Eye of the Needle(24)

“So what happened here?”

“Damned if I know.”

Harris looked at the wound in the agent’s chest. “Stiletto?”

“Something like that. A very neat job. Under the ribs and straight up into the heart. Quick. Would you like to see the method of entry?”

He led them downstairs to the kitchen. They looked at the window-frame and the unbroken pane of glass lying on the lawn.

Canter said, “Also, the lock on the bedroom door had been picked.”

They sat down at the kitchen table, and Canter made tea. Bloggs said, “It happened the night after I lost him in Leicester Square. I fouled it all up.”

Harris said, “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

They drank their tea in silence for a while. Harris said, “How are things with you, anyway? You don’t drop in at the Yard.”

“Busy.”

“How’s Christine?”

“Killed in the bombing.”

Harris’s eyes widened. “You poor bastard.”

“You all right?”

“Lost my brother in North Africa. Did you ever meet Johnny?”

“No.”

“He was a lad. Drink? You’ve never seen anything like it. Spent so much on booze, he could never afford to get married—which is just as well, the way things turned out.”

“Most have lost somebody, I guess.”

“If you’re on your own, come round our place for dinner on Sunday.”

“Thanks, I work Sundays now.”

Harris nodded. “Well, whenever you feel like it.”

A detective-constable poked his head around the door and addressed Harris. “Can we start bagging-up the evidence, guv?”

Harris looked at Bloggs.

“I’ve finished,” Bloggs said.

“All right, son, carry on,” Harris told him.

Bloggs said, “Suppose he made contact after I lost him, and arranged for the resident agent to come here. The resident may have suspected a trap—that would explain why he came in through the window and picked the lock.”

“It makes him a devilish suspicious bastard,” Harris observed.

“That might be why we’ve never caught him. Anyway, he gets into Blondie’s room and wakes him up. Now he knows it isn’t a trap, right?”

“Right.”

“So why does he kill Blondie?”

“Maybe they quarreled.”

“There were no signs of a struggle.”

Harris frowned into his empty cup. “Perhaps he realized that Blondie was being watched and he was afraid we’d pick the boy up and make him spill the beans.”

Bloggs said, “That makes him a ruthless bastard.”

“That, too, might be why we’ve never caught him.”





“COME IN. SIT DOWN. I’ve just had a call from MI6. Canaris has been fired.”

Bloggs went in, sat down, and said, “Is that good news or bad?”

“Very bad,” said Godliman. “It’s happened at the worst possible moment.”

“Do I get told why?”

Godliman looked at him intently, then said, “I think you need to know. At this moment we have forty double agents broadcasting to Hamburg false information about Allied plans for the invasion of France.”

Bloggs whistled. “I didn’t know it was quite that big. I suppose the doubles say we’re going in at Cherbourg, but really it will be Calais, or vice versa.”

“Something like that. Apparently I don’t need to know the details. Anyway they haven’t told me. However, the whole thing is in danger. We knew Canaris; we knew we had him fooled; we felt we could have gone on fooling him. A new broom may mistrust his predecessor’s agents. There’s more—we’ve had some defections from the other side, people who could have betrayed the Abwehr’s people over here if they hadn’t been betrayed already. It’s another reason for the Germans to begin to suspect our doubles.

“Then there’s the possibility of a leak. Literally thousands of people now know about the double-cross system. There are doubles in Iceland, Canada, and Ceylon. We ran a double-cross in the Middle East.

“And we made a bad mistake last year by repatriating a German called Erich Carl. We later learned he was an Abwehr agent—a real one—and that while he was in internment on the Isle of Man he may have learned about two doubles, Mutt and Jeff, and possibly a third called Tate.

“So we’re on thin ice. If one decent Abwehr agent in Britain gets to know about Fortitude—that’s the code name for the deception plan—the whole strategy will be endangered. Not to mince words, we could lose the f*cking war.”

Bloggs suppressed a smile—he could remember a time when Professor Godliman did not know the meaning of such words.

The professor went on, “The Twenty Committee has made it quite clear that they expect me to make sure there aren’t any decent Abwehr agents in Britain.”

“Last week we would have been quite confident that there weren’t,” Bloggs said.

“Now we know there’s at least one.”

“And we let him slip through our fingers.”

“So now we have to find him again.”