handlers, translators, radio boffins, and a distraught girl from the typing pool who’d just lost her grip on a stack of papers. I touched the edge of one, and gave myself a papercut.
“Some day you’ll die, human,” remarked the fiend as the the cut healed and the tottering papers righted themselves.
“Say it ain’t so,” I panted as I trotted to keep up with him.
“So it’s vital that when you end up…somewhere, you don’t know too much about the angel,” he added, as we took the sweeping Georgian staircase two steps at a time.
“I understand.”
“You don’t. But understand this: it’s no crime to know one’s Adversary. We’re immortal, of course I know Aziraphale. He’s a bloody great coruscating menace.”
“I’ve seen him in action,” I said, and described the phone-line trick. We vaulted the glossy brogues of Passion Pants Robertson, probably on his way to discuss last night’s antics, heading downstairs and caught mid-stride. For once in my life, I saw what the man looked like when worried out of his mind.
“Ha! I’ve ridden the wires since the Wheatstone telegraph.” We jinked past the hulking frozen form of Inspector Philpott, looking just as dirty and exhausted as Curtis, on his way back from delivering my satchel to Bunny Hopkins. “Glad to know the angel’s keeping up, but that’s chickenfeed, ‘cos — mind that tea-trolley! — a Principality like him is built for defence and twice as strong on home turf. But I don’t like the wanker. Never have, never will.”
“Alles klar,” I said, saved from this awkwardness by the far greater awkwardness of bursting in on my immobilised mentor in our little office, frowning at the satchel which he’d just set down on the desk. Next to it was, of course, a camera, ready to photograph the contents…but now, was that necessary? All I had to do was open my bag, get my dictionary, and extract the comic and the letter. It would surely buy me a few more weeks at St. James’ Street — and for a spy, time is everything. My hand stole towards the buckle.
The demon slapped it away. “Nix on the fixing.”
“You fixed those papers,” I griped, no longer so keen on transparency as when I wrote my letter. Dying in the Cause was one thing. Explaining my membership of the Royal Exorcism Force to the Twenty Committee was quite another.
“That girl was distracted, but Bunny is concentrating. He expects to find the goods on Regina Diceman,” without touching the satchel, Crowley snapped his fingers, and my English-German dictionary appeared in his hand and opened itself, “such as a Brave Letter for Those Who Come After. Or an annotated map — but in someone else’s handwriting,” he inspected it, and whistled through his teeth, “someone who's very smart. Or lastly, my own excursion into publishing. Look, I need you to promise you won’t give Diabolical! to anyone else. Better yet, keep it on you at all times.”
“Because it shows you as a demon?”
“Because it has a reader-detecting miracle on it, which links to my copy, which I keep in a pocket dimension. Don’t look like that, Titch, it’s perfectly hygienic.”
“You’re able to tell when I’m reading it? Oh, God.”
“Had to make sure only you saw the real me,” said His Infernal Smugness. “Let anyone else read it, and they’ll see someone else. If I pause the miracle a sec — ”
He flipped to the first episode, ending with Von Schall fleeing a rat-swarm — in hindsight, a clue as obvious as it was fantastical — then to the diabolist’s dispute on the ocean liner, and I saw it was true. Von Schall’s face was the same, but the ‘demon’ was generically handsome, and the diabolist’s objection was to green eyes, and not red hair.
I bucked myself up by the reflection that Heinz von Schall was trying to remortgage his soul for such powers.
“I’ll keep it close.”
He gave my Diabolical! back to me, read my letter to the St. Brides Witchfinders in seconds, then turned his attention to Peter Ffolkes’ map. He spent a good half-minute on that, muttering over the 'haunted' churches: St. Mary’s in Porcroft Green, All Saints’ in Weath, and St. Vincent’s in Dottisley. Then he dabbed a finger to the paper, and licked it.
“Someone’s got brains, a mimeograph, and some map stencils. That boy at Barts had a printer’s manicure, and so did his mate — and even in a trance, Titch, you didn’t tell me about them. I smell angelic interference.” He looked reproachful. “Are you working for Upstairs and Downstairs? ‘Cos that’s the worst idea since the radium jockstrap.”
