‘A woman,’ Ulhurt sounded surprised that Steinhauer even needed to ask. ‘A good woman. Preferably black. Black is the fashionable colour at the moment, I mourn for my leg.’
That evening, a henchman brought a tall, fine-looking mulatto girl to the clinic. She came from the Alexander-Platz area in a closed car with the blinds down, and returned there in the early hours of the morning – with enough money to take a couple of days off. The male nurses reported to Steinhauer that their patient performed well, and made an extra effort during the following day.
Within thirty-six hours, Steinhauer returned to the clinic and sought out Ulhurt in his room. The huge sailor lay on his bed, and Steinhauer – his head reeling with devious decisions – pulled a chair close to Ulhurt.
‘You are to start,’ he announced, quietly, as though someone might be listening.
‘English sailors?’ Ulhurt grinned with crooked pleasure.
‘I fear not. Not yet. Something has happened. Serious, and you are the only man I trust to do the job.’
Ulhurt stared at him, eyes dull.
‘Together,’ Steinhauer continued, ‘we live in a land of shadows, my friend. Secrets are sometimes not kept. We have an agent who works here in Berlin – no need for names.’ He glanced, nervously, at the door. ‘This agent has acted in a treacherous way – working for us, while giving the appearance of working for another country. We arranged this, so that the country concerned should be given false information…’
‘What country?’ It sounded very important to Ulhurt.
‘England.’
The sailor smiled, and Steinhauer continued. ‘It has been discovered this agent has, in fact, been passing useful – correct – intelligence to the British.’
‘So.’
Steinhauer glanced around again. He seemed particularly agitated. ‘You see, it is my fault. If the agent is questioned, my head will be on the block – is there need to explain more?’
‘You’re in the shit, unless…’ Ulhurt smiled happily.
‘It’s a way of putting it, yes,’ Steinhauer nodded. ‘Unless this person is silenced. Unfortunately my superiors are already suspicious. The agent lives in a small, cheap apartment over the Pschorrbrau – the beerhouse off Friedrichstrasse, on the corner of Behrenstrasse. Number 165. Apartment 4, on the second floor. You get to it through the beerhouse, or the private door round the corner in Behrenstrasse. You know the area?’
‘Well enough.’ Ulhurt’s eyes had lost their dullness. ‘You want me…?’
‘You’ll be rewarded well. A quick, professional job. Quiet. Just go to the apartment at seven o’clock tonight – the agent is expecting one of my men. Just kill.’
‘Leave it to me.’
Steinhauer fiddled with his hands, still looking nervous. ‘There is one small problem,’ he hesitated. ‘The place is being watched. You must get in and out without being spotted. Heaven knows, we’ve taught you…’
‘Don’t worry. Seven o’clock.’
‘I’ll be waiting here for you. For your return.’
At half-past six that night, Ulhurt limped his way into the busy beerhouse on the Friedrichstrasse. The tables were full, and pretty girls performed intricate choreography around the customers, holding four, sometimes five, foaming steins of beer.
Ulhurt found a place, called for a stein of the Kulmach beer, for which the place was famous, and began to drink. He spent nearly twenty-five minutes taking in the scene and in particular watching the archway that led to the stairs, and so to the apartments.
At five minutes to seven, he paid for his beer, rose and headed for the stairs. In the few remaining minutes, he discovered the way down to the other exit – an ill-lit passage, with stairs leading to the street door which opened onto the Behrenstrasse.
There were only four apartments above the beerhouse – two to each floor – their large doors grimy and in need of paint. Certainly, Ulhurt thought, these would be cheap places. Outside the door marked Number 4, he slid a hand into his pocket, pulled on a pair of thick gloves and removed the piano wire from inside his coat. Winding the two ends around his wrists he reached for the knocker, tapped three times softly, and then dropped his hands, holding them together.
For a second he was surprised when he saw the agent who opened the door to him. It was the mulatto girl they had brought to the clinic for him. She wore only a thin silky robe, through which her dark enticement clearly showed.
