‘You’ll have an office here, and you’ll be assisted by a British Special Branch police inspector called Syme. He’s a good friend; he’s spent time in Germany. He’s young but he’s clever and ambitious. Recommended by your successor here, in fact. Use him to get through the hoops.’ Gessler jabbed a finger at Gunther, reminding him again of his old headmaster. ‘But so far as Syme is concerned, and anyone else who asks, we still want Muncaster because of suspected political links. I wish we could have gone straight to the top and asked Beaverbrook for him, but in the circumstances we must fly beneath the radar, as the Luftwaffe people say. For now at least.’
‘Do
‘I know a little more than you.’ Gessler couldn’t stop that annoying smirk appearing again. ‘About what Edgar Muncaster might have been working on. Enough to realize this could be important. I can’t tell you, Hoth, because to be blunt what you don’t know you can’t tell anyone else. The point is, Himmler and Heydrich want this done.’
Gunther was already thinking about how to navigate his way through the British authorities, the bureaucracy, without them learning what he was doing. He thought, if Heydrich’s hunch was right – and it was only a hunch – he might do something important with his life after all.
AT THE HOSPITAL ON WEDNESDAY, two days before, the rain had been succeeded by days of fog and mist. Frank sat in his usual place in the quiet room. The previous day he had told Ben, the Scottish attendant, a little about his university friend David, and Ben suggested Frank telephone him, see if he might be able to help get him transferred to a private clinic. ‘After all, if he’s a civil servant, they ken how to get things done. You can use the telephone in the nurses’ office when I’m on duty.’
But Frank wasn’t sure. The fewer people he spoke to the better, because of his secret, because of what Edgar had told him. And he was suspicious of Ben; why had the attendant singled Frank out to help, particularly when he had spoken bitterly about Dr Wilson giving Frank more attention because he was middle-class? Ben seemed direct and friendly enough but still there was something in him that did not quite ring true. He noticed that sometimes his Glasgow accent was stronger, as though for effect.
Earlier that morning Ben had come up to him and asked if he had thought any more about phoning his friend. Frank asked suddenly, ‘Why are you doing this? Why are you helping me?’
Ben raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘You’re a suspicious wee fella. It’s just I don’t think you belong here, you should try’n get out. But it’s up to you, pal; if you’re happy to trust Dr Wilson, that’s fine.’ He’d walked away then, Frank staring after him anxiously. He knew it was true, he was suspicious of everybody, had been since childhood. He hadn’t heard any more from Dr Wilson about electric shock therapy, but feared he might and that it might make him blurt out what he knew. He thought again about David Fitzgerald. He had been one of the few people Frank had ever really trusted and liked. He hadn’t seen him, though, for some years. After they graduated from Oxford they had kept in touch by letter, and Frank had been invited to David’s wedding in 1943 but he had never been to a wedding and felt he would be unable to cope with all the people. After that the gaps between David’s letters had grown longer and for the last couple of years they had only exchanged Christmas cards.
Frank preferred to stay in the quiet room but the attendants often chivvied him out, saying he must come to the day room, mix with the other patients. He didn’t want to; the others reminded him of the awful position he was in. Some passed their time staring at the wall, others would suddenly erupt with fury over nothing. Some of their faces had been twisted and warped into strange expressions by years of madness. But Frank knew he had his own peculiarity, his habitual grin; and he had attacked his own brother. Was he mad too? It was all right when the drugged effect was strong in him, but as it weakened and wore off at the end of the period between his three daily doses, his heart often pounded with fear now and he wanted to scream. And though he had never dreamed about school since leaving Strangmans, he did dream about it now. This place reminded him of it in so many ways. He had even had a couple of frightening dreams about Mrs Baker.
Mrs Baker had been a spiritualist. Frank’s mother claimed she was able to contact his father, who had been killed at Passchendaele in 1917; Frank had been born, prematurely, two weeks later. His mother had never recovered from his father’s death. George Muncaster had been a doctor, he hadn’t needed to volunteer, and Frank’s mother had begged him not to go but he believed joining the Army Medical Corps was his duty. Then, as his wife had feared, he had been killed, leaving her alone in the big house with just two boys and Lizzie, the daily woman.
