“Is this all the Churchill stuff you have?” he asked. I nodded. “You surely won’t object if we borrow them for a while?” I nodded again. “Tell me,” he said with a change of tone, “did your Major Stanhope show any interest in these boxes? I’m told you had them with you in your cabin. Did Major Stanhope visit you there? Did you leave him alone with these at any time?”
I lit another cigarette and thought. How did O’Brien know where I’d kept the boxes? If he knew that, how was it he still seemed to know nothing of Major Stanhope? I was glad I’d said nothing of the Westbourne Grove meeting. O’Brien was looking closely at me. I shook my head. My conversations with Stanhope, I told him, had all been in the first class saloon. A few insignificant comments aside, he’d shown more interest in calendars than Winston Churchill. And I was more worried now about O’Brien’s mention of the establishment in Orwell Street. I needed time to sit down and think. If I was to tell him anything more, it could wait until I’d had time to compose myself.
O’Brien turned off the kitchen light and went over to the window. He moved the curtains gently aside and looked down into the street. He dropped the curtains and went back to the light switch.
“I don’t wish to alarm you, Dr Markham,” he said in a tone that was anything but reassuring. “But can I ask you not to leave this flat tonight? Can I also ask you not to answer the door unless I telephone you first? Would you also object if we collected these boxes from you tomorrow morning? It may be that there is nothing there of interest to us. But we should be grateful for the chance to look for ourselves.”
I stubbed my cigarette into the ashtray and lit another. Whatever Pakeshi had given me earlier was wearing off with a vengeance, and I could feel a heavy trip to the lavatory coming on. But I tried to smile and look less perturbed than I felt.
O’Brien fished out another card and handed it over. If anything odd happened overnight, he said—he lingered on the word anything—I should call him. In the meantime, I should keep the door locked. I might also keep the curtains drawn.
A few minutes after O’Brien had eventually left, there was a gentle knock on the door. I froze and sat down on the floor. There was a louder knock. Then I heard Pakeshi calling through the bullet hole.
“Anthony, Anthony,” he said with soft urgency, “open the door.”
“Go away,” I quavered. “I’m not allowed to come to the door. It’s too dangerous.” There was a hiss of annoyance.
“Anthony,” he said, now louder, “if you won’t open the door, I’ll stand out here until you do!” Keeping my body against the wall, I unlocked the door and opened it a few inches.
“If I had the slightest inclination,” he sneered, “I’d already have blown your arm off.” He pushed hard and walked in past me.
“What do you want?” I whispered as I closed and relocked the door. Ignoring me, he walked into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of tea. He came back and seated himself on a patch of the settee that wasn’t too stained. He’d now taken off his professional clothes, and was wearing the silk pyjama clothes of a wealthy native. There was a red dot on his forehead. His pupils had the contracted look of someone who’s been eating or smoking opium. In other circumstances, I’d have made a sarcastic reference to his consultations with Mrs Dale. But I looked at the half bottle of brandy he’d produced from within his robe. He topped up his teacup and passed the bottle to me.
“It may not be my business to know what the most excellent Inspector O’Brien could have wanted with you so late in the evening. But I do regard it as my business to know what is in those boxes. Perhaps it is not in my interest to know. But it is my undoubted wish.” He smiled coldly as I came back from the kitchen with an empty teacup and filled it from his bottle. There was no reason why he should know about any personal matters. But he might as well know the rest. I drained the cup and gave him an edited account of the conversation.
“Have you any tools in this flat?” he asked. I shook my head. With an expression of disgust, Pakeshi got up and went over to the front door. I thought to lock it again after him, but decided to go into the kitchen for a cup of tea. A few minutes later, Pakeshi was back, now carrying a canvas bag. He dumped it on the floor and fished inside for a hammer and chisel.
“What are you doing?” I asked wearily. I drank half my tea and topped it up with more of the brandy. “The police will be round in the morning to take everything away. I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to go opening them now.”
“I am, Dr Markham,” he said in a voice that didn’t welcome objection—and that didn’t now sound particularly Indian—“proposing to open those fucking crates. If you don’t wish to see what might be in them, I do!” With surprising force, he jabbed his chisel under the lid of one of the boxes and strained to prise it off. It was no more of a success than the effort someone else had made on the box. With a muttering of something in Hindi, he threw the chisel down and set to work with his claw hammer. With a squeal of nails within wood that might have woken Mrs Dale in whatever drug-induced slumber she’d been left next door, that got the lid off.
“Those are copies of his accounts for 1934 onwards,” I said, looking at the neat bundles of yellowish paper. “There’s a loan agreement secured on his country property that I’ll never be able to mention. But that’s everything of any interest.” Pakeshi stared at me a moment, then set about another of the boxes. I had to pick up the chisel and help lift the lid off this one. This time, he made me go through the bundles of typed and mostly undelivered speeches. These were Churchill’s later Philippics against Germany, and his calls for a witch hunt against pro-German Jews throughout the Empire.
“And what is this?” Pakeshi asked, pointing at the cardboard file right at the bottom of the box?” He had me there. This wasn’t anything I’d packed in Chicago. One of the unopened boxes was crammed with miscellanea I had found the time to organise properly. But this shouldn’t have been in with the speeches. I’d been very precise about sorting the contents of this box. Confused, I took it out and lifted the flap. Charred about the edges—doubtless from the fire that had ravaged the main collection—these were original manuscript pages in the old man’s later hand. I lifted the top sheet and held it up.
“Be careful, you idiot!” I snapped, pulling another of the sheets back from Pakeshi. “Can’t you see how scorched it is?” I put both sheets back into the file and took the lot into the kitchen. I put the file onto the table and lifted out all the dozen or so sheets. If they had been numbered, the lower edges were gone from every sheet, and I made sure to look at each in order. Pakeshi leaned over my shoulder. I could smell the garlic on his breath as he read them. I would have started an argument—only I was far too busy trying to control my now racing heart.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“When was President Anslinger ever in London?” Pakeshi asked. Now standing behind me, he still looked down at the heap of scorched paper. “When did Anslinger leave his bunker beneath the White House, let alone visit a hostile foreign country?” As if it had been cold tea, I took another mouthful of his brandy and cleared my throat.
“It says here he came over in the spring of 1948,” I answered. “He wasn’t President yet, you can see. He was still Lindbergh’s strong man. They’d settled the Houston Mutiny, and there was another six months to go before Lindbergh was killed. It seems that Anslinger was on a secret mission to get a big foreign policy success to bolster Lindbergh in the Congressional elections he’d promised for that year. He got us to repay the whole Great War debt and open our colonial markets to American manufactures. We also promised to bully the Japanese into vacating Hawaii and the Philippines, and we promised to guarantee the Pacific coast of America against further attack. You may remember how the announcement of the deal nearly did for Halifax as Prime Minister.”