‘Well! Come in.’ She seemed pleased to see him. After all, Ulhurt was exceptionally satisfying, even to a whore. She opened the door, and, without any hesitation, Ulhurt kicked it closed behind him, turned her around, slipped the wire over her head and killed her without a sound. It was done in seconds, and the mulatto did not cry out.
He lowered her body to the carpet, left the piano wire embedded around her lovely neck, and let himself out, onto the landing.
There were not many people about in Behrenstrasse, and Ulhurt did not pause to see if he could spot a police watcher. He moved with speed, limping along in the direction of the nearest Stadtbahn station.
He had gone five paces when he detected movement, men closing in from behind, and to the side. As far as he could see there were four of them, coming at him fast.
Ulhurt ducked down the first alley to his right – narrow, dark, and with a light at the far end, bracketed high to the wall. With his training, he could take all four if they were foolish enough to follow.
They were stupid, two of them coming at a rush, one shouting for him to stop.
Ulhurt turned, braced himself against the wall, tripped the first man and heeled him, between the leg, with his one good foot. The other, a small pudgy fellow, walked straight into the sailor’s rocklike fist and went down with a dreadful silence.
The other two were calling, but they had only just reached the alley. Smiling, Ulhurt decided he had time to get clear. He found he could walk very fast when it was necessary and had almost reached the far end of the alley when a figure stepped into the pool of light thrown by the lamp attached to the wall.
The first thing Ulhurt saw was a pistol held in the man’s hand. He calculated that he could not reach the pistol in time. They would shoot him down. Well, he would go fighting. He gave a terrifying roar and started to launch himself forward, when Steinhauer’s voice cut through the night. ‘You just passed the test. I would have been almost too frightened to use this thing.’ He returned the pistol to his pocket, and Ulhurt stood, staring at him, not knowing whether to be furious, or to laugh.
‘I had to know how you would behave,’ Steinhauer told him later. ‘If you would kill to order, no matter who it was.’
‘I very nearly had you as well,’ the sailor gave an unpleasant smile. ‘Pity about the girl. She was good.’
‘Plenty more where she came from.’
On the following evening, another car arrived at the clinic, delivering a further reward for Ulhurt – another mulatto girl: tall, with long splendid legs which gripped the sailor like those of a wrestler. He was never asked to kill this girl, and she was sent to him each week. Usually on a Thursday.
*
As the weeks went by, so the Railtons adjusted to their various new roles, now their patriarch, The General, was gone.
The weather did not improve. If anything it became colder.
As had been predicted, Asquith won the election – though the Liberal majority was greatly, even alarmingly, reduced. For John, who attained a handsome majority, no immediate call came to join the Cabinet.
Charles darted around the country, his movements, and occupation, cloaked in discreet and cloudy silence.
Mildred began to feel more miserable as her pregnancy advanced. She did not confide in Charles, though she had the most terrible premonition about this baby, and the labour.
The younger people returned to school, and Giles went about his own private war – sometimes in secrecy, more often in committee; where he soon discovered that his battle was with the stone-faced men of the trea
sury, and even more granite-like Military. It was obvious that the generals, and those who controlled military thinking, foresaw any future war as mere skirmishing with tribesmen around the Empire. The Navy had a greater understanding of what the collection and use of intelligence would mean should a modern war erupt. But the generals could not even envisage the possible strategy or tactics of a future conflict.
He clashed on a number of occasions with Sir Douglas Haig, who, on hearing that part of the operations mooted for a Secret Intelligence Service would be the recruitment of foreign nationals, exploded, ‘I’ve rarely heard of anything more infamous. A member of his Majesty’s Civil Service suborning foreigners into betraying their own countries, and paying them to do so.’
On another occasion, Haig maintained that, ‘The gathering of military intelligence has always been, and will always be, the role of the cavalry. If I want intelligence, I get it in the field, by fair and square methods; and if it’s obtained by an officer in disguise, then he is aware that, if discovered, he will be shot, like a gentleman.’
