Dominion

‘No. You don’t in the Civil Service, unless you know someone well. David and I never – never crossed that barrier.’

He asked bluntly, ‘So you and Fitzgerald never slept together?’

She shook her head. Tears had begun to roll down her cheeks.

‘He was almost certainly using you, you know.’

She looked at him with a sudden fierceness. ‘I loved him. I kept hoping he’d – it’s hard for a woman, you know, you can’t make the first move the way a man can.’ She gave a fractured laugh. ‘Just seeing him, just going to concerts with him, and lunch, it was – almost like a drug. A little makes you want more, doesn’t it?’

‘Fucking tart,’ Syme said.

She looked down again, spent.

‘Well, Miss Bennett,’ Gunther said heavily, ‘now the scales have fallen from your eyes.’ He thought of his wife. He had loved her, too, right up to his discovery of her betrayal.

She looked at him. ‘I still love him. Think of me how you like. I can’t help it.’ It was pathetic, yet said with an odd dignity. Gunther felt a twinge. He looked at Syme. ‘Perhaps you could get the local police to visit her mother, see if they can arrange something. After all, we don’t want the old woman making a public scene.’

Syme shrugged. ‘I suppose so. But I want this one taken to Special Branch HQ.’

‘I’ll get our people to arrange a car.’

Carol cringed back in her chair. ‘I advise you to talk as freely, Miss Bennett,’ Gunther said severely, ‘as you have here.’

Syme smiled. ‘We’ll make sure of that.’

Afterwards he and Syme went up to his office to talk. So far as Muncaster was concerned they had found out nothing. They found nothing the next day either, or the next. Muncaster and Drax and the Fitzgeralds were gone, vanished, no doubt hiding somewhere in the network of Resistance safe houses. Muncaster’s fellow workers were questioned again, and some of his old fellow-students at university. Drax’s parents, too. None of them knew anything. Gunther learned from Syme that all sorts of enquiries were going on in the Civil Service; MI5 had been brought in now. Gunther said he was glad, but he wasn’t really interested in the spy ring.

On Friday afternoon, a week after Fitzgerald’s flight, a thick fog came down, in the afternoon, smothering London. Gunther’s office was at the top of Senate House and from the window he saw an odd thing; the smog did not quite reach the top of the building, so from his office he could look down on it. He had an extraordinary view of a greyish-yellow sea, stretching to the horizon. It was like the poisonous atmosphere of some alien planet, with only the very tops of the tallest buildings visible. It was one of the strangest things he had ever seen. Above the smog the air was milky-white, the winter sun just visible as a pale red orb.

Syme came in; he walked across and joined Gunther at the window. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said.

‘I hope it doesn’t last.’ Gunther looked at him. ‘Any news?’

‘Nothing. We’ve plenty of agents in the Resistance, but nobody’s seen or heard anything of these people. And trawling the whole country, it’s going to take a hell of a time.’

‘Any progress on the Civil Service spies?’

‘A few leads. They haven’t come to anything yet, but they will. I’m not allowed to talk to you about it,’ Syme added, ‘only if something comes up that is relevant to Muncaster.’

‘I understand,’ Gunther said. ‘We’ll get there, you know. We will.’ He smiled encouragingly. ‘You will get your promotion, your exciting job in the North, a big house there to go with your new Jew’s one.’

‘And you?’

Gunther shrugged. They both looked down at the fog. It swirled and eddied below them, the top lit by a reddish tinge now as the sun began to set. Gunther smiled. ‘This view reminds me of a story I learned at school.’ He began to quote from the Bible. ‘He took Jesus to a high place, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; and said, “All these things I will give thee, to have dominion over, if you will fall down and worship me”.’ He frowned. ‘That is not quite right. Was it “dominion” or “power”? Anyway, it was something like that.’

‘Jesus was a Jew, wasn’t he? Who was it who took Jesus to the high place?’

Gunther shrugged. Then he remembered, with a superstitious shiver, that it had been the Devil.

‘My parents never took me to church,’ Syme said.

‘You were lucky.’ Gunther smiled again, sadly. ‘It was very dull.’

When Gunther left Senate House that evening he had to navigate the streets by memory, walking right next to the buildings, a hand touching the walls, bumping into people who were doing the same. The walls were damp, the fog thick and stinking of sulphur. The fumes made his nose and throat sore. He was relieved when he got back to the flat. He knew that he needed to think, to try to find some way forward. He had a bath and a meal. After looking out he drew the curtains against the horrible night and sat at the table in his bathrobe, a strong cup of coffee beside him.

The interrogations, the telephone calls, all the frantic activity had taken them nowhere. They had to find a new way of thinking.

He got up, pacing the thick carpet. He was starting a headache; the fog had brought it on just as the dust gave him headaches in Berlin. He thought, what would the Resistance people do with Muncaster now they had him? What would he do if he were them, had hold of someone with a big secret, who was mentally ill, and unstable? Kill him, surely, to prevent him being captured and telling all he knew. Muncaster had wanted to kill himself anyway.

But the man calling himself Ben Hall could easily have killed him at the hospital. No, they wanted him alive. Why? It had to be because of the Americans. It had all started with them. They must have put the British Resistance up to this. He thought, they’re going to try and get Muncaster to America.

He went to the window and pulled aside the curtain again. Outside, thick, gluey darkness, the faintest fuzzy glow from a streetlight below the flat, car horns breaking the silence – distant, muted, like sounds from a ship out at sea. Was that how they would try to get Muncaster away, on a merchant ship going to America? Descriptions and photographs had already been circulated to the ports. He thought, in his mental state, and with his damaged hand, Muncaster would be easy to spot. No, they wouldn’t risk a ship.

An aircraft? He dismissed that, too. Security at the airports would be even tighter than at the ports. A submarine, that was surely the most likely option. An American military submarine. It was known they sometimes came into the Channel.

He crossed to the bookcase. He pulled out an atlas and looked at the map of England. Birmingham, where they had started from, was right in the centre of the country. They would have to get Muncaster to the coast, but probably have to hole up somewhere for a while first. If a submarine were picking them up it would have to be from a southern or western port. The Welsh coast? Devon or Cornwall? Certainly nowhere too near the Isle of Wight, under German control. Sussex or Kent? He thought, if it were me I’d set it up so they could go due south, the shortest way via London. He ran his finger down the long straight line of the motorway from Birmingham to London. They could hide up in the city. They would have to wait for the right weather, a calm sea and a moonlit night – then travel from there to the Sussex or Kent coast.

He thought, if it was a submarine it would communicate with the coast by radio. But how to find the wavelength, the code? He took a slug of coffee. He thought of Muncaster, that piteous little man, led down a beach somewhere. A picture of his own son, playing on the sand in Krimea, came unexpectedly into his mind. He thought it all through again, looking for holes in his theory. Then he went to the telephone. He would call the embassy, tell Gessler the German authorities on the Isle of Wight should be told to watch for a submarine, listen for radio signals. First, though, he telephoned Syme, at home. He took a little while to answer, and he sounded sleepy. It was past one o’clock; Gunther had lost track of time.

‘I have been thinking, William. I believe Muncaster and his people may be in London. How many agents inside the Resistance do you have in the city?’

‘A good few.’

‘I think you should concentrate here. Try to sweep up as much of the London Resistance as you can. Do you think that would be possible?’

Syme said, ‘Usually we only do that if we’ve hopes of netting some big fish.’

‘Muncaster is a very big fish. And his people have killed one of yours in the city.’

‘This weather won’t make it easier.’