That Old Black Magic Page 3

  “Tell me,” the older man asked, “how did you come to know so much about all these ancient texts and obscure deities? It’s a most unusual repertoire for a Met detective.”

  This Spooner knew only too well. He shrugged. “Aye, I’ll no’ deny it,” he said. His formative years were not something he cared to discuss with his contemporaries at the Yard. But he felt no such restraint talking to a man of such obvious culture. “If you’re ever up in Aberdeen, pay a visit to 84 Belmont Street and you’ll find Spooner’s Rare and Antiquarian Book Shop, Established 1910. That’s where I was born and raised.”

  “Well, well,” Spooner’s visitor puffed on his pipe, eyeing the young man sitting across from him. He had an angular body that did not seem quite comfortable inside the grey flannel suit he was wearing. His hair was greased back off his forehead, heightening the angles of his cheekbones. Spooner’s specs had earned him the nickname of “Prof” at the Yard, but when he took them off, there was a flinty quality to the hazel eyes behind them.

  “A fine city, Aberdeen. And what enlightened parents you must have had to have let you run amok in such a wonderful classroom as that.”

  A frown passed across Spooner’s countenance, like a cloud briefly obscuring the sun.

  “My mother died not long after I was born. My dad had his work cut out running the business and keeping us afloat, so my grandma moved down from Shetland to take care of me. And that woman’s head was full of more jigs and reels than even these things,” he tapped his nearest filing cabinet with his toe, “could accommodate. That’s who’s to blame for me turning out the way I did.”

  The lips behind the pipe turned upwards. “I rather think I’d like to buy you a drink. What would you say to that?”

  Several drams of whisky later, Spooner’s new friend had given him a card and told him to please call each time an interesting new Triple-U came to his attention. It had a Chelsea phone number printed on it, but no name.

  “For whom shall I ask?” Spooner enquired, realising that not once had this information yet been offered to him.

  His companion smiled. “Just say that you’d like to speak with Mr King.”

  “OK, Chief,” Spooner replied and from then on that was the name he bestowed to the distinguished gentleman of MI5. They continued to meet regularly. Many of the Triple-Us Spooner considered dangerous were tried and detained, and, while reporting on these, the Chief had subtly probed his protégé for potential willingness to step into an undercover role in the field. It was a prospect Spooner had agreed to and anticipated with equal degrees of trepidation and relish.

  But after the air raid on the Scrubs last September led to their move into the country at Churchill’s behest, communication from that quarter had ceased. Spooner’s workload became heavier and less interesting, comprised mainly of accompanying a King’s Counsel in sifting through the cases of hundreds of refugees from Europe on the look-out for secret agents. When he’d had time to wonder about anything, Spooner would ponder what the Chief was up to and whether he would hear from him again. He missed their conversations and the ideas they had sparked in him.

  On Hammersmith Bridge he felt truly happy for the first time in five months.

  “You’re looking well, Ross. I expect they have a good veg plot at the Palace, but do they let you into the wine cellars? That’s what I want to know…”

  “Chief!” Spooner turned, beholding the man in the Simpsons overcoat who had appeared, bulldog at his side, with the affection of a real nephew. “No, no fear of that. They have us all barracked with civilians back in Woodstock – I’m sharing with a family of five. It’s a nice enough place, don’t get me wrong, but…”

  “You must be itching to get out of there,” the Chief surmised. “So here’s what I propose. I like to do this little circuit on a Sunday morning,” he pointed across to the south side of the river, “along to Barnes from here, over the bridge and back through Duke’s Meadows to Hammersmith. I think you’ll find the path delightful and remarkably quiet at this time of day. Which is just as well, for I have quite a story to impart… And there’s a very good pub at the end of it. What would you say to that?”

