The Second Midnight. Andrew Taylor

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СКАЧАТЬ of the Anschluss by this time. The problem was that no one there had any interest in Farrar; they had no reason to disbelieve the official story, and hence no reason to investigate it. In 1939, few people in the service were aware that SIS was operating in tandem with a changeling half-brother called Z.

      Eventually Michael was able to consult the Vienna police file, though that was useful more for what it omitted than for what it included. According to the civil police, George Farrar died around midnight in room 47 of the Hotel Franz Josef on the Plosslgasse. The body was found the following morning by the chambermaid. Farrar was fully dressed and lying supine on his bed; there were cherry-pink patches on his skin. The gas was on but unlit, and the cracks around the door and the window had been clumsily sealed with newspapers and towels. The chambermaid turned off the gas and fetched the manager; the manager called the police.

      The police found the remains of a bottle of brandy, an empty glass, the room key and a scrap of paper on the bedside table. Four English words had been scrawled in pencil on the paper: I can’t go on. There was no reason to doubt that they had been written by the dead man, though the only standards of comparison were a few notes in Farrar’s order book and his entry in the hotel register.

      Further investigation showed that Farrar’s financial affairs were in a bad way. The manager and the chambermaid testified that Herr Farrar had seemed distraught and depressed. Another witness came forward – a public-spirited Bavarian tourist, who claimed to have met Farrar in a café on the Ringstrasse a few hours before he died. According to the obliging Bavarian, Farrar had been drunk and talking of suicide; he blamed his problems on the international Jewish conspiracy.

      Michael didn’t dispute the evidence in the police file, except perhaps the testimonies about Farrar’s state of mind. Of course it was curious that no one had thought to test the body for traces of cyanide – for cyanide, like carbon monoxide, left patches of lividity on a corpse. It was curious but not necessarily significant. The Viennese police sent Farrar’s belongings to the British Embassy, which transmitted them to Worthing. They were itemized with Teutonic thoroughness on the file – right down to Handkerchiefs, 6, Pair of Glasses (Broken) and Book Entitled The Black Gang by Sapper.

      But someone had been careless: there was no mention of a pencil.

      Z Organization had a man in Vienna – indeed, William McQueen had intended to contact Farrar on the Thursday to pick up the gold. McQueen’s cover was at risk, but he made cautious enquiries after Farrar’s death. He found a waiter from the Franz Josef who admitted, when suitably primed with alcohol, that something odd had gone on that night. The manager had taken over the receptionist’s evening shift. There was a rumour among the staff that two men from the Hotel Metropole had been seen in the Franz Josef on Wednesday night.

      The Hotel Metropole was the Vienna headquarters of the Gestapo.

      The gold was no longer among Farrar’s belongings, but that was only to be expected. Uncle Claude and everyone else drew the obvious inference: the Gestapo had somehow identified Farrar as a courier; they had killed him and taken the gold. The fact that they had killed him – rather than used him as bait – suggested that they already knew for whom the gold was intended. Perhaps Farrar had talked before he died. As a result, Uncle Claude decided his resources were better used elsewhere: McQueen was transferred to Basel, and the Z network in Vienna never amounted to much.

      The real irony only became apparent years later, when Michael was interrogating a Gestapo officer who had made something of a name for himself in wartime Holland. Knowing that his prisoner had previously served in Vienna, Michael threw in a question about the Farrar affair.

      The officer, who was in the talkative, confiding phase of his interrogation, remembered it well, because of the gold. Farrar, it seemed, had been a womanizer whose bravado was in inverse proportion to his height. On the Tuesday night he had quarrelled with a man he believed to be a German tourist. The cause of the dispute was the favours of a prostitute; and the scene of it was that bar on the Ringstrasse. Farrar had won.

      The following evening, the plainclothes man and a colleague had paid a visit to the Franz Josef, intending merely to teach Farrar a lesson. Farrar was out, but the manager gave them a passkey to his room. While they were waiting, they discovered the gold concealed in his suitcase. The presence of undeclared gold marks worth nearly a thousand pounds sterling didn’t suggest to the two policemen that Farrar was engaged in espionage. Why should it have done? In those days, plenty of people were trying to move hard currency out of Austria for the most personal of reasons, and foreigners, with their relative freedom to cross the frontiers of the Reich, were often used for the purpose.

      On balance, it was safer to kill Farrar if they wanted to take the gold. The manager of the Franz Josef was persuaded to cooperate; he didn’t want to lose his job and possibly his liberty. The officers had to give Michael’s captive a percentage of the proceeds, because his authority was needed to ensure that the civil police drew the right conclusions.

      The police did as they were told. It was, they were informed, a political matter which concerned the security of the Reich. And there was the irony: the lie was perfectly true.

      George Farrar was murdered in Vienna on the 15 February 1939: that was the beginning of Michael’s pattern.

      It was an arbitrary choice, yes: but at least it made the whole affair seem personal – and therefore easier to bear. It showed that affairs of state were ultimately dependent on the motives and actions of apparently insignificant individuals. What happened after Farrar’s death was made somehow more intelligible by the idea that it could be traced back to the greed of two secret policemen, the whim of a Viennese whore and the libido of a commercial traveller in toys.

       One

      The ivory ruler snapped in two as it hit the top of the desk. Three inches of it ricocheted off the polished oak and landed on Hugh’s shoe. He jumped backward. The remaining nine inches stayed in Alfred Kendall’s hand.

      His father’s knuckles, Hugh noticed, were the same colour as the ruler.

      Alfred Kendall turned slowly in his chair. He was still dressed in his City clothes, which lent an odd formality to the proceedings.

      ‘Do you mean to tell me that the headmaster is lying?’

      ‘No, Father.’ Hugh’s hands clenched behind his back. His body was treacherously determined to tremble. ‘Mr Jervis was mistaken. I—’

      ‘Don’t lie to me, boy. I’ve known Mr Jervis for a good ten years. He isn’t a fool.’ Kendall tapped the letter in front of him. ‘Nor is he the sort of man to fling around wild accusations.’

      Hugh’s vision blurred. ‘I didn’t do it.’

      The words came out more loudly than he had intended. For a moment his father stared contemptuously at him. Hugh tried to look away. It was almost with relief that he saw his father begin to gnaw his lower lip with a long, yellow tooth. This was almost invariably a preliminary to speech.

      ‘Never did I think I should read such a letter about a son of mine.’ Kendall’s voice hardened. ‘You don’t seem to realize that you’ve brought shame on the entire family.’

      Hugh shrugged. It was a gesture of discomfort, not insolence, but his father interpreted it otherwise. Kendall’s slap caught Hugh unawares: he reeled back against the table.

      ‘That,’ his father said slowly, ‘is just a foretaste of what you should expect. Don’t snivel. СКАЧАТЬ