gave him a detailed briefing.’
He broke off, and sat staring at the desktop in front of him. As the silence grew longer, Sinclair and Bennett exchanged glances. It was a minute or more before the other man looked up. His eyes showed the same unfocussed glaze as before.
‘I won’t pretend I wasn’t curious to know him. Up till then he’d only been a name to me. But I was aware of his reputation and I approached the prospect of our meeting with caution.’ He paused once again. ‘I don’t suppose I need tell you that the qualities required for the kind of work Lang did for us are… quite special. It’s not a profession for the squeamish. But even so, there are limits… or there ought to be.’ Vane tapped the buff folder before him. ‘Unfortunately I can’t show you this. I’d be in breach of the law. But there are things in it you would find shocking. At least I hope so. They certainly were to me. If I were asked to characterize it I would say it was not so much a record of a man without scruple, as one without moral sense. So you’ll understand when I say I had considerable misgivings at the thought of working with him. Nor did this meeting of ours offer much in the way of reassurance.’
He mused for a moment, as though in recollection.
‘It’s not easy to describe the effect he had on me. In many ways he’s quite ordinary. Soft-spoken; almost diffident in manner. And the business side of things went without a hitch. I found him quick to grasp what I was telling him, exceptionally so. Nothing needed to be said twice. But it was as though there was a barrier between us. Something real, but transparent, like a pane of glass. And he was on one side of it and I was on the other and there was no connection between us. No human bond. Thinking about it afterwards, I realized this feeling I had sprang from his glance. His eyes. They were quite dead.’
Vane reflected on what he had said. Then he shrugged.
‘It must have been later, when we were driving into Oxford, that I made some reference to my car. It was new, as you know, and I’d bought it because I thought it would be easy to maintain in Germany and less noticeable than a British-made vehicle would have been. It so happened a minor problem had developed with the gears and I must have expressed some irritation over the fact that I couldn’t now drive up to Scotland the following day, as I’d intended, but would either have to leave it in a garage in Oxford, or find some way of getting it back to London, so that the necessary repairs could be made while I was away.
‘Whatever it was I said, Lang offered to deal with the matter. He said he planned to spend a day or two in the Oxford area, but would willingly drive the car to London for me after that. The worst of it is I so very nearly refused his offer, and for no other reason than that I’d taken such a strong dislike to him. But my reaction seemed out of all proportion, so in the end I let him have it. If only I’d followed my instincts!’
Visibly upset, he stared out of the window where lights could be seen burning in other windows across the courtyard.
‘What happened? Did he pick her up on the road?’ He spoke without looking round.
‘Yes, in Henley. She was running an errand for her mother. The shops were only a mile away.’
With a sigh, Vane turned to face them once more. He seemed paler than before. ‘The car was delivered to my garage in London, as promised. By the time I returned from Scotland, Lang was already in Germany establishing himself. I took up my own posting in Berlin in October. It was more than two years before I saw him again.’
‘Despite the fact you were there all that time?’ Sinclair was incredulous.
‘Yes, but that was by arrangement, you see. It wasn’t intended we should meet. Lang’s assignment was in the area of political intelligence and his orders were to recruit and control agents, to run them, as it were, and to forward their reports to me. Naturally it was important he should have no contact with our embassy in Berlin. My own position was nominally that of a senior attache with responsibilities in the economic field and I made sure our paths didn’t cross. He reported to me in writing.’
‘Did his duties take him to Munich, by any chance?’ Sinclair asked the question.
‘Most certainly.’ Vane hesitated. He bit his lip. ‘Look, there’s no reason I shouldn’t tell you what Lang was doing for us in Germany, provided you remain discreet about it. His specific brief was to cultivate contacts in the Nazi party. It’s something we’ve been slow to get on to. Like others, we’ve tended to dismiss them as rabble. Now it looks as though they may form part of the next government. Or, God forbid, end up running it.
