Lysander was shocked, himself. He hadn’t seen a man collapse so abjectly and so suddenly ever before. It was as if Vandenbrook had become instantly dehumanized, changing into a form of atavistic suffering unit that precluded any reasoning, any sentience.
Lysander helped him to his feet – now absurdly conscious of their situation, two uniformed English officers in a Knightsbridge drawing room, one a spy-hunter and the other the sobbing spy he had hunted and caught – and yet every instinct in him was concerned and humane. Vandenbrook was a man in extremis, gasping and snuffling, hardly able to stand.
Lysander sat him down and found some crystal decanters in an unlocked tantalus on a table beside the grand piano and poured him an inch-deep draught of some amber fluid. Vandenbrook took a gulp, coughed loudly and seemed to compose himself, his breathing more measured, his sobbing ceased. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve and stood up, taking some paces towards the fireplace and back. It struck Lysander that, should Vandenbrook attack him, he had no defensive weapon to hand – but Vandenbrook seemed docile, cowed: no threat at all.
He sat down again, smoothed his jacket, smoothed his hair and cleared his throat.
‘What’re you going to do?’ he asked, his voice still quavery and frightened.
‘I have to give you up. I’m very sorry.’
‘That’s why you appeared at the Directorate, didn’t you? To find me.’
‘To find whoever was passing information to the enemy.’
Vandenbrook started to sob quietly again.
‘I knew this would happen,’ he said. ‘I knew someone like you would come one day.’ He looked Lysander full in the face. ‘I’m not a traitor.’
‘We’ll let the courts decide –’
‘I’m being blackmailed.’
He asked Lysander to follow him and they went up half a flight of stairs to a small mezzanine room off a landing. This was his ‘study’, Vandenbrook explained – some bookshelves, a small oak partners’ desk with many narrow drawers and a green-shaded reading lamp. In a corner was a large jeweller’s safe, the size of a tea-chest. Vandenbrook crouched by it and turned its combination. He opened the door, reached in and removed an envelope, handing it to Lysander. The address said simply, ‘Captain Vandenbrook, Knightsbridge’.
‘It’s always put through the letterbox,’ Vandenbrook explained, ‘in the middle of the night.’
Lysander lifted the flap and drew out a photograph and two pages of grubby, typewritten paper. The photograph was of a young girl – ten or eleven, he thought, staring blankly at the camera. Her hair was thick and greasy and the cotton blouse she wore seemed too big for her. Around her neck, incongruously, was a single rope of fine pearls.
‘I have a problem,’ Vandenbrook said, weakly. ‘A personal failing, a vice. I visit prostitutes.’
‘You’re saying this girl is a prostitute?’
‘Yes. So is her mother.’
‘How old is the girl?’
‘I’m not sure. Nine. Eleven . . .’
Lysander looked at Vandenbrook as he stood by his big safe, hunched, swaying, looking at the floor.
‘Good god,’ Lysander said flatly. ‘This girl is younger than your daughters.’
‘It’s not something I take any pride in,’ Vandenbrook said, his voice regaining some of its old arrogance. ‘It’s a terrible weakness in me. I confess – fully.’ He opened a cigarette box on his desk, took out and lit a cigarette.
‘Have you ever been to the East End of our great city?’ Vandenbrook asked. ‘Down by Bow and Shoreditch, those sort of places. Well, if you’ve got a little bit of spare cash you can get anything you want. Little boys and little girls, dwarfs and giants, freaks of nature, animals. Anything you can imagine.’
‘Tell me about the blackmail.’
‘I used to visit this girl – with her mother’s compliance – once a month or so,’ he said. ‘I became fond of her. She was unusually unconcerned by what I asked her to . . .’ He stopped himself. ‘Anyway, out of affection for her I gave her a pearl necklace. That was my mistake. It was in a box, there was the jeweller’s name, it was traced back to me. Her mother, a conniving, evil person – she wrote the deposition – now knew my name and who I was.’ He sat down on the edge of the desk, suddenly looking exhausted. ‘About a year ago, the end of last year, 1914, this envelope arrived with precise instructions. I was to pass on all the information I was party to at the Directorate. Everything I knew – movement of stores, munitions, construction of railway branch lines, and so on. If I didn’t comply then this photograph and the girl’s testimony would be sent to the Secretary of State for War, my commanding officer, my wife and my father-in-law.’ He gave a weak smile. ‘I assume you know who my father-in-law is.’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Then you’ll understand. A little. So I wrote down what I could find out and, as directed by the instructions, left the envelope to be collected by a person unknown in a particular hotel.’
‘The same hotel?’
‘Various hotels on the south coast. No doubt you’ve visited them all.’
Lysander looked at the girl’s blank face and read a few lines of the deposition. ‘The captin use to come and akse me to sit on his nee . . . He took my close off and then he told me to opin my legs as wide as I could . . . Then he woud wash me with a flannel and warm water and tell me to . . .’
Vanderbrook looked at him as he scanned the page, his eyes dead, the dashing uptilted blond moustache like a bad prop, the affectation of a different man altogether.
‘Did you try to find this woman and her daughter?’
‘Yes, of course. I hired a private detective agency. But they were long gone from their usual haunts. They obviously sold me on. To someone. Who may have sold me on again. Many men are trapped in this way. You wouldn’t believe it. There’s a whole trade in this blackmail, passed along, from one person to another –’
‘Many?’
‘We’re all capable of anything,’ he said. ‘Given the means and the opportunity.’
‘The pervert’s quick and easy excuse,’ Lysander replied, coldly. ‘Since time immemorial.’
‘I don’t excuse myself, Rief, as it happens. I hate myself, I loathe my . . . my sexual inclinations . . .’ he said with real feeling. ‘Just spare me your sanctimonious moral judgement.’
‘Continue with your story.’
‘Whenever a copy of this photograph and the witness statement arrived it was a sign that I should supply more information. I was also told which hotel I should leave it at. Another one came two weeks ago. The Dene Hotel, Hythe – the one you have.’
‘How do you encode it?’
‘What’re you talking about?’
‘Your previous letters were all in code. This one wasn’t.’
‘What code? I just write down the facts and figures and leave them at the hotel.’
Lysander looked at him, feeling a new panic. Somehow he knew at once Vandenbrook wasn’t lying. But then he checked himself. The man did nothing but lie, it was his raison d’être. However, he thought on, furiously investigating the ramifications of this news – if Vandenbrook didn’t transform the data into code then who did? If Vandenbrook was lying, then why did he not encode the last letter? There must be another Andromeda – or else Vandenbrook was playing another game with him. He began to feel his brain cloud.
‘What should I do, Rief?’
‘Do nothing – go to work, act as normal,’ Lysander said, thinking – this would buy him some time. He needed more time now, definitely, the complications were multiplying rapidly.
‘What’s going to happen to me?’ Vandenbrook asked.
‘You should hang as a traitor, if there’s any justice – but perhaps you can save yourself.’
‘Anything,’ he said fiercely. ‘I’m a victim, Rief. I didn’t want to do this but if my . . . my peccadillo was to become known . . . I just couldn’t face that, you see. The shame, the dishonour. You’ve got to help me. You’ve got to find out who’s doing this to me.’