Princes Gate (32 page)

Myerson’s eyes flickered as he drained the last dregs of gin. “’Ang on a moment then.” He scurried behind the counter and disappeared from sight. The policemen followed. A narrow staircase behind the counter led down to a grubby, illlit room. Bernie was rummaging around by a box in a far corner of the room.

“What are you doing?”

“Just tidying up a little. It’s a real mess down here.”

“What’s in there?”

“You want to see some of my work, don’t you? You did say you’re not going to go after me for anything in these photos, didn’t you?”

“Any agreement is dependent on you behaving yourself. Come on, bring it over here.”

Myerson dropped the box on to the floor and dragged it over to the policemen. It was overflowing with black and white photographs. Merlin picked up the photo at the top of the pile and held it out to Bridges. “I don’t think Iris would be happy if she knew you were looking at this sort of stuff.”

“No, sir. Very athletic.” The photograph displayed a naked woman, with long, flowing, dark hair, lying on a chaiselongue. She faced the camera with a pouting look and her legs splayed wide.

With his eyes now a little more accustomed to the light, Merlin looked around the room. Up against the wall he recognised the chaise-longue from the picture. On a chair nearby were draped various items of female underwear or nightwear. On the other side of the room a black curtain on rails closed off an area of space. Merlin could hear a tap dripping from behind the curtain. “So you snap the girls over here, Bernie, and then develop the pictures over there. Very efficient set-up, if I may say so. Rather like a Ford production line.”

Myerson shrugged and sat down on the chaise-longue. Merlin left Bridges to plough through the pictures in the box and walked over to the curtain. He pulled it back and saw a grimy metal sink. Next to the sink were a collection of tins and some clothes pegs. There was no work in progress and he pulled the curtain back.

“See anyone we know, Sergeant?”

“I don’t think so. Some of these could be girls we saw at the club, but it’s so dark in those places, I’d be hard pressed to be certain.”

“Hmm.” Merlin’s stroll around the room had brought him to the corner from which Myerson had brought the box. “Any negatives there?”

“Plenty here in folders and envelopes at the bottom of the box.”

“You won’t mind if we take the negatives and pictures with us, will you, Bernie? Just so we can make sure we’ve not missed anything.”

“I suppose I can’t stop you, can I?”

“I don’t think you can.”

“Mind if I just go through the photos so I’ve got a reference list of what you’ve got? It’s like my stock-in-trade isn’t it? I need to have a record, see.” He crept over to the box but Merlin shook his head and Bridges pushed him away. Swearing under his breath, the photographer fell back onto the chaise-longue.

Underneath the table on which the box of pictures had originally been resting, Merlin found a pile of old books. He leaned down and blew dust off the topmost volume. “What are these then?”

“Just photographic text books. Nothing important.”

Myerson stood up and limped over to Bridges. “Can I help you carry the box upstairs, Sergeant, if that’s all now?”

The large book on top of the pile was entitled
The Works of the Great Victorians
.

“Come on, Merlin, I’ll help your young chap with the box. I think you’ve seen everything there is to see.”

Merlin pulled the book out and opened it to a random page. An austere Victorian paterfamilias with his family stared back at him. “This is interesting stuff, Bernie.”

Myerson dropped the corner of the box he had just lifted from the floor and hurried over. “Yes, well, Mr Merlin, I have learned a lot about photographs in my time, but I don’t think there’s anything of interest to you there.” Myerson took hold of the book and attempted to close it but Merlin kept his hand on the page. “Hold your horses. I just want to look at some of the photographs. A little beauty will hopefully remove from my mind the ugliness of your own collection.” He turned the page and found a sepia tinted landscape of hills and trees, in the middle of which sat a turreted house. “Scotland, Bernie, or perhaps Austria, your homeland.”

“It’s Hungary, Mr Merlin, as you know. Now let me put the book back and you can get on with your business.” Myerson tugged again at the book, Merlin resisted and it fell to the floor. On impact something fell from its pages and fluttered under the table. Myerson bent down and put the book on the table. “Alright, alright. Look at the book if you want.”

“Look’s like you’ve lost a page there, Bernie. Don’t you want to pick it up?”

“Oh, it’s only a page marker. It ain’t important. Can I turn the light out now?” Myerson reached over to the light switch, turned if off and went up the stairs. Merlin bent down and felt around in the dark for the page marker. He found it but, as he straightened, banged his head on the bottom of the table. Rubbing the growing bump on his head with irritation, he made his way up the stairs. Back in the shop Bernie had got hold of another bottle of liquor, this time whisky, and was thirstily drinking.

Merlin set the ‘page marker’ on the counter. It was another photograph. He picked it up, moved to the door and stepped outside into the light. After a while he came back into the shop. “Very interesting, Bernie. Unusual sort of stuff for you I’d have thought. Diversifying a little I suppose. A good thing to cater to a broad range of markets.”

Myerson’s bloodshot eyes stared balefully back at Merlin. He said nothing.

“Can I have a look, sir?”

“I don’t know, Sergeant, I really do think you might be a bit too young for this one.”

Bridges took the picture and inhaled sharply.

“There must be a good story behind this picture, Bernie, and you’re going to tell the Sergeant and me all about it. Apart from the interest of the content alone, and the circumstance that it was this picture that you were clearly most anxious to hide from us, there’s the surprising fact that one of the characters featured might be known to the Sergeant and me. Now, put that bottle away, sit down here and tell us everything.”

Herman Zarb was relaxing at his desk with a cup of tea when the call came through. His junior secretary spoke to him in the reverential tone she always adopted when she picked up a connection from the States. She still found it hard to comprehend the miracle of science which enabled the human voice to be transferred three thousand miles along a piece of wire at the bottom of the ocean. “It’s Mr Hull, sir, er, I mean Mr Secretary Hull.” She had been admonished by the senior secretary for omitting Mr Hull’s title last time he’d come on the line.

