Eye of the Needle(25)

“I don’t know,” Bloggs said gloomily. “We don’t know what part of the country he’s operating from, we haven’t the faintest idea what he looks like. He’s too crafty to be pinpointed by triangulation while he’s transmitting—otherwise we would have nabbed him long ago. We don’t even know his code name. So where do we start?”

“Unsolved crimes,” said Godliman. “Look—a spy is bound to break the law. He forges papers, he steals petrol and ammunition, he evades checkpoints, he enters restricted areas, he takes photographs, and when people rumble him he kills them. The police are bound to get to know of some of these crimes if the spy has been operating for any length of time. If we go through the unsolved crimes files since the war, we’ll find traces.”

“Don’t you realize that most crimes are unsolved?” Bloggs said incredulously. “The files would fill the Albert Hall!”

Godliman shrugged. “So, we narrow it down to London, and we start with murders.”





THEY FOUND what they were looking for on the very first day of their search. It happened to be Godliman who came across it, and at first he did not realize its significance.

It was the file on the murder of a Mrs. Una Garden in High-gate in 1940. Her throat had been cut and she had been sexually molested, although not raped. She had been found in the bedroom of her lodger, with considerable alcohol in her bloodstream. The picture was fairly clear: she had had a tryst with the lodger, he had wanted to go farther than she was prepared to let him, they had quarreled, he had killed her, and the murder had neutralized his libido. But the police had never found the lodger.

Godliman had been about to pass over the file—spies did not get involved in sexual assaults. But he was a meticulous man with records, so he read every word, and consequently discovered that the unfortunate Mrs. Garden had received stiletto wounds in her back as well as the fatal wound to her throat.

Godliman and Bloggs were on opposite sides of a wooden table in the records room at Old Scotland Yard. Godliman tossed the file across the table and said, “I think this is it.”

Bloggs glanced through it and said, “The stiletto.”

They signed for the file and walked the short distance to the War Office. When they returned to Godliman’s room, there was a decoded signal on his desk. He read it casually, then thumped the table in excitement. “It’s him!”

Bloggs read: “Orders received. Regards to Willi.”

“Remember him?” Godliman said. “Die Nadel?”

“Yes,” Bloggs said hesitantly. “The Needle. But there’s not much information here.”

“Think, think! A stiletto is like a needle. It’s the same man: the murder of Mrs. Garden, all those signals in 1940 that we couldn’t trace, the rendezvous with Blondie…”

“Possibly.” Bloggs looked thoughtful.

“I can prove it,” Godliman said. “Remember the transmission about Finland that you showed me the first day I came here? The one that was interrupted?”

“Yes.” Bloggs went to the file to find it.

“If my memory serves me well, the date of that transmission is the same as the date of this murder…and I’ll bet the time of death coincides with the interruption.”

Bloggs looked at the signal in the file. “Right both times.”

“There!”

“He’s been operating in London for at least five years, and it’s taken us until now to get on to him,” Bloggs reflected. “He won’t be easy to catch.”

Godliman suddenly looked wolfish. “He may be clever, but he’s not as clever as me,” he said tightly. “I am going to nail him to the f*cking wall.”

Bloggs laughed out loud. “My God, you’ve changed, Professor.”

Godliman said, “Do you realize that’s the first time you’ve laughed for a year?”





9




THE SUPPLY BOAT ROUNDED THE HEADLAND AND chugged into the bay at Storm Island under a blue sky. There were two women in it: one was the skipper’s wife—he had been called up and now she ran the business—and the other was Lucy’s mother.

Mother got out of the boat wearing a utility suit, a mannish jacket and an above-the-knee skirt. Lucy hugged her mightily.

“Mother! What a surprise!”

“But I wrote to you.”

The letter was with the mail on the boat; Mother had forgotten that the post only came once a fortnight on Storm Island.

“Is this my grandson? Isn’t he a big boy?”

Little Jo, almost three years old, turned bashful and hid behind Lucy’s skirt. He was dark-haired, pretty, and tall for his age.

Mother said: “Isn’t he like his father!”

“Yes,” Lucy said. “You must be freezing—come up to the house. Where did you get that skirt?”

They picked up the groceries and began to walk up the ramp to the cliff top. Mother chattered as they went. “It’s the fashion, dear. It saves on material. But it isn’t as cold as this on the mainland. Such a wind! I suppose it’s all right to leave my case on the jetty—nobody to steal it! Jane is engaged to an American soldier—a white one, thank God. He comes from a place called Milwaukee, and he doesn’t chew gum. Isn’t that nice? I’ve only got four more daughters to marry off now. Your father is a Captain in the Home Guard, did I tell you? He’s up half the night patrolling the common waiting for German parachutists. Uncle Stephen’s warehouse was bombed—I don’t know what he’ll do, it’s an Act of War or something—”