At Cologne they had to wait an hour between trains, so they had a late breakfast and then Ranklin changed some money, bought tickets to Kiel and a newspaper while O’Gilroy had an early lunch.
“I imagine I’ll know when you’re dead when you’ve stopped chewing, not just breathing,” Ranklin said tartly, not having found any mention of Cross’s death in the German paper.
“How long before we get to this place Kiel?”
“Um … another ten hours.”
O’Gilroy said nothing and Ranklin went to buy himself a tin of Nurnberg teacakes.
They travelled first-class to Hamburg, but even so the last day of June was no time to be going on an unplanned journey. Too much competition with holiday-makers who had booked their campaigns of pleasure months before, and were now spraying chatter and cake-crumbs all around them.
Ranklin passed some of the time by trying to teach O’Gilroy some everyday words and phrases in German. He was a quick learner, though at his age he would never master another language, and his Irishness would always show through. But being Irish was itself a form of disguise for his present job, and Ranklin was ready to exploit it. He assumed O’Gilroy knew that, but it was too delicate a matter to be mentioned aloud.
The rest of the time, Ranklin just grew irritated at the journey and the vagueness of their task. At one stop, when they had the compartment briefly to themselves, he grumbled: “They should have some way of getting more information and instructions to us. Once we’re there, we’re bound to be under suspicion – if they suspected Cross – and difficult to get in touch with safely.”
“Like ye said, the problem of communications.” O’Gilroy was taking it all too equably for Ranklin’s mood.
“If it is just a clearing-up job – well, they should have somebody stationed permanently in a place as important as the German Navy’s headquarters town. Or they could have sent somebody along with Cross senior.”
“Mebbe they just don’t have the men. If they could find better than yeself who doesn’t like the job and me who doesn’t belong in it, d’ye think they’d be using us?”
That, unhappily, was unanswerable.
At Hamburg, where they changed trains and stations for Kiel, Ranklin bought another newspaper and at last found a reference to Cross’s death. At dawn on Sunday – yesterday – he had been found in one of the new and still empty locks at Holtenau, the Baltic end of the Kaiser Wilhelm Kanal (just Kiel Canal to the rest of the world) a mile or so north of Kiel city. He was a retired Royal Navy lieutenant, aged thirty-five, a keen yachtsman and a regular visitor to previous Kiel Weeks who had been staying at the Imperial Jachtklub. Sad, tragic, unfortunate – but no explanation or speculation. Ranklin guessed it was a simple rephrasing of a police statement.
He translated to O’Gilroy, who thought it over and said: “A sea lock, it’d be. Deep. How deep?”
“For the last few years they’ve been dredging the Canal and building these new locks to take the biggest battleships.”
“Forty foot, nearer fifty foot from the dockside, then.” Ranklin had forgotten how close to the sea the Irish lived – closer than the English, since literally every Irish city was a port. And hadn’t there been a hint that O’Gilroy had worked in the shipyards of Queenstown or Kingstown?
“A long way to fall, anyhow,” O’Gilroy observed. “D’ye mind me suggesting something? That ye don’t read nor speak German too well while we’re here. That way ye might be hearing things people don’t expect ye to understand.”
It was a lesson Ranklin seemed to be relearning constantly. His new job could use every skill he had, and many he hadn’t, but use them best in secrecy.
21
Kiel was boisterously overcrowded during the biggest event of its year, which meant there wouldn’t be as much as a mousehole left to rent. Nor were there any motor taxis: they simply hadn’t reached Kiel yet. So by the time they had packed themselves and their bags into a cab, Ranklin was reduced to clinging limply to his James Spencer identity and taking everything else one step at a time. The first step was the vice-consul.
Only, at that time of the evening, he wasn’t there and Herr Kessler was. “You are of Herr Cross a long-term friend?”
“Ah, yes,” Ranklin agreed, hoping one lunch covered the idea. “I was.”
“He is dead.”
“That’s why I’m here. Has his father arrived?”
“Yes. He is not here. He with Herr Sartori eats.”
The Sartori family clearly had a whole fistful of fingers in the pie of Kiel, being both British and American vice-consuls as well as Lloyd’s agents, before you started counting the shipping interests and incomes housed in their solid, dark waterfront offices. Kessler was just some senior clerk, but he had the stout unflustered dignity that comes with working for a long-established firm. And death was just another, probably not unfamiliar, commodity.
“Do you wish to see the police report?” he offered. “Herr Cross did not wish to see.”
Ranklin could imagine that the details of a beloved son’s violent end might lack appeal, but took the two-page document for himself.
“It must not this office leave,” Kessler warned.
So Ranklin stood at one of the high ledger desks in an empty office and picked his way carefully through the report. At least the police side of it was clear and concise: the Nachtwachter at the (new) Holtenau locks had telephoned the local police at 1.43 a.m. They arrived at 2.02, helped get the body out of the lock, and called the Kiel police at 2.17. Hauptmann Lenz arrived from Kiel at 2.39 and confirmed identity of the body (so a police captain, a big fish in a small city like Kiel, already knew Cross; that was bad news). Body sent to the Lazarett by 3.15, a cable sent to Cross’s parents’ home by the vice-consul as soon as the telegraph office opened at 8, medical report received at 1.30 p.m.
It all looked too neat and precise, but so did any report, including hundreds Ranklin himself had written. He copied all the times down without believing they were more than approximate, and moved onto the medical details. After ten minutes chewing his empty pipe and guessing at German versions of medical Latin, he deduced that Cross had broken almost every bone in his body, but predominantly his arms, skull and kneecaps, ruptured most internal organs but died – and was there a hint of expertise triumphant here? – of asphyxiation due to inhaling water and blood. Water in an empty lock?
He gnawed his pipe some more, wrote a few more notes, and took the report back to Herr Kessler.
“You understand?” Kessler asked.
“I think so. When will Herr Cross come back?”
“He does not come back. He stays at the Jachtklub or Hotel Hansa.”
“Thank you.”
“Please.”
Kiel harbour was a long inlet with the shipyards on the far, east, side, and most of the town and the docks on the west. Quite apart from the regatta, it was a busy place, the docksides lined with small steamers and Baltic trading schooners, the water crammed with homing fishing boats, ferries and important-acting motor launches. The Yacht Club, which Ranklin decided to try first once he had routed O’Gilroy and their baggage out of the nearest tavern, lay further out, almost on the edge of town and halfway to the Canal mouth and Holtenau.
“How’s it looking?” O’Gilroy asked, once they were clattering north in a cab.
“Good and bad.” He gave a rough outline of the report, adding: “The fact that they gave it to our vice-consul – in effect, to our Foreign Office – suggests it’ll stand up to scrutiny.”
“Sure, but is it the report they put in their own files?”
And come to think of it, Ranklin realised that the police and medical reports must originally have been separate. “Umm, yes. Well, the Canal and its locks aren’t secret, but they’re government property so it’s a suspicious place to be and a suspicious time to be there.”