I unpacked some of the truth. The fact that Narker and Ffolkes were not just Witchfinders, but Aziraphale-sponsored Witchfinders, was an irony that seemed to amuse the demon. My suspicions about the forgery operation clearly shook him. I kept hovering in the air the question of who, exactly, I was working for. I was working for Crowley, of course, and the British Government. No-one else.
“But Aziraphale still made sure you couldn’t accidentally tell anyone about this. Which means that whatever he’s planning, it’s important. Do those jokers know the truth about your ‘sponsor’?”
“They do not. And he’s their sponsor, not mine.” Christ, how I hoped all those statements were true. Had Aziraphale had ever given me cash, or anything that could be miraculous? He’d said something about ‘every witchfinder being worthy of his hire’, but hadn’t I scrupulously paid for the yellow lupins and the Ottwell Binns paperbacks? His crate of books had been for Mother’s evacuees, I’d phoned Heaven on Ffolkes’ behalf, not my own, and though I suspected the angel was in cahoots with the REF to forge a work of prophecy, I hadn’t seen more than a typeset fragment of it. Surely, I was clean. Not at all a human double agent for Heaven and Hell.
“May I remind you that you picked on me because I'm a hereditary Witchfinder. Regardless of who they’re working for, other Witchfinders are drawn to me, unless it's the other way round. It’d be more surprising if I hadn’t run into any.”
“Your protégé is exhibiting signs of hubris,” the demon stage-whispered into Bunny’s ear. "I approve."
I ignored this. “Also, Narker and Ffolkes think I work for some boring bureau and if you meet them again, I’d like it to stay that way. But should I die, the SOE will recruit them without revealing my connection to you. Don’t underestimate them, they’re hot on the trail of your rat detectives. They know they're on a mission, and they know the creatures can read.”
“Yeah, but their spelling’s atrocious.”
“This might be the moment to tell me what they’re after. They’ve chewed half the hassocks in London.”
He tucked my note and the map back into my dictionary, then snapped his fingers, sending it back into the still-fastened satchel.
“Supplies, of course. Holy ground makes it hard for me to know where Heinz is, but he can’t conjure up food and if even if he miraculously evades human notice to buy or steal some, there’s no hiding the fact the stuff is gone. Maybe he's got a bike for emergency moves — I'd have a folding one, if I was him — but he can't rely on it. He must have at least a sleeping-bag and a change of clothes. Ergo, people must be bringing supplies, helping him move, and picking up tip-offs as to where he’s going next."
"If he's the agent we think he is, he's got a radio transmitter."
Crowley nodded. "Makes sense. My rats have been brute-force searching for him, but they’ve always been a few steps behind. But maybe, if we put together everything we know, we can get the drop on the bastard before its too late.”
I silently apologised to Bunny Hopkins, frozen in the act of trying to defend me from my wilder decisions. The beard he’d trimmed to play chauffeur was getting wizardy again, a pencil-stub was tucked behind his ear, and one of his white shirt-buttons was sewn on with khaki thread. Even in an outfit like the SOE he was a born outsider, and the person in St. James’ Street to whom I was most dog-loyal.
“On to the plundering of vital intelligence?” I asked.
“Come on, Agent Tyche. You know you want to.”
-----
By human standards, Bunny's corkboard was a triumph of ingenuity. By infernal standards, I feared it looked quaint. No rational person could be expected to conclude that diabolism was a very practical science, and that not taking it seriously was a security loophole, but bless the man, he’d tried. On the upper right were Morse transmissions intercepted by our MI5 listening station in Barnet and its network of triangulation vans, some of them decoded, most not. Below that was a map of South-East England, with village names circled in green, and what looked like snippets razored from the pages of a church guide. Bottom left, there was a map of London, this time annotated with X's in blue. Some of the place-names I knew well, but others were gnomic. Abney Park, of course, and Old Paradise Gardens near Milton Motors, but why was a back-to-back terrace across the street from the garage labelled 'Parsley', and adorned with the biggest X of all? Finally, at the top left, the Great Hopkins had refined his search for the cut-out for Operation Parsifal: the person who we'd hoped would try to unearth a station-locker ticket, wrapped in oilskin, from the grave of Lydia Northrop in Abney Park, in the hope of redeeming it for the stolen Nanteos Cup, which naturally (since the burglar had been Agent Nevermore) was not there. That person might have passed by, but they'd never gone as far as trying to peel back the turf, and we'd assumed that since we'd had a lot of trouble keeping yellow flowers on the grave, they'd never seen the pre-arranged signal to collect the ticket.
