There was no hint at all of Army experience in O’Gilroy’s posture: he was upright, but apart from that as relaxed as a tired snake. He barely managed to flick away his cigarette end and raise his bowler as Ranklin came out into the sunlight.
“Stand to attention,” Ranklin muttered, “and look as if I’m taking off your balls with a blunt knife. I’m sure you know you had the police trailing you last night – and what happened to one of them. I’ve been hearing all about it. Don’t answer: they’ll expect me to rave on at you, and we have to assume we’re being watched, everywhere. I think their Naval Intelligence is in on the act, too, and I fancy they got Cross’s number. Now his father wants me to play detective and the police are co-operating. It makes it easier for them to keep an eye on us.”
He remembered to keep his expression angry and to punctuate with savage gestures. By now O’Gilroy was at attention and looking like a dog trying to charm its way out of a whipping.
“One bit of good news is that Mrs Finn’s on her father’s yacht in the harbour and we’re invited to lunch. You’ll probably have to eat with the crew, so d’you want to come?”
“When else would I be seeing the inside of a boat like one of them?” O’Gilroy asked mournfully.
“Fine. Now we’d better take a look at these locks.”
Just then, Lenz came striding out of the Club, touched his hat to Ranklin, gave O’Gilroy a disdainful up-and-down look, and went to a small but well-polished blue tourer that he cranked and drove away himself.
“Lenz,” Ranklin said. “Their captain of detectives.”
“I saw him watching from just inside the Club.
“Assume he’s always around. Get us a cab, please.”
There were plenty of other cars parked at the quayside, but still none of them taxis. So they ended up in another open horse-drawn four-wheeler, O’Gilroy sitting upright under his bowler, Ranklin slumped under his straw boater (at least he had the right hat) and both far enough from the cabby to talk freely, they hoped.
Of course, Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t have taken the first nor the second cab on offer (did the man never miss a train thereby?) but there was hardly any secret about this journey. Still, Ranklin hadn’t realised the Holmes stories were so well-known in Germany – unless they were just prescribed reading for Naval Intelligence.
Watching the harbour jog past, he realised how spoilt he had become by the motor taxis of London and Paris. A few years ago, he would have relaxed, knowing he was going as fast as possible; now, he fidgeted with impatience that slowly dissolved as O’Gilroy reported his night in the Old Town. Ranklin half admired his tenacious depravity, half feared he would have done most of it from choice anyway.
“You seem to have had a most educational time,” he conceded finally. “And about all I did was count Cross’s socks. Would you know either of the two men again?”
“Surely.” O’Gilroy smiled nastily. “One’ll be walking bent over and holding himself private-like, and t’other’s got his nose spread right across his face.”
“Ye-es. I suppose it is more practical to have a description of people after they’ve met you than before. And the woman?”
“Mebbe. The voice I think I’d know. D’ye want to see the pictures?” He passed them over. “That’s the one the feller said ye’d like best.”
“And quite right too.” Ranklin quickly covered some square metres of female flesh with the German High Seas Fleet. It was an ordinary postcard showing a salute being fired at some earlier Kiel Week. Perhaps five ships might, to an expert, have been identifiable through the smoke clouds. So saluting guns didn’t use smokeless charges: the Admiralty wasn’t likely to award him a pension for that news.
“There’s a number on the back,” O’Gilroy said.
The scrawled figures said 030110. Ranklin looked blankly at them, then blankly at O’Gilroy. “Well? – you bought it.”
O’Gilroy shrugged. “He just said ye’d like it. Didn’t say there was a couple of hard boys outside wanted it as well.”
“Just another damned mysterious bit of paper.” He realised he hadn’t read the cablegrams Mr Cross had given him, not wanting to produce them in the Club breakfast room. He took them out, gave one to O’Gilroy, and they both read for a while. The cab turned inland and began to climb through wooded parkland past the Bellevue Hotel.
Three cablegrams had been sent at two-day intervals during the past week, each from Korsor to Mr Cross Senior at his Essex home. But one was about commodity prices, timber, grain and coal, another gave the results of the early yacht races and the third was about the times of boats and trains for young Cross’s journey home.
They stared at each other.
“Code?” O’Gilroy suggested.
“Yes, except his father couldn’t understand them. Perhaps it was a trial run to see if the cable office accepted such messages.”
“Lots of numbers in them.”
“That’s true.” Ranklin began counting. “Exactly twelve figures in each message, not counting times and dates put on by the cable company.”
“That sounds like something.”
“Damn it, everything sounds like something – even Dragan el Vipero.”
“Ye’ve heard of him, too?”
“Yes – and you? Reimers, their Naval Intelligence, I think, said he was in town.”
“Paddy the barman told me. Said ’twas him killed the King of Greece.”
“Another?” Brussels had been full of stories-for-sale about that assassination. The shot had been fired by a loony, but that left the question of who hired the loony, then who hired whoever hired the loony … Dragan sounded as if he belonged in such rumours; it seemed the sort of name which, mentioned in a Low Dive, would cause half the customers to slink out white-faced and the other half to knife you.
O’Gilroy took a more robust view. “Most fellers call themselves names like that’re just piss and wind. Worry about the ones that tear yer arms off without introducing themselves.”
“I’ll try to remember. Oh, and one other thing.” He hadn’t planned to mention the bearer bond, high finance not being O’Gilroy’s strong point, but if they were sharing paper puzzles … He explained what the bond was, officially.
O’Gilroy looked it over and grunted: “Pretty picture. Is this where we’re going?”
“Yes. Mind, all that isn’t built yet.”
“Tell me something, Captain,” being called that again immediately made Ranklin wary; “are we trying to solve what got him killed?”
“No, we are not. No matter what his father thinks. And quite apart from what it would do to us, we aren’t in the business of revenge. Cross knew the risks he was running, he knew he was on his own.” But, forced to think about it, he realised he was assuming Cross had been murdered – probably because he assumed that spies on active service didn’t die accidentally. But for that very reason, he had to convince Lenz and Reimers that he accepted it as an accident.
“I expect the police did it anyways,” O’Gilroy said equably. “And how would ye prove that?”
“Hold on. The Prussian police have a reputation for thinking with their fists, but they’d rather have the kudos of catching a spy.”
“They was looking for him, just before he got dead.”
“So you said. They didn’t say why they were looking?”
O’Gilroy gave him a pitying look. “Since when did the police say why they was doing anything?” Their different backgrounds had given them very different outlooks on the police – of any country.
“What happened that night that they should suddenly want Cross?” Ranklin mused. “Or had they been watching him and lost him?”
“And him in a pink jacket.”
“That sounds like a Leander Rowing Club blazer.” In Kiel’s Old Town, that would have stood out like a lighthouse on the darkest night.