  “This time last week,” said the Chief, as they walked beneath the plane trees that grew in a sheltering avenue along the footpath by the river, his bulldog Dorothy now off her lead and snuffling along ahead of them, “I was told a very intriguing story…”

  Seven days previously, he had arrived at a tall white Georgian house on the outskirts of Ham Common, summoned by a colleague in MI5 who had taken a statement from Karl Kohl at Canon Row station the night before. At Camp 020, as this house was now known, he was shown all the items the agent had landed with, plus two personal belongings he had tried to conceal, before being taken to a cell where Kohl, his leg now properly set after a night in Brixton prison infirmary, waited to continue his confession.

  “He was not, on first sight, an impressive storyteller.”

  The Chief observed a man with thick brown hair that defied the usual German military crop and sprouted in waves over his forehead, though this did not disguise the heavy lines and battered demeanour of a face that had already seen too much. His deep-set, dark brown eyes were bloodshot and fearful. Karl had not slept well in Brixton. Every time he shut his eyes he was falling from the plane again, pitching headlong into oblivion. Despite being given sedatives, he kept waking up screaming.

  “A hapless German spy, sent on a mission to blow up two RAF stations near Peterborough, who broke his ankle jumping out of his plane and was captured by a couple of farmers. It was the first mission he’d ever been on and, despite the fact that the Abwehr furnished him with an impressive kit, they had never let him try parachuting before. He had very little going for him, except for the story he told to explain these discrepancies.”

  Karl asked for a cigarette the moment their interview began. The Chief passed over a packet, watched his subject break into it hungrily. The detective who had brought him up from Huntingdonshire had noted that Kohl reminded him of the sort of opportunist you’d find hanging about in billiard halls, wearing padded-shouldered pinstriped suits – a typical wide boy. But the suit he had been wearing was quality tweed and Kohl had not been happy to be parted from it. There was every reason to believe he had chosen it himself, as he had gone to the trouble of getting his tailor to sew something into the lining behind his inside jacket pocket.

  The Chief glanced at the preliminary statement the prisoner had made the night before, stating that he had been working as a humble NCO in the meteorological department of the Wehrmacht before being selected to join Intelligence.

  “Why do you think you were chosen to go on this mission?” he asked.

  Karl smiled, partly in gratitude for the cigarette and partly because even he now found this question amusing. The change of expression made him look almost handsome.

  “It wasn’t Captain Gartenfeld who picked me,” he said, “that’s for sure.”

  “Captain Gartenfeld?” The Chief was familiar with the name of the Luftwaffe’s expert on aerial reconnaissance.

  “Ja,” Karl nodded. “He was the one who dropped me off. He’s running this new operation, didn’t you know?” He ran his fingers through his hair, brushing it away from his forehead with a weary smile. “I could tell you a lot more about him, only I would need some kind of assurance first.”

  The Chief puffed on his pipe. “I hate to tell you, old man,” he said, “but you don’t appear to be holding a very strong hand.”

  Karl shook his head, reached for another cigarette and lit it with the butt of the previous one. “I’m not really asking for myself,” he said, waving his hand. “The mission that I was supposed to carry out involved another agent, one who is already operating from somewhere in Britain unknown to you. If I was to divulge anything further about our mission and Captain Gartenfeld’s operations, then I would want to make sure that both of us could rely on being able to turn our expertise over to helping you.”
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br />   The Chief beamed his cosiest of smiles. “Then you’d better tell me something good,” he said, “to convince me that the other agent isn’t just a figment of your imagination. You were quite delirious when you were found, I understand?”

  “OK,” Karl shifted uncomfortably, his foot beneath the plaster alternately throbbing and itching, the nicotine he had been so desperate for not a strong enough distraction. “My fellow agent has already orchestrated many successful missions for the Luftwaffe. On aircraft and munitions factories in and around Birmingham last year.”

  The Chief’s eyes narrowed. “Which factories, specifically?”

  “The Spitfire factory at Castle Bromwich,” said Karl. “The Austin factory at Longbridge. Another four armaments works – I cannot recall their exact names. And finally, that bicycle factory where all your Sten guns are made. That was the one they were most pleased about. Knocked it out completely, didn’t they? Well, all the co-ordinates for these attacks came from my contact. The person who selected me for this mission.”