“Put him through.”

A distant female voice spoke. “He will be with you momentarily, Mr Zarb.” The phone made a variety of clicking and buzzing noises until Cordell Hull’s Tennessee drawl came through reasonably clearly. “How are you, Zarb?”

“Well, sir. And you?”

“Not so good, to tell the truth.”

Zarb nervously stirred his drink. “Anything I can do?”

“That’s why I am calling. The President and I have had several telephone conversations with the Ambassador in the last couple of days.”

“Yes, sir.”

“He is, of course, his usual bullish self about the British war effort.”

“Er, yes, sir.”

“I’m being ironic, Zarb. You know ‘irony’, that thing the British say is alien to the American mind. Well anyway, we listened to the usual amount of defeatist bilge that the Ambassador had to spout about Great Britain’s prospects and the apparent invincibility of the Nazi military. Very depressing it was too. I hope to God he’s not right.”

“As you know, Mr Secretary, I have made every effort to encourage him in a more balanced view of Britain’s position.”

“Yes, yes, Zarb. I know you have done your best but you have not been successful. Mr Kennedy’s views on the British war outlook are as unbalanced as ever. Of course, I understand from my friends on Wall Street that Mr Kennedy has sold short so many British and French stocks and bonds that it would be counter to his economic interest to moderate his views.”

“I am aware of the Ambassador’s dealings, as are the British authorities, who take a rather dim view of his market activity while in his diplomatic post.”

“Naturally, but I am afraid it is only the arrival of the Final Judgement which is going to stop Joe Kennedy from dealing. Being in charge of the Securities and Exchange Commission didn’t stop him, so I hardly think being Ambassador to Great Britain is likely to.”

“Sir.”

“Anyway, coming to the point of this call – Norton, Arthur Norton, what’s he up to at present?”

“Operating in his usual maverick way. As you know, the Ambassador doesn’t like me to interfere with him, so I can’t give you a definitive report on his activities.”

“I know that, but you must have some idea of what he’s been up to. Who he’s been seeing and so on.”

Zarb leaned forward and pulled a piece of paper across his desk. “He does have a rather broad range of contacts in diplomatic circles. I haven’t got anything like a complete list but I have asked a few of my colleagues to keep an eye on him. Recently he seems to have developed a particular friendship with a fellow in the Foreign Office, an up-and-coming young diplomat close to Halifax, name of Freddie Douglas.”

A loud crackle came over the line and the voice in Washington faded. “Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that, sir.”

Hull’s voice came back strongly. “I said, do you know who his contacts at the Italian Embassy are?”

“No. Do you want me to find out?”

“Please, Zarb. Apparently the Ambassador has received some communication which, according to him, is of the utmost importance to the future of Europe. He said he was going to fly up to Washington from Palm Beach to tell us about it. When I asked him the source of this communication, he mumbled something about the Italians. Couldn’t get any more out of him so he’s bearing down on the President and me tonight. I knew that you couldn’t have been in the loop on this as you would have been on to me straight away, would you not?”

“Of course. I know nothing about any Italian communications.”

“Quite. So it occurred to me that the likely conduit of such information to the Ambassador might be Arthur Norton.”

Zarb’s cheek began to twitch, the only discernible sign of anger in a man who prided himself on his self-control. He spoke calmly into the black Bakelite telephone receiver. “Norton was in here the other day in something of a flap about not being able to get hold of the Ambassador. In the end I put him in touch with our cipher department and he sent some coded message over to the States. When I asked the cipher clerk who dealt with it to give me a decoded copy, he told me that he had been expressly forbidden to reveal the details to anyone by Norton. As the clerk was in a difficult position, I let it pass, on the basis that I would take it up in due course with Norton and the Ambassador himself.”

Through the crackle and hissing again coming down the line, Zarb could just hear Secretary Hull sighing deeply. “This, Zarb, is the trouble you get when amateurs are given high-ranking diplomatic posts. Just because Joe Kennedy spent some of his ill-gotten bootlegging money backing the President years ago, we have an idiot like Arthur Norton running round London fancying himself as a latter-day Talleyrand.”

“Is there anything you want me to do?”

“No, no. I’ll see if I can track down the encoded message Norton sent to the Ambassador but, in any event, I’ll know whatever it’s about in a few hours when Kennedy arrives here from his extended vacation – sorry, I mean his sick leave – in the sun. Anything else of note I should know before I ring off?”

Zarb stroked his chin and looked at his reflection in the elegant eighteenth century mirror to the left of his desk. His cheek had stopped twitching. “Well, Mr Secretary, we’ve had a couple of local junior employees of the Embassy die. It’s been rather distressing and…”

Hull cut in abruptly. “That’s very sad, Zarb, but these things happen. Now I think…”

“Sorry to interrupt, Mr Secretary, but these employees didn’t die of natural causes. They were violently murdered. I know it may be of no importance in the greater scheme of things, but I thought I’d mention it since my sources, such as Miss Edgar at the residence, inform me that the police are regarding Mr Norton with great suspicion.”

There was silence at the end of the line. “Sir, are you still there?”

“Yes, sorry. You shocked me. Does the Ambassador know anything of this?”

“Yes, sir. He knows.”

“Send me a note of the details. It’s strange that Norton has come under suspicion.”

“Mr Norton is a rather louche character and has a very lively social life. I do not like the man but I find it hard to imagine that he’s involved in murder. He can be pompous and aggressive so my guess is that he probably just put the police officers’ noses out of joint. Generally speaking, I don’t think the police have made any real progress yet and, in these fraught times, one tends to wonder whether there is any greater meaning to the violent deaths even of a chauffeur and an office girl.”