All the candidates Gog and Magog had only photographed once when the grave was unadorned — including, thankfully, Aziraphale — had been eliminated, along with everyone who'd seen the flowers, but failed to investigate the grave. The only ones left were of Julian Glozier, scholarly heir to a boot-polish fortune, and Maud Whelan, favourite fabric-runner of a Nazi sympathiser, the White Russian couturier Anna de Wolkoff. More digging had clearly been done into both their backgrounds. An uncle of Maud's had been in the Fianna Éireann3 and later fought in the Easter Rising, which was interesting but not conclusive, and Mr. Glozier had dropped his Bronze Age researches and was trying his hand at A History of the English Landscape, which by the accounts of several London publishers was dryer than a Pharaoh's sock.
“And who might these be?” asked Crowley, stabbing their portraits with spread fingers.
“The only people who repeatedly passed within eyeballing distance of the Northrop grave, while you’d gone AWOL. Thanks to what I presume was your interference, sometimes yellow flowers were on it, and sometimes they weren’t. If it wasn’t for you,” I added with a glare, “Bunny might actually know who the cut-out is by now.”
The demon was unabashed.
“And von Schall would know that we know. Die Überprüfung der Geheime Wissenschaften might not realise the Nanteos grail is Medieval, but you know who would? Heinz. That Welsh job had to be his way of getting me out of London. The last thing I needed was the SOE grabbing one of his people and letting him know you lot were on to him.”
“His people? More than one?”
He shrugged. “He needs an innocent, a lover, and a traitor. The innocent he’ll have to source locally, but even a diabolist can’t make someone he hasn’t met fall love with him. As for the traitor? Ordinarily, not easy. In wartime? Fifth Columnists all over the shop. Let's do the girl first. What are Maud Whelan's claims to fame?”
“Since we've been watching her, she’s only done one notable thing: she secretly got engaged to a tailor on Savile Row. But her uncle in the Fianna did six months in prison," I read out from Bunny's pinned notes, "which means he can't easily enter England without our police clocking him. But he might have paid his niece's way to London.”
The demon shook his head. “Even if all that supposition was true, she’s not the cut-out. It has to be the Englishman...Glozier? Julian Glozier. If Bunny is as clever as you say, it has to be him.”
I felt the blood rush to my face.
"Look here, Nevermore - Crowley - the Irish would cheer to see us burn4, and she’s the pet of a White Russian who belongs to the Right Club. A perfect tool for the Abwehr.”
“But not for von Schall. He needs three specific victims, so if she’s helping him, she’s one of them. And unless you can come up with a sequence of events that leads to an ancient evil German meeting a Galway girl, Maud can’t be his lover, so that would make her the traitor. An Irish nationalist who spies for the Reich might be many things, but would you say she was a traitor?
Reluctantly, I shook my head. “It's a fair point. But why can’t she be the innocent?”
He looked at me like you might regard someone who has, in good faith, suggested we can’t discount that the moon might be made of cheese. Then he started talking fast, as if it was now or never.
“Because Aziraphale’s incapable of sin. Also, because there’s not much I’d like less than my Adversary getting killed by some terminally keen Kraut trying to shanghai me into a blood pact. Look, I don’t like the angel, but you know what I do enjoy? Thwarting him. Making his life Hell is the perfect job. That sort-of makes it metaphysically inevitable it’ll be him, I could draw you a six-axis curse graph but you wouldn’t understand. Weird thing about being a demon: it’s not so bad on a day-to-day basis. Cash, fame, sex, power, snap your fingers and you have it, but it’s vital you don’t want it, ‘cos — ” he took a deep breath as if he needed it. We were getting near what Hamlet would have called ‘the rub’.
“Because anything you want, you’ll lose?” I offered. “Sounds like Hell.”
