He hastily emptied the rest of the envelope onto the table by the window and unfolded his new passport. It showed him to be James Spencer, merchant, of Lahore, India, travelling with his servant Terence Gorman.
“Just like I was yer dog,” O’Gilroy commented, realising he had to give up having a passport of his own.
“It would be the same if you were my wife or child.”
“English gentlemen surely love owning people.”
“Look, we talked this over …”
And had agreed to experiment with a master-and-servant act to widen their social coverage. O’Gilroy might now pick up gossip from other servants and go unnoticed where a gentleman would arouse suspicion. And, within limits, they had been free to invent their own new selves.
Ranklin’s had been the trickiest, since a gentleman leaves a well-marked trail of family, schools, university or one of the services, job – if he has one – his clubs and London friends. Now each such footprint he had left in Time had to be considered, then altered or erased.
Spencer had once been real enough, a schoolboy friend who had vanished from Oxford after a scandal that had been called “unspeakable” because, no matter how hard people had spoken of it, nobody could understand its complications. However, if only half those complications were true, it was reasonable to assume that Spencer was long dead, and the only relatives the Bureau could trace were in Canada. Ranklin had simply given him a new life in India where he had served for three years himself – and the Bureau had rounded it off with the proper passport, driving licence, calling cards, letter of credit and tailors’ labels to replace those on his clothes which, of course, bore his real name.
Ranklin now looked at these gloomily. Like his clothes, he was used to an identity that fitted and was his alone, and James Spencer did not really fit. He was second-hand and awkward, and like most short people, Ranklin hated seeming awkward.
But perhaps worst of all, he was quite incompetent with a needle and thread. “Can you sew?” he asked.
“Yez asking a soldier with ten years’ service?”
“Of course! Then would you be so kind?”
O’Gilroy’s new identity had excited him: he liked being secret and unknown. The Bureau had found his problem to be the very opposite of Ranklin’s: to leave his background as vague as he preferred it, would, they thought, itself be suspicious. So they had added longer periods of service with Anglo-Irish (“West British” as they called themselves) families, and a misspelt letter from a sister in America urging him to emigrate after her.
O’Gilroy read this through twice and announced: “She’s convinced me. Anything’s better than sitting here sewing for a black-hearted scoundrel like yeself, Mr Spencer.”
“I observe the sitting but not yet the sewing. I think we agreed you didn’t have to be a good valet, but you had to be seen to be trying.”
Replacing the tailors’ labels apart, all they now had to do was leave a trunk of unsuitable clothes with the hotel, lodge their old passports and papers at the bank and catch a train to give their new identities a trial run in Brussels.
Oh yes – and Ranklin could shave his upper lip for the first time in twenty years. His moustache was the one aspect of his Army background he didn’t mind leaving behind. And the risk of being mistaken for a Naval officer was, he reckoned, very slight.
20
DID YOU HEAR POOR RICHARD DIED ACCIDENT KIEL QUERY CROSS SENIOR TRAVELLING VIA HOOK STOP HE WOULD MUCH APPRECIATE YOUR MORAL SUPPORT KIEL STOP CONTACT THROUGH VICE CONSUL STOP REGARDS TO MATTHEW AND CONALL ENDS SIGNED UNCLE CHARLIE
“Bloody hell,” Ranklin croaked sleepily. Then, to the sombre night porter: “Allez reveiller mon domestique, chambre cinque zero quatre, s’il vous plait,” and pushed some coins at him.
They must have been enough because he came back for more, along with a rumpled and dressing-gowned O’Gilroy, and Ranklin sent him for a large cognac. Then he gave O’Gilroy the cable.
“Richard? Would that be the feller we was talking with in Amsterdam?”
“Must be. Died in an accident. Christ. How?”
“D’ye think this is real?” He flapped the cable.
“I do. That ‘Matthew and Conall’ … If anybody else knows as much about us, how much more can we give away by going to Kiel? You get dressed and pack up, then come back and pack for me. I’ll be downstairs feeding francs into the night manager to get us on the next train.”
The cognac arrived as Ranklin was tying his necktie. He swallowed half, pretending it was late yesterday instead of early today, and left the rest to stoke up O’Gilroy. The next half-hour was as fraught as he’d expected, but then they were in a cab and almost galloping through the empty dawn streets to the Gare du Nord. Perhaps no city in Europe becomes so much a fortress against the night as Brussels, but now the heavily shuttered windows seemed deliberately blind to the bright new day. And on the whole, Ranklin’s feelings were with the windows and not the day.
The station platform was barely more wakeful, with hunched sleepy figures standing oblivious to the shrieks, clanks and drifting smoke from the busy shunting engines.
O’Gilroy lit a cigarette. “And what are we doing when we get there?”
“I don’t know yet. Can he expect us to investigate how Cross died?”
“That’d be telling the Germans who we are – if they knew who he was.”
Ranklin reread the crumpled telegram (should he be sure to destroy it or be sure to keep it? – but have a ready explanation for who Uncle Charlie was? Oh Lord, the complications). “‘He would much appreciate your moral support’. How’s your moral support?”
“I forgot to pack it.”
“I wonder if this doesn’t decode as ‘Find out if Mr Cross knew what his son was up to, stop him making a fuss, and pack him off home with the body at the double.’”
“I’d prefer it that way. Speaking of codes, is that the best the Bureau can do?”
“In a rush like this, I imagine it is. We don’t want the hotel getting a cable in five-figure cipher groups. Anyway, the cable companies won’t send them except between embassies and governments. And we were told our worst problem would be communications. ”
“I could’ve told them that meself. But when I was …” then O’Gilroy shut up firmly.
“Europe’s a little bigger than the back streets of Dublin and Cork, but if you’ve any suggestions …?”
It was doomed to be a long, hot, crowded day. The train, second- and third-class only, much to O’Gilroy’s disgust, took four sticky hours to crawl the hundred miles to Cologne. At first, Ranklin just sat and watched Belgium’s industrial towns waking up, step by step, town by town, like heavy smokers rolling out of bed and lighting the first cigarette, then the first pipe … by Liege, the windless sky had a false ceiling of smoke from thousands of kitchen and factory chimneys. After that, he read a newspaper.
There was nothing about an Englishman’s death at Kiel, but after two weeks of frontier incidents and skirmishes, real fighting seemed to have restarted in the Balkans. Who had started it was uncertain, but Ranklin’s money was on Bulgaria. They were fighting the Serbs near Kotchana and the Greeks on the river Mesta. He got angry at the lack of certainty and detail, then remembered how much, much less those actually fighting would know of what was going on. So he tried instead to get angry at the stolid pipe-puffing faces around him who thought of this as a distant peasant squabble and didn’t realise that war could run along a telegraph wire faster than fire along a fuse. But if they did realise, what could they do about it? So he glowered at O’Gilroy for having the good sense to fall asleep again.
They were roused for a long Customs check at Herbesthal, where Ranklin tried to look, casually, for the rumoured signs of preparation for an invasion of Belgium, but saw none.