  His red-rimmed eyes burned with intensity and, involuntarily, he reached for the amulet around his neck. The Chief watched Karl’s expression freeze as he realised it was no longer there.

  “The Serpent and the Lion?” he said.

  They had reached Barnes Bridge and the sun was high above them, banishing the clouds and sparkling off the freshly laid snow. Children were running about in Duke’s Meadows, laughter ringing in the cold, clear air. Ducks bobbed about on the river. It was surreal, in such a setting, to think about the carnage Kohl had described.

  “Did it all turn out to be true?” Spooner asked.

  The Chief nodded. “And it gets much stranger yet. The reason I was specifically asked to interview Kohl was because, when he was asked to part with his clothes at Canon Row, he almost choked himself trying to swallow this. I think you’ll recognise it…”

  He opened his fist to reveal a silver pendant attached to a thin chain. A circle enclosing a pentagram, within whose six points was depicted the face of a goat.

  “A Baphomet,” said Spooner and whistled. “Depending on who or what you believe, the God of the Knights Templar; or the Goat of Mendes, worshipped by witches.”

  “I remembered you telling me so when we discussed this symbolism before,” said the Chief, putting the amulet back in his pocket. “Which is how I realised the importance of the next item Kohl had gone out of his way to conceal – and not from us, I might add, but from the very people who sent him.” From another pocket he produced his next item of evidence. “This had been sewn into the lining of his suit.”

  It was a small black-and-white photograph of a striking looking woman, sitting curled up on an armchair. Her outfit looked expensive: a silk dress in what were probably two contrasting colours, with matching shoes and a fat string of pearls around her neck. She was laughing through the gap in her front teeth, eyebrows plucked like horizontal crescent moons rising in a sardonic, almost mocking expression. Spooner stared at her for a long minute before flipping the image over, suspecting there would be an inscription on the back. What surprised him was that it was written in English.

  “My Dear,” he read aloud, “Our time is at hand. Our love is for ever. The Serpent and the Lion. Your Clara, July 1940.”

  “She is his contact,” said the Chief. “According to Kohl, her real name is Clara Bauer and she’s a German actress. But to the people of Birmingham, where she’s been living on and off since the thirties, she is an English singer, popular in the music halls, where they know her as Clara Brown. To the Abwehr, she is Agent Belladonna. Kohl was supposed to have used his radio to contact her when he arrived and because he didn’t, she may have been suspicious when our signals, using the call sign Kohl supplied, attempted to reach her. She didn’t respond and all subsequent efforts have failed to rouse her.”

  Spooner felt a tingling sensation up his spine that had nothing to do with the weather. “So what happens now?” he asked.

  The Chief put his arm around his protégé’s shoulder. “This, my dear Ross, is the moment we have long spoken of. If you are still willing, you leave the Palace and go into the field in search of someone that might not even exist, except in Kohl’s imagination. But if she does, she’s a Witch more dangerous than any others you’ve recorded before. In short, I want you to try and find Clara and bring her to me.”

  3

  THE ECHO OF A SONG

  Saturday, 15 February 1941

  “Witches, Warlocks and Wizards, you say? Interesting. I can give you Mesmerists, Memory Men and Magicians. See if you can work out the difference…”

  The words rang through Spooner’s mind as he reached the outskirts of Birmingham. They had first been spoken to him five days previously by the man who was to be his guide through a different world of smoke and mirrors: a theatrical agent by the name of Norris Denman. Norrie, as he preferred to be called, was an old friend of the Chief’s. He was also part of the intricate network of independent agents recruited to the Department of Counter-Subversion that was the Chief’s sole responsibility, an outfit so clandestine that many of his colleagues in MI5 knew nothing of its existence.