Giles Railton suffered many moments of anguish, for his own logic told him that Europe was fast becoming a powder keg, and, sadly, he guessed the first explosions could easily detonate very near to home – in Ireland.
Chapter Five
No born Railton had ever been blessed with the jet black hair, and eyes, that Bridget Kinread brought to the family when she married Malcolm. Both The General and Giles had approved her looks, clear skin, and sparkling personality. Neither of them had ever seen her in a mood that matched her hair, for Bridget’s black moods came upon her like a violent summer storm – all crash and lightning.
The blackness was upon her now, as she sat at her old bedroom window, watching the mist gather closer, sweeping in over the valley. She prayed that even at this late date, Malcolm might change his mind.
But Malcolm had done it. One hundred and fifty acres and a Georgian house, bought and paid for. Glen Devil Farm. They were to move in within the month – and everybody knew it.
It was always the same in the country of her birth. She often felt that Ireland was more of a village than a country, for all its national pride. Within a day, the ‘interested’ people would know that the Englishman, Malcolm Railton – himself who wed Bridget Kinread of Ballycullen House – had paid a fair sum for Glen Devil Farm.
If only Malcolm could have bought in England. For all his education, the army, his upbringing, the man had no idea of what it would really be like; nor what strain it could eventually place on her. She had tried to tell him; but, like so many of his compatriots, he just failed to understand. No Englishman alive – or dead for that matter – had ever truly understood. If they could, then the bitter river of enmity which ran skin deep under so many Irish lives, would have dried up long ago.
Many times, in her childhood, Bridget had sat in this very window, wondering at her own melancholy. It was wrong, she knew, very wrong, to think of her own people and her own country as she did. But it had been the same from the time she could first remember; and the feeling had grown with the events which shaped her life; for she had left Ballycullen House at eleven years of age, to be educated in England, living with her aunt near Virginia Water.
Until she returned to Ireland as Malcolm’s bride, Bridget had visited the country of her birth only for short holidays. Now she was back, a changed woman with new horizons, married late at thirty, into one of the great English families.
In the event, her husband was infected by the wizardry of people and country. This was where he would farm. The blackness descended from the moment she realized what would happen.
Ballycullen House was empty but for Michael Bergin, the stable hand; for both her mother and father had gone with Malcolm, into Wicklow Town. ‘We’ll live in better style than any of the Railtons in England,’ Malcolm said, as he kissed her before leaving. ‘Bridget, my dear, here in your Ireland we can afford to farm and live like lords. What’s more, there’s greater respect.’
For the first time, she detected the innate snobbery of the family into which she had married. It was not so obvious in people like her father-in-law, Giles, with whom she had pleaded after The General’s funeral.
‘He’s set on farming, Papa Giles. Is there no way he could farm here, at Redhill? He’d be an asset.’
Giles looked at her with cold eyes, shaking his head. ‘Bridget, my dear, there is no legal way, and, if it’s what he wants, I cannot stop him. However, you are a Railton now, and there are things you can do for your new family. Things of great importance.’
She waited, puzzled, not realizing what he meant until he began to ask questions about her past, and the people she knew in Dublin, and elsewhere.
‘I live by old honours,’ Giles said. ‘Love of Country, King, Empire and God. Those things grow thin with age, of course, but I trust you will live by the same. The family, your new family, lives by these things, and we are all dedicated to service. You would wish to be of service?’
She said yes, and he then began to talk, telling her what she must do.
And now, Bridget Railton was alone in her parents’ home. Any one of them who wished to talk with her would know, and come. As she thought this, so Bridget caught sight of the horseman coming across the fields at a gallop, and even through the drizzle, which had now reached the house, she could see it was Padraig O’Connell, whom she had known since they were both barely five years of age.
She slid from the window seat and peeped into the mirror, smoothing her hair and adjusting the lace collar on her simple brown woollen gown. From the top of the stairs she could already hear Michael Bergin admitting Padraig into her father’s house, through the kitchen door at the back.
