“I wish I knew, ma’am.”
Margaret Thatcher glared at him. The horrible silence settled around the four people in the cold, damp room tainted with the smoke from the feebly drawing chimney.
“I lost my youngest kid,” the American said when it seemed like the atmosphere was freezing close to absolute zero. “Her name was Tabatha May, she was eighteen years old. After we’d had our boys she was…an accident. Like any kid you don’t expect she was everything to us. My wife Joanne and me, we still think we’ll wake up one morning and it’ll all turn out to have been a bad dream. Not a minute of any day goes by that we don’t remember driving Tabatha up to Buffalo to start college.” His voice choked, only for a moment. “Do you mind if I ask who you lost, ma’am?”
Airey Neave, who knew Margaret Thatcher as well as anybody in Government House, and Tom Harding-Grayson, whose acquaintance with her was of a shorter but latterly somewhat intense character — literally under fire — both feared the Angry Widow would fly at the quiet American.
They were both astounded when, after sniffing back a sob she nodded and whispered: “My husband, Denis. He was my rock.” They were even more flabbergasted, and a little shocked, when she added: “And I very much fear that a remarkable man whom I met only recently has been sent abroad on perilously dangerous work from which, in the present circumstances, he might well not return…”
“The last I heard,” Walter Brenckmann sympathised, “my oldest boy was on the USS Scorpion. For all I know, the Scorpion is riding herd on the Enterprise Battle Group as we speak.”
Tom Harding-Grayson coughed genteelly.
“In the hours before relations were severed with the United States, Captain Brenckmann visited my cottage where by chance Henry Tomlinson and I were drowning our sorrows. Henry and I came away from that meeting convinced that there was at least one man on Ambassador Westheimer’s staff who was as troubled by the turn of events as we were,” a quirk of arid humour, “and are.”
“Sir Henry is aware of this meeting?” Margaret Thatcher demanded, having hastily recovered her briefly mislaid composure.
“Not officially.”
If the Angry Widow recognised that the Foreign Secretary and her own closest advisor in Government — Airey Neave — had drawn her into a trap, she hid her vexation. Tom Harding-Grayson and Airey Neave knew that if they had her on their side then there was a prospect that the Prime Minister might listen to what they had to say, and more importantly, to what the former American Naval Attaché had to say. Margaret Thatcher had been with Edward Heath at Balmoral, and she’d backed him — to the hilt — when he sacked most of the Cabinet and put the UKIEA on a war footing. All her political credit had been banked when the Premier needed it most, and therefore, commanded a premium.
When neither of her colleagues made a move to kick off proceedings the Home Secretary took command.
“Tell me about yourself Captain Brenckmann?”
“I’m a small time Boston lawyer who volunteered for Officer Selection to the Navy Department back in forty to avoid being drafted into the infantry, ma’am.” The American waited to see how his opening gambit went down, adjusted the tone of his narrative and continued: “Joanne and me married in thirty-four the year I graduated law school at Yale. I was twenty-five; she was a few weeks short of her twenty-ninth birthday. She worked in a typing pool and waited tables to put me through law school. We met in a diner when I was a freshman. Our families were scandalised, mine no more than Joanne’s. Walter Junior was born a few days short of nine months after the wedding. Daniel arrived fourteen months later, Sam thirteen months after that. Tabatha was an accident that happened on a seven day furlough in the spring of forty-three. The doctors had said Joanne shouldn’t have any more kids after Sam came along but, hey, what do doctors know?”
“Did you see much war service, Captain Brenckmann?”
“My fair share, ma’am. I’d hoped they’d send a lawyer like me straight to the Judge Advocate’s Department. Washington wouldn’t have been that far away from Joanne and the boys; instead I got assigned to a DDE, that’s a destroyer escort. After Pearl Harbour I spent most of my time crossing and re-crossing the North Atlantic. Convoy escort duty. By the time I got home in forty-six I was a Lieutenant-Commander in the USN Reserve. I got called back when the Korean War kicked off; they made my third half-ring into a full ring and gave me a Fletcher class fleet destroyer to drive. After that I went back to lawyering again. Joanne and me were thinking about selling up, moving down to the Florida Keys when I retired. Only somebody blew up the World first and I got put on a plane for England.”
Margaret Thatcher absorbed the story.
“I qualified as a barrister before I entered Parliament,” she informed the American. “My original training was as a chemist. I’ve always found the combination of a scientific and a legal training indispensible in the analysis and reconciliation of conflicting narratives.”
“Being a successful litigator requires a forensic mind,” the man agreed.
The woman didn’t reply immediately.
“It is our view,” she determined, unhurriedly, “that the attack on Balmoral could not have been carried out without the active, or perhaps, tacit, acquiescence of diplomatic staff at your Embassy.”
“I have no intelligence with which to confirm or counter that view, ma’am,” the American responded. “I didn’t come here to defend or to denigrate my former colleagues at the Embassy.”
“Why did you agree to come here, Captain Brenckmann?”
“I came here because I don’t want there to be another war.”
Chapter 12
Seventy-four year old António de Oliveira Salazar had been Prime Minister of Portugal for over thirty years. He had founded and led the Estado Novo — New State — Party which had ruled over his country since 1932. He wasn’t an easy man to know; hardly surprising given that he and his Spanish contemporary, General Francisco Franco Bahamonde, were the last of the pre-war dictators. Nevertheless, Sir Richard Templar, the British Ambassador had developed a somewhat grudging respect and admiration for the Portuguese leader in his seven months in Lisbon. Salazar lived modestly, forsaking the trappings of his office. He hadn’t come to power through street-fighting, civil war, or by persecuting or demonizing minorities, or by gratuitously misrepresenting the historical narrative of his country. By and large his rule had been without the excesses of the other European dictators and even during the 1939–1945 war he’d made it known that he detested Hitler and everything he stood for. As long ago as 1940 Life magazine had called him ‘the greatest Portuguese since Prince Henry the Navigator’. A quiet, modest academic whose manners remained professorial and sometimes overly introspective for a man in his position, Oxford University had once awarded him a Doctorate in Civil Law.
In the Second World War when Portugal had walked a fine line between the various combatants ever mindful of the priority of co-existing with a Spanish neighbour that might — at any time up until the end of 1943 — have flipped onto the Nazi side of the conflict with disastrous consequences for the Portuguese state. During Hitler’s war Lisbon had been the espionage capital of Western Europe, the playground of the British MI5, MI6 and Special Operations Executive, the German Abwehr and its SS analogue the Sicherheitsdienst, the Soviet NKVD, and the forerunner of the CIA, the American Office of Strategic Services. In the middle years of World War II Salazar had adroitly guided his small country along a perilous diplomatic high wire; tolerating German U-boats and surface raiders sheltering and replenishing in his waters, turning a blind eye to Allied machinations on Portuguese territory, ignoring the Great Game being played out in the streets of his capital city by the intelligence communities of all the warring parties, knowing that only continuing Portuguese neutrality might preserve the nation.