  Most of these agents worked alone, so that, at times, there might be three or even four of the Chief’s protégés reporting back to him on any one of the many organisations he had under surveillance. Somehow, he was able to keep track of all the threads he had woven into his great tapestry of subterfuge, and knew exactly where the next stitch should be placed. In this rare instance, he had considered it pertinent for two of them to work together. Therefore Spooner, ostensibly on leave from his work at Blenheim Palace, had spent most of the past week assisting Norrie and learning the sleight-of-hand ways of the world of pan-stick and paint.

  Norrie was a fine tutor, a wily old silver fox, with a mane of hair that curled around his large ears and an exotic aroma of cologne that lingered long after he had made his customary greeting of kissing on both cheeks. Showbusiness – along with French brandy and the smoke of fine cigars – ran through his veins: he claimed to have been born backstage at the Grand Palais on Commercial Road and had been running his agency for over thirty years. He knew his counterparts in Birmingham well, so Spooner’s mission had been choreographed to look like a routine visit that would take care of some outstanding business at the same time as giving him the opportunity to hunt for Clara.

  He had just about got the hang of the car he had been given for this assignment. A highly polished maroon Rover 16, it had a flashy exterior but felt like a tank to handle. With a map splayed out on the passenger seat beside him, he maintained a steady pace and, judging by the clock on his dashboard, he would arrive before sunset. The thaw had helped, the snow now replaced by low clouds that merged with the thick smoke pouring from a thousand chimneys that was his first sighting of the second city.

  As Spooner wove his cautious way towards its centre, he was able to see for himself the havoc that had been vested on the place: a vast pile of bricks and fallen beams surrounded by scorched arches that was the old market hall in the Bull Ring, set ablaze on the first air raid on the city centre last August. An Edwardian shopping arcade reduced into twisted fingers of warped metal, pointing angrily up at the sky. And, as he drew closer to his destination, the mountain of rubble that was all that was left of the Empire, renowned as the best Variety House in Birmingham – which made one less place to look for Clara.

  The city had been battered precisely because of its importance in the construction of the war machine, but this was a secret shared only by its citizens and the Luftwaffe. A government D-notice had been placed over the city, forbidding any reportage of the regular aerial attacks that testified to the deadly accuracy of Kohl’s story. But, using his contacts in the House and various ministries and departments, the Chief had been able to match all the spy’s claims to verifiable fact.

  There had been an attempt to knock out the Spitfire factory at Castle Bromwich on 13 August the previous summer, eleven bombs
hitting their target and causing severe damage, seven deaths and forty-one injured. Seven days later, more bombs had been dropped on a shadow Austin factory in Longbridge, where Fairey Battles, Hurricanes, Stirlings and Lancaster Bombers were being produced under the cover of car manufacturing. Attacks on the city centre between 15–25 October had included the Fisher and Ludlow factory where shell-casings, bombs and wings for Lancasters were made; the Reynold factory that made Spitfire wings; GEC, producers plastic components for aircraft; and SU Carburettors.

  Most devastating of all was the 19 November attack Kohl had boasted of, on the Birmingham Small Arms factory at Small Heath, responsible for the manufacture of rifles, sten guns and anti-aircraft guns. Fifty-two people had been killed when the shop floor collapsed on shift workers who had ignored the sirens for too long to reach the company’s air raid shelters and instead sought refuge in the basement. Only one man had been pulled out from inside that flaming hellhole alive.

  Still the city continued to pound, smelt and manufacture without respite. Along the miles of canals that served as the ventricles of the city, tons of back diamonds from the North and South Staffs coalfields were drawn along in barges by heavy horses, to feed the insatiable pumping heart of foundries and factories. Spooner could hear their relentless tattoo, smell the vapours of hot metal and coal permeating each breath of air. Birmingham shook to a constant war dance.

  He was headed for a slightly quieter area of the city, a warren of cobbled streets laid out at the end of the last century, where music halls and theatres had long been established and the performers who worked there preferred to socialise. Norrie had booked him into a bed-and-breakfast called High View on John Bright Street that was run by a couple of his old clients, Janet and Bob Howell.