So who was this Conrad de Lancey? What was Hertenberg up to? And what did it have to do with Heydrich?
De Lancey could be a spy being run by the Abwehr. Or Hertenberg could be a spy being run by the British secret service. Admiral Canaris might know. Given the involvement of Schalke, Heydrich might know. Asking Heydrich would be stupid. Dropping a casual word to Canaris while riding with him in the Tiergarten might elicit an interesting answer. But then Heydrich would find out that Schellenberg had been asking questions and that might turn out to be stupid too.
Schellenberg needed more information. Following the seizure of the British agents, a number of his officers had been assigned to Holland. One of them should keep a quiet eye on Hertenberg.
Whitehall, London
Still furious with his father and Theo, Conrad left Kensington Square to report to Van at the Foreign Office. His brain was in turmoil as he waited in an ante-room for the Chief Diplomatic Adviser. The reality of Millie’s death was pressing in on him, grief piercing through the anger, slowly at first, but more insistently with every minute.
When Mrs Dougherty eventually told him Van was ready to see him, it took a supreme effort of will to focus on his report. He expanded on his cryptic phone call from Amsterdam describing what Theo had told him about Captain Schämmel and the Venlo affair. Then he explained why he had gone to Paris. About Theo and Bedaux. And about the Duke of Windsor.
Van’s concern was obvious. Concern tinged with anger, not at Conrad but at the former king. But not as much surprise as Conrad would have expected.
‘I need hardly tell you that what you have outlined to me now is highly sensitive,’ Van had said. ‘Please do not repeat it to anyone. Clearly an allegation that a member of the royal family is a traitor is extremely serious. I can assure you that we will investigate it thoroughly, but until then, it’s just a suspicion. Leave it with me. And thank you.’
Conrad stood up to leave. ‘By the way, de Lancey,’ Van said, his voice uncharacteristically soft. ‘I heard about your sister’s murder yesterday morning. I am sorry. I met her on a couple of occasions: a lovely girl. Please accept my condolences for you and for your family, especially Lady Oakford.’ His voice hardened. ‘But tell your father to restrain himself with these independent peace initiatives. They cause all kinds of diplomatic mayhem. And after what happened at Venlo, and what befell your poor sister, it appears they are extremely dangerous.’
‘I quite agree, Sir Robert,’ said Conrad. ‘But my father ceased to listen to me on those matters long ago.’
‘We think we know who killed her,’ Van said.
Conrad looked at him sharply. ‘Who?’
‘I received a report from our intelligence services an hour ago, which sheds some light on it, although it also casts doubt on your information about the duke. Apparently her companion Mrs Scott-Dunton followed your sister into the sand dunes and found Millie’s body. As she was running for help, she saw someone whom she recognized leaving the dunes.’
‘And who was that?’ asked Conrad. But as he asked the question, he knew the answer.
‘Your friend in the Abwehr,’ said Van, his face grave. ‘Theo von Hertenberg.’
24
South Kensington, London, 19 November
The couple of days following his return from Paris had been extremely painful for Conrad. While the war was still very much ‘phoney’ for everyone he saw in the street, and for his unit back in Tidworth, it seemed to have already blown his family apart. Millie’s death struck Conrad and each of his parents hard in a series of repeating blows interspersed with brief periods of unreal calm. Lord Oakford was suffering from guilt, and so he should be. But then so too was Conrad.
The rational part of his brain knew than he had been correct to ignore his father’s requests to contact Theo, that standing up to Hitler was important. But if he had just done what his father had asked, Millie would still be alive. It wasn’t as if Lord Oakford had asked him to negotiate with the Nazi government. Theo represented people who were as opposed to the Nazis as Conrad himself.
Conrad didn’t know what to make of Van’s assertion that Theo was the most likely person to have killed Millie. He couldn’t accept it; he didn’t want to accept it. The whole point about Theo, what bound him and Conrad so tightly in such difficult circumstances, was that each believed that people were more important than nations or ideologies. Killing his friend’s sister would be the repudiation of what they both believed; in a world increasingly full of betrayals, it would be the ultimate betrayal.
But Theo had always been hard to read. There were several different Theos at Oxford: the idealist certainly, the intellectual, but also the womanizer, the drinker, and the arrogant Prussian. More recently there had been Theo the spy.
Theo the spy was especially hard to read. Conrad had no idea why Theo could possibly want to kill Millie, but he knew from first-hand experience the subtle complexities of the German intelligence services where the Gestapo and the Abwehr performed a lethal dance of bluff and counter-bluff and where it was impossible to be sure — to be absolutely sure — on whose side anyone was on.
Including Theo.
All right, Conrad admitted to himself, he didn’t want to believe Theo had killed his sister: there must be some other explanation, and he must find it. He needed to speak to Constance Scott-Dunton and find out what she knew and how sure she was of her identification.
From his club, Conrad sent a message to her via Sir Henry Alston’s office at Gurney Kroheim asking her to meet him as soon as she returned to England. He heard from her the following morning, suggesting that they meet at the Russian Tea Rooms in South Kensington.
He arrived there first, at about half past three. It was a cosy place, with wood panels and a roaring fire. He found a table and ordered some tea. A copy of a magazine named Truth lay on the table next to his. He picked it up and leafed through it. There was a particularly unpleasant article about how influential Jews in Britain, including the publisher Victor Gollancz and a bevy of bankers, had pressed Britain to come to the aid of their brethren in Berlin and declare war on Germany. Another criticized Hore-Belisha, the War Minister, for his previous business failures and his support for ‘co-religionists’.
Conrad tossed the magazine to one side. Seeing views like this not only written but read by his own countrymen made him profoundly sick. He had seen first hand in Germany how anti-Semitic words could become anti-Semitic actions, and how even a cultured society could succumb to hatred and paranoia. Why couldn’t people in England realize that as well as the threat from the continent, there was also the threat from within their own society from poisoners who wrote articles like that?
He looked around the room. The café was half full with respectable people respectably dressed. There was a foreign-looking gentleman with a white beard reading a newspaper in the corner. Then there was a middle-aged man with a beaked nose above a trim moustache drinking tea with a couple of women. Conrad thought he recognized the man: Captain Maule Ramsay, a Scottish Conservative MP noted for his anti-Semitic speeches. What kind of place was this that Mrs Scott-Dunton had brought him to?
‘You must be Millie’s brother. You look just like her.’
Conrad pulled himself to his feet and took the hand of a dark woman with pale skin and shining eyes.