‘Lang was sent to Berlin with the assumed character of a representative of an Austrian textile firm. His job was to insinuate himself into party circles with the aim of identifying individuals who might prove useful to us. It’s a delicate business, one he’d shown himself to be highly skilled at. He had an eye for picking out the kind of people who could either be bought or persuaded to cooperate by other means, not all of them savoury, and which I’ll leave to your imagination.’ Vane grimaced. ‘Suffice to say he was quite ruthless, something we’d taken note of in the past.
‘We’d so arranged it that the firm he was supposed to represent had business ties in Munich and this provided him with an excuse to go there and hang about the beer halls, so as to make his face known.’ He noticed the glance that passed between his visitors. ‘Why? Is that significant?’
‘To us, yes.’ Sinclair nodded. ‘Two of the murders I’ve spoken of took place in the Munich region.’
Vane absorbed the information with a frown. He made no comment. ‘Well, so much for our plans. Now I’ll tell you what occurred. For the first year or so everything ran like clockwork. Lang went about his work with his usual efficiency. In due course he joined the party and having identified various figures whose acquaintance might yield dividends later began to cultivate them. He lent money to several. All was proceeding according to plan. But then, midway through the second year, his work began to fall off. The change was gradual, but quite marked. His reports became irregular – something unheard of, he was methodical to a fault – and when they reached me showed signs of diminishing activity on his part. I remonstrated with him in writing several times, without effect, and was beginning to think a face-to-face meeting between us might be necessary when I received a message from him asking for just that. He wanted to see me urgently.’
Vane made a gesture of weariness. ‘There was little I could do but agree, and so we met at a small hotel in the country, outside Berlin, where he told me he wanted to cut short his assignment and leave Germany. He gave as his reason his growing suspicion that he’d been identified once more as a British agent. He insisted he was in danger and said he could no longer carry on with his work.’
‘When was this?’ Sinclair broke in. ‘Can you be precise?’
‘Early in June of this year. Does that tell you anything?’
‘Yes, the last in the chain of murders occurred in April. The Bavarian authorities got a lead from it and with the Berlin police mounted a campaign to identify the killer. They used the newspapers among other means. Lang must have been aware of that.’ Sinclair paused, curious. ‘What did you make of his behaviour?’ he asked.
Vane shrugged. ‘As regards his being exposed as one of our agents, I was far from convinced. After all, his activities weren’t directed against the state. But something was amiss. He was clearly under strain.’ He hesitated, gnawing at his lip. ‘I won’t pretend I had any sympathy for him. I found him no less alien than before. But I couldn’t discount the possibility that he might be cracking up, and immediately following our meeting I got in touch with London and it was decided we should withdraw him, temporarily at least. He let it be known he’d been called back to Vienna on some pretext and left Berlin.’
‘But came to England?’ The chief inspector was listening closely.
‘Yes, we brought him back here discreetly. We wanted to keep him under our eye until it had been decided what to do next. I took the opportunity to return to London myself. I had my own views on the subject and every intention of airing them.’
‘And where was Lang while all this was going on?’
‘In a clinic near Lewes, in Sussex. It’s a place we have a… connection with. He was told to take it easy for a few weeks. We arranged for him to receive treatment while he was there.’
‘For what, precisely?’
‘The doctors found he was suffering from nervous exhaustion, which came as no surprise. We’d seen other agents react to the pressures of their work in similiar ways. It’s a hazardous profession, after all. But I was more interested in what their psychiatrist had to say, man called Bell. It was clear he was fascinated by Lang. In his very first report he described him as an unusual patient, one whose personality he found disturbing, but difficult to penetrate. Opaque was the word he used.’
‘Was that all he had to say?’ Sinclair frowned.
‘At that stage, yes. And since he didn’t take issue with the more general diagnosis, Lang was treated simply for strain. He was encouraged to relax. On the advice of the doctors we’d provided him with a car and I understand