Frank knew his mother didn’t love him, though she did love Edgar. But Edgar, who was nearly four years older than Frank, had been born when she was young and happy, before the world went mad in 1914. She was always saying Edgar was a good boy, clever and obedient, while Frank with his childhood illnesses and, even then, oddities, was a trial.
But it was Frank who most resembled his father. The photograph of him, draped in black, on the mantelpiece had shown the same long nose, full, feminine mouth and large, puzzled dark eyes. Like Frank, he looked as though he might have been afraid of the world. Edgar, though, was big, stocky and confident. Before he went on his war orphan’s scholarship to their father’s old school in Scotland, he would often call Frank names like ‘runt’ and ‘weed’ and a word he had found in a Grimm’s fairytale: ‘You’re weazened, Frankie,’ he would say, ‘a weazened creature.’
Thousands of women turned to spiritualism in the 1920s, women who had lost sons and husbands and brothers in the trenches. Mrs Baker first came to the house in Esher late in 1926, when Frank was nine. Edgar had already gone to Scotland, and Frank was at a small local day-school, a quiet, fearful child with few friends.
It was because the house, which had also been his father’s surgery, was so large that Mrs Baker’s seances were held there. The group came on Tuesday evenings, half a dozen women, middle-aged before their time. Lizzie, the maid, who was always nice to Frank, told him she did not hold with spiritualism and he should stay away from it all.
The women would arrive just before Frank’s bedtime, greeting his mother with friendly formality. Lizzie would have prepared sandwiches and soft drinks beforehand – Mrs Baker said alcohol interfered with her channel to the spirits – and they would chat to each other about normal things, their gardens and servants or those wretched miners still on strike. When Mrs Baker arrived, though, they fell into a reverent silence. She was a very tall, stout woman of around fifty, her big, square face with its little blue eyes framed by short, bobbed curls. She wore fashionable dresses, though the straight lines of the day did not suit her large frame, and a long rope of pearls reached to her waist. She always carried a large bag, decorated in a Paisley pattern, draped over her arm.
Frank was allowed to take the sandwiches around. The women always asked politely how he was, and Mrs Baker would look down at him from her great height, saying she hoped he was being a good boy, a helper to his mother. One of the other women once commented that he was a poor fatherless lamb but Mrs Baker gave her a reproving look and said earnestly, in her rich contralto, that Frank’s father was with him in spirit. After twenty minutes’ conversation Mrs Baker would clap her hands. ‘Time to begin, ladies. I feel Meng Foo approaching.’ Meng Foo was her spirit guide, a princess of ancient China. ‘She is ready,’ Mrs Baker would say. ‘I see her walking towards me, so delicately on her little bound feet.’ The women would drop their eyes respectfully, and his mother would tell Frank to go to bed. Then, the other ladies following, she would open the double doors to the dining room with its big table.
Lizzie had said, as Frank sat in the kitchen watching her cook, that it was strange how Mrs Baker had told her ladies to avoid the new spiritualist church a mile away. ‘All very well for your mummy to say other spiritualists have driven Mrs Baker away because of jealousy over her being on a higher plane. I know she gets paid for these sessions; I don’t know how much but I bet it’s a lot.’
Frank’s mother told him Mrs Baker made a connection with his father almost every week. She had heard him speaking through her; it had been his man’s voice, his Scottish accent. When she told Frank about the seances her habitual sad expression would change to a happy, wondering smile. Frank’s father, she said, was in a place of sunlit gardens and beautiful palaces. Sometimes, in the distance, he glimpsed Jesus walking there, all haloed in white. She told Frank his father was sorry for going and leaving them; he knew now that he had done wrong. He was always watching over Frank lovingly.
The idea of his father watching over him meant little to Frank, for he had never met him. And inside him was a seed of doubt, nurtured by Lizzie, about Mrs Baker and all her works.
On Tuesday evenings Frank, driven by curiosity, began creeping out of bed after the women had gone into the