A snort. “Dead wrong there. Ichor down the walls, that’s Hell’s scene. Sin-wise, I fit in better with you lot. You’re a misotheist and they’re always fun, Passion Pants is vain even by my standards, and Bunny here — he blipped his hand before my mentor’s unseeing eyes — is the sort of smart-arse who loves to know everyone else’s secrets, and give away none of his own.”
“That’s his job,” I gritted. Bunny would rather stroll naked through St. James’ Park than have his investigations picked over like this.
“Isn’t it just.” He patted the motionless man on his shoulder. “So far, he’s been working with one hand behind his back. But if I'm right, and we can eliminate Maud, then we might know two out of von Schall's three: the innocent, and the traitor. But not the lover. To do that, I'll need all the help MI5 can give. I'll need your Twenty Committee to believe in diabolism, Titch, and I need them to do it soon.”
"Now? After a year and a half of buggering us about, now seems the right time to reveal yourself?”
“You nitwit, I don't need them to believe I’m a demon; I need them to believe in diabolism. Make them believe that there’s something to these books of prophecy von Schall wants so badly. Make them believe that he’s going to try the ritual. Make them fear what might happen if it works, ‘cos God knows I do. And I can make a chosen minion — that’s you, by the way — persuasive as all Hell. ”
"A chosen minion?" Every Witchfinder corpuscle in my veins lit up with indignation. “Jesus Christ.”
“Wouldn’t hurt if they believed in him too. Just not, you know, in me.”
Not for the first time, I was furious with ‘Nevermore’. Not for the first time, I marvelled at his ability to balance absurd risk with keen self-preservation. It would be bad for Britain if the Twenty Committee didn’t know that Heinz von Schall planned to bind a demon to his will, but calamitous for Crowley if they knew the demon was their own agent. Even if the Committee did nothing rash (such as, for example, researching the topic of Holy Water), they couldn’t avoid knowing Nevermore had refused a pact with a diabolist who’d be a feather in any demon’s cap. Or that he was anxious that a certain angel’s blood shouldn’t seal the deal. The Twenty Committee comprised two dozen mortal souls: a sword of Damocles over his head and Aziraphale’s for the next eighty years. No, he could never risk scores of humans knowing the truth about A. J. Crowley.
Just me, who knew as much about him as anyone, more even than Heinz von Schall. Just me, whose credo was: a) that like it or not, the paranormal appeared to exist, and b) that a God who approved the current state of humanity was what our American friends would term A Piece of Work.
“Crowley, suppose I somehow convince the Twenty Committee that while Von Schall’s hunting for prophecies, he’s also planning triple murder, because he really believes in this. Suppose that Aziraphale turns out to be one of the chosen three. Can the awful man even harm him? And if he succeeds, will it work?”
The demon turned to face me. Took his glasses off. His eyes weren’t barley-sugar any more, but saffron-gold.
“When angels and demons seem human, parts of us believe we’re human — though if you’re a demon, a few bits can get missed,” he added with a yellow wink. “Those parts are called corporations, and they can bleed and die. You can get re-incorporated, of course. After twenty years of blessed questionnaires.”
“I see.” Reader, I didn’t, but this was no time for metaphysics. I checked the first installment of Diabolical! for the rite’s requirements. “It says ‘an adult of genuinely pure heart’. Does an angel — I can’t think of a politer way to put this — does Aziraphale technically count as an adult?”
Crowley’s unguarded cackle swept me back to the first time I’d met him, in this very room, perched on a chair with an ankle crossed on one knee.
“If we get out of this, he is never going to live that down. But what would you say about someone who’s older than this planet, but gives hardened mobsters three strikes and a secondhand paperback?”
“That he should know better,” I said at once. “Or he does know better, but doesn’t let that stop him.”
“What are the chances the other two candidates are less good? If Heinz pulls this off, I’ll have to serve him. And no spy on Earth will be able to stop us.”
“All right. I can’t promise I won’t end up in the loony hatch, but I’ll give it my very best shot.”
