McPhail laughed, too.
‘You won’t find anything too awful,’ he said. ‘But it won’t half do them good if they think that you might.’
He pointed to a large building with long windows looking out to sea.
‘That’s the mess. The officers’ mess. The wardroom, we call it. I expect the Admiral will take you over for a drink. Are you putting up there, while you’re here?’
‘No, I’ve booked in at a pension. The Pension Francia.’
McPhail looked doubtful. ‘The Francia? Well, a lot of our people do stay there. When they’re with a lady friend. Or wife, of course. Ladies can’t stay in the mess. But the Francia is very handy.’
‘It’s that sort of place, is it?’ said Seymour.
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘So you’ve come over to Gibraltar, then?’ said the Admiral.
‘Yes. There are several things I want to do. But it might be helpful if I could pretend to be investigating something else. You remember we spoke of the stores.’
‘Fine. I’ll set it up.’
‘I’ve already dropped a few hints.’
‘That probably accounts for the worried look on one or two faces.’
‘If you can arrange things, I’ll make a start. But that, of course, is not the real reason why I am here. Nor, I imagine, for your interest in Lockhart.’
‘No.’
‘What is the real reason for your interest in Lockhart?’
‘I don’t know how far I can go…’
‘I’ve done a lot of Diplomatic work.’
‘The man from the FO said you had, and that’s good. But this isn’t quite Diplomatic work.’
‘I didn’t think for a moment that it was.’
‘No.’
The Admiral rubbed his chin. The bristles made a slight scrapy noise. Probably been up for hours, thought Seymour. Shaved in the middle of the night.
‘No,’ the Admiral said again. ‘Defence is not the same as Diplomatic. Especially at the moment, when we might be in the run-up to another war.’
‘You think so?’
‘You always have to think so if you’re in the Services. Especially if you’re in the Navy. You’ve got to think that far ahead. Do you know how long it takes to get one of our capital ships on a new course? One of the big ones? Well, you won’t do it in much less than three-quarters of a mile. So it’s no good coming up at the last moment and saying, “Mind that boat!” Or rock, or whatever. So you’ve got to think ahead. Which, believe it or not, is just what the Government is doing.’
Seymour didn’t believe it. In his experience, which was of the ministry responsible for the police, the Home Office, ministers didn’t think ahead. They just improvised on the spot, after the event, when it was already too late.
‘It’s this new bloke,’ said the Admiral. ‘Did you know we’ve got a new bloke at the Admiralty?’
Seymour didn’t. In the East End Naval affairs did not loom large.
‘Yes. There’s been a switch around and we’ve got a new bloke. Churchill, his name is. Doesn’t know anything about the Navy, of course. Been a soldier. Well, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it doesn’t get you far when you’re managing ships. But this new bloke seems actually to have a few ideas, and some of them are not totally daft. For instance, he intends to switch the whole Navy from coal to oil. Fisher’s idea, of course, but a good one.’
He looked expectantly at Seymour. Seymour could see this was significant but for the life of him he couldn’t see why. Something to do with fuel, obviously. What made ships go. Until now he had not, actually, ever thought about this. If anything, he was still living mentally in the world of sail. Of course, he knew, vaguely, that sail was being superseded by steam. That must be the coal. And now, apparently, coal was being superseded in its turn by oil.
‘Hmm,’ he said, trying to sound impressed. ‘Important, I imagine.’
‘It is!’ said the Admiral enthusiastically. ‘You can see at once the implications it has for us!’
‘Oh, yes!’ said Seymour. ‘Oh, yes.’
‘Take refuelling times, for instance. With oil, all you’ve got to do is stick a pipe in and then pump. With coal, you’ve got to have dozens of people shovelling. Takes hours. The switch from coal to oil will cut refuelling times — and, therefore, turn-round times — by four-fifths!’
‘Amazing!’ said Seymour.
‘Oh, it’s going to be. And that’s not the end of it. It will revolutionize the way we do things. But we’ve got to get on with it. Otherwise, the Germans will do it first. In fact, they probably have done it first! But — and this is where I really do take my hat off to the Government — in one respect we’re ahead of them.’
‘We are? Oh, good!’
The Admiral paused dramatically, then lowered his voice.
‘We’ve got the oil,’ he said.
‘Got the-?’
‘Yes. Stitched it up. Bought the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Guaranteed the Navy’s oil supplies for years.’
‘Well, that’s splendid!’
‘And I don’t need to tell you the difference that will make!’
‘No, indeed!’
‘And this is where Lockhart comes in.’
‘Lockhart?’ said Seymour with a start.
‘Yes. You see, until this Anglo-Persian deal, we hadn’t been sure where our oil was going to come from. We’d been thinking about it, of course. I’d been thinking about it. Thought about little else from the moment I knew the switch was in the offing. I’d been making forward contracts, building storage tanks, trying to find suppliers — and this, of course, is where Lockhart came in.’
‘Lockhart?’
‘Yes. With his contacts. All through the Middle East. Especially with the Arabs. Now, of course, he wasn’t dealing directly with the Persians. But he had plenty of ways of dealing with them indirectly, and I found him invaluable.
‘It had to be done quietly, you see. We were ahead of the game, and we didn’t want to let on to anyone else. And that was especially important to me, down in the Med, with the Turks at one end, and the Germans in cahoots with them, letting them have warships.
‘Of course, once the Anglo-Persian oil started coming through, we’d be all right. But until then we were scratching around for oil. And that was where Lockhart came in with his connections. As I said, he was invaluable.
‘So when I heard — and this was two years ago, remember, when things were still in the balance, and before the Anglo-Persian oil had really started flowing — that Lockhart had been murdered, I thought: hello, someone’s putting their finger in my pie! And I didn’t like it. By then I looked on Lockhart as one of my people. If someone was out to get him, I was out to get them.
‘So I went to the Foreign Office and said, “This is an Englishman. More than that, he’s one of my people, so you’ve got to do something.” Did they do anything? Did they hell! They just faffed around, pushing papers in all directions, referring it here, taking it up there. I think they hoped I would go away. But once I’ve got my teeth into something, I don’t let go and I’d got my teeth into this. And I still have. I want to know who killed Lockhart. And that, I hope, is what you’re eventually going to tell me.’
Seymour, in fact, had come across the Admiral’s ‘new bloke’ previously. Before he had been switched to the Admiralty, Churchill had been Minister at the Home Office, in charge, among other things, of the police. And there he had put Scotland Yard’s back up in no small way.
This had been over the famous — or notorious — ‘Siege of Sidney Street’, as the newspapers had called it. A small armed gang had tried to break into an East End jeweller’s. Surprised in the act, they had shot three policemen and then, hotly pursued, had taken refuge in a house in Sidney Street where they had been trapped. Shooting was rare in London’s underworld and the case had made big headlines in the press. And where there were big headlines, there were usually, in Seymour’s experience, shortly afterwards big politicians. Churchill had interested himself personally in the case and had turned up on the spot; to be photographed for the newspapers, some said unkindly.
Worse, though, in the eyes of the police, he had called in the Army. He had even gone to the lengths of summoning up a field gun — this, for a relatively small incident, in the crowded streets of the East End, when the criminals were already trapped! Seymour was not alone in thinking that this tended towards overkill. However, it had gone down well in the newspapers.