‘I can hear you, Padraig O’Connell,’ she called, surprised at the calmness of her own voice. ‘And shame on you coming here when a respectable married woman’s alone in the house.’
His laugh was gruff and carried little humour. The laugh of a dead man, her father had once called it, after they had been up until dawn, drinking and arguing politics.
He stood in the hallway, at the foot of the stairs, his clothes damp from the soft rain he had tried to outride; dark eyes looking up at her, his hair long and tangled, and the mouth smiling – like his laugh, the smile of a dead man, not reaching the eyes.
‘If you wanted Father, he’s in town with my husband.’ She stood at the last stair, the blackness of her own eyes almost outfreezing his.
‘Sure and I know that. Would I have come here if your husband was at home?’ then his voice fell by one note, like a scale on the pianoforte. ‘Or your father either, Bridget. No, we must speak. Where?’
She motioned towards the parlour, and he went on ahead of her, as though he owned the house and not her family. ‘You know why I’m here?’ He turned towards her, as she closed the door behind them.
‘You tell me and I’ll know – though I’d rather not, Padraig, I’d best be truthful.’
‘Tut! And is that the way to be talking to someone who was your friend from childhood? Almost kin to you.’
‘A little more than kin, and less than kind’ She muttered the quotation from Hamlet.
‘You’re talkin’ in riddles, so. Is that how they speak in your polite London society?’
‘I mean I do not want you here. You or your kind. You know well enough what I mean.’
He nodded, and she thought there was an almost tangible calmness within this man. The inner peace of certainty: a mark of his cause. ‘Aye, so, I know what you mean, but there’s no escaping kin and country, Bridget. In the next few years things may go peacefully, though I doubt it; and it’s my duty to call on you.’ He laid one thin hand on her wrist. Everything about him was lean, she thought, from the dead laugh to the body, even the way he breathed: shallow, lean breaths as though all his energy went into it. She tried to shake off the hand, but his grip was deceptively strong. ‘Your English husband’s bought Glen Devil Farm, so that can only mean you’re back to stay
.’
‘There’s talk of putting a manager in,’ she lied.
‘There’s no such talk. There’ll be no absent landlord at Glen Devil. Now you listen to me, because it’s of your country, and your people, that I’m talking. You know what’s going on?’
‘I can guess.’
‘The next few years’ll see it happen, Bridget. For good or ill, this is the crucial time. If they force through this Home Rule Bill, the Protestants – the Unionists and Orangemen – will not have it. It’s already been said in Belfast, and in Dublin, that if the Bill goes through, the Unionists will form a Protestant government in Belfast. We’ve heard it all before. Didn’t the present British Home Secretary’s pox-ridden father, Lord Randolph Churchill, say long ago that, if the Bill passed, then Ulster would fight, and Ulster would be right?’
‘I’m not one for studying the politics of it.’
‘No, well, he did say it, and they would fight. Only they would not be right. We deserve a united Ireland, ruled by ourselves, governed by ourselves.’ The dead laugh again, as he spoke in Gaelic, ‘Sinn Fein’ – Ourselves alone.
‘Ourselves alone,’ Bridget laughed back, in his face. ‘And what do you expect ourselves alone to do? Massacre all the Protestants here and in the nine counties? Kill the English? Butcher the soldiers, and be butchered?’
He tightened the pressure on her arm. ‘Look now; whichever way it goes, the thing must be finished soon – within the next few years. Maybe sooner. Now you listen. If that Bill is passed, then we’ll get what we’ve always wanted, though there’ll be trouble. Fighting, yes; and killing as well. For if the Bill doesn’t pass this time, then the Republicans will rise up and pass it of their own accord. The feelings are high, and they’ll run even stronger…’
‘You and your kind will see to that, I’ve no doubt.’
‘Then have no doubt. There’s hatred flowing again. Arms are already being brought in. If the Bill passes there’ll be fighting; and if it doesn’t pass there’ll be revolution in this green country. Either way, the storm’ll break. Sooner rather than later.’