1. The true identity of this notorious ‘Ace of Spies’ was still a mystery in 1940, but at the time of writing, we know his patronymic was probably Rosenblum, and he was born in Odessa in either 1873 or 1874. return
2. The ancient nickname of Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital, Smithfield. return
3. The Fianna Éireann: a youth organisation founded in 1909 as an Irish version of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts; like many such clubs, they soon turned into a recruiting-ground. Members fought in the Anglo-Irish war, and in the Irish civil war that followed Partition in 1921, after which they were sometimes a permitted group under Irish law, but more often a proscribed one. By the late 1930's, their numbers were small. return
4. Reader, I will not sugar-coat my remarks here. In 1939, the run-up to the Declaration of War was punctuated by the explosions of the S-plan, a bombing campaign in England orchestrated by the Irish Republican Army, which caught the attention of the Abwehr. The Germans' hope of recruiting significant numbers of Irish agents proved fruitless — but in 1940, we didn’t know that. Though the S-Plan failed to alter the government’s stance on Ireland, it succeeded in one respect: throughout the War, everyone in British counter-intelligence was deeply paranoid about Irish people in mainland Britain. It wasted a lot of our time. return
Notes:
EXCESSIVELY COPIOUS NOTATIONS:
1. Okay, on a scale of Ouch Ouch Ouch to Permadeath, how dangerous is Holy Water/Wafers to demons?
The scene where Reggie might manage to harm Crowley, due to her faith in her father who was a strong believer, was one of the first bits of this fic I wrote. I still don't quite know how to handle Holy Stuff (or indeed, Hellfire) in Good Omens, but I've settled on some combo of 'weapon's degree of holiness' and 'wielder's intent to do damage'.
2. Reggie's openness about the Witchfinder Army...
... is not quite congruent with the book or TV series, in which Crowley and Aziraphale are comically oblivious that there's only one surviving WA squad, and they both sponsor it, until they get to the Air Base. But the book isn't consistent on this point either: Book Aziraphale and Book Crowley are ruefully aware of the possibility of recruiting the same people— when they list up six human political contacts, three are indeed working for both Heaven and Hell — and when Shadwell turns out to know both of them, they don't seem surprised. So I think it’s likely, especially as numbers dwindled, that Shadwell was hardly the first Witchfinder who carried out missions for both Mr. Crowley and Mr. Fell, and if our dynamic duo suspected anything, they were disinclined to bring it up.
3. The radium jockstrap: yup, it pretty much did exist.
4. 'The Irish would cheer to see us burn.'
In the course of working out why Bunny would neglect Glozier in favour of a seemingly more likely Irish candidate, a detail not at all important to the plot, I wrote myself a mini essay on Ireland in WWII which no-one is under any obligation to read, but here it is:
Reggie's harsh assumption is congruent with her social background, and what she says about the IRA S-Plan/Sabotage Plan of 1939-40 is true: it went on for 11 months in England, killed 10, and injured 96. In the wake of the Irish War of Independence, the Partition, and the Irish Civil War, England was (not for the first time) despised as maker of promises it wouldn't keep. The majority of the Irish population backed neutrality when WWII broke out, but people who wanted Germany to win weren't rare.
The WWII period is known as 'The Emergency' in Ireland for good reasons, and BBC Bitesize has a decent summary of how its government juggled their fragile neutral status. Éamon de Valera, the Irish Prime Minister who loathed the English and notoriously offered the German Embassy condolences on Hitler's death, also headed the government that allowed British airmen who baled out over his country to escape to Northern Ireland, but interned any German ones. My rough conclusion: performative acts of neutrality went to the Axis, but any actual assistance went (very quietly) to the Allies, along with 70,000 Irish volunteers whose decision to fight against Britain's enemy was more conflicted than for any other nation, and thousands of Irish women who worked in munitions, a dangerous and toxic job.
As far as espionage goes? By the start of 1941, Bunny and Reggie would be grossly overestimating the likelihood of Germany recruiting effective Irish agents, and ignorant of how far the Irish government was prepared to go against the Abwehr in secret. There were IRA members who were willing to work with Germany in the hope that if Britain lost WWII, a united Ireland would emerge, but there were also Unionists who reckoned that Hitler was out to get what he could from Ireland in terms of harrying Britain, and saw them as pawns. G2, the Irish counter-intelligence bureau, caught all 13 German spies sent into Ireland, and had its own cryptographic one-man army, the genius librarian Richard J. Hayes.
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