Skyprobe (4 page)

The only sound in the room came from a clock which ticked the seconds away behind Katherine Danvers-Marshall’s back. Shaw waited for her to answer his question, watching her face meanwhile. There was fear and anxiety in her eyes but after a while she said in a clipped tone, “It was bound to come out, wasn’t it. Sooner or

later? I knew that. I always said so to my husband, but he wouldn’t listen. You see, he was so wrapped up in his work. He refused to risk any interruption in that” Suddenly her shoulders drooped; she had a defeated look. “If he’d been . . . entirely honest they’d have taken him off all work involving a security risk, wouldn’t they? Anyway, that was what he believed. Myself, well, I never did think they’d have gone as far as that, but
he
always said they would.”

She stopped. Shaw sat very still. When she didn’t go on he said promptingly, “I think you have quite a lot to explain, Mrs. Danvers-Marshall.” He repeated his question, his face hard now: “What do you know of Stefan Aleksander Spalinski?”

* * *

It was a slightly sordid but wholly understandable story of promiscuity and evasion. Katherine Danvers-Marshall had known Spalinski years before; her husband, she said, had never met him—but, for a very personal reason, she, at least, owed much to Spalinski and his wife. Spalinski’s wife, the woman who had been the girl Vanessa Burnside, had been married previously to Katherine Danvers-Marshall’s cousin Arnold Burnside, who had been killed at Dunkirk. Katherine, who had been deeply attached to her cousin, had grown fond of Vanessa also. At about the time of her cousin’s marriage Katherine, then aged nineteen, had fallen very much in love with a young man a few years older than herself; at twenty she had borne his child, a girl. After this she had never seen him again (and later had heard, more or less by chance, that he also had been killed at Dunkirk.) As soon as they were able to, the Burnsides had adopted Katherine’s illegitimate baby legally. Katherine had been heartbroken but her parents had made difficulties and in fact the child couldn’t have had a better home. Thus, owing to the cousin’s death in action and Vanessa’s subsequent re-marriage, to Spalinski, it was Katherine Danvers-Marshall’s daughter who was now living, presumably in Poland still, as Spalinski’s stepdaughter. The Spalinskis had taken her there when they had left England in 1948 and Katherine, who two years after they left had married Neil Danvers-Marshall, had had no contact with them since. She had told Danvers-Marshall everything, and, apparently, he had understood. Nothing of the past had ever been talked about to anyone, never even mentioned except between themselves, and by the time of the marriage, which was almost twelve years after the birth of Katherine’s baby, with a world war between, none of their friends knew anything of the story; also, Katherine’s parents were dead by this time and she had never been back to her old home. Thus when Danvers-Marshall had been screened by the security people in the States, nothing had been known and Danvers-Marshall had never volunteered anything. Katherine admitted that he had given deliberately untruthful answers to certain questions and had falsified forms, but this had not been from wrong motives. He was anxious only that nothing should stand in the way of his work; and he was convinced that such a connection in a Communist country would ensure that he was turned down on security grounds.

“He was probably dead right,” Shaw said grimly. “Especially in the States! He’d be considered wide open to persuasion. That’s precisely the kind of pressure the Communists love to exploit. Now—let’s have a little more about Spalinski.”

She said, “I can tell you one thing, they could never have pinned Communistic leanings on Stefan—or on Neil, of course.”

“If Spalinski wasn’t a Communist, why did he return to Poland?”

She said quietly, “Because he loved his country and had never quite settled to English life. And also because he had been a pre-war officer in the Polish Army. He wanted to fight for Poland in the only way left to him once the war was over—underground.” She added, “When he was still in England, after the war, he became a member of the NTS. I believe he went back to Poland as an agent for them.”

“
Did
he indeed? That’s extremely useful to know!” Here was an avenue that could well yield up whatever it was Spalinski had been trying to tell him; Shaw knew precisely where he could find the British agents of the anti-Communist organization known as the NTS. The Popular

Labour Alliance—which was the translation of the Russian name—was in fact a Russian set-up but it had many sympathizers and active supporters in the satellite countries. Its aim was consistently to organize anti-Communist forces with the object of fostering revolution by peaceful means. To this eventual end the NTS, as directed from its operational centre in Frankfurt, maintained representatives in all important seaports. These agents contacted seamen from Communist-bloc ships in order to disseminate literature and establish contacts with members inside the Communist countries. In addition the NTS organized frontier crossings into these countries and had even, from time to time, dropped parachutists inside the Communist borders. Perhaps this was how the Spalinskis had entered Poland in 1948—completely with forged papers, to start a new life. The Polish authorities could scarcely have been unaware of Spalinski’s connection with the NTS; as Spalinski, he could hardly have expected to remain alive for long once he had crossed the border. He would have been provided with a completely new identity, but Katherine Danvers-Marshall couldn’t be expected to know about that. . . .

Shaw asked, “Have
you
any ideas as to what this threat Spalinski spoke of could be? In your personal relationship with your husband, can you find any clues, any pointers?”

She was puzzled. “How do you mean, exactly, Commander?”

Shaw frowned; it was a hard question to answer. Latymer had failed to convince him that a woman’s intuition could pierce the intricacies of a Communist plot in advance. He said off-handedly, “It just occurred to me that you might have noticed something off-beat . . . that’s all really.”

“Men lurking around Florida with cloaks and daggers?” She laughed, cynically. “Doesn’t the British Defence Staff or whatever it is, know better than that, Commander?”

“I apologize,” he told her, smiling. “I just thought you might have been aware of something in the air—that possibly, for example, your husband had had something on his mind, that he might have made unscheduled trips perhaps, during which, let’s say, he could have been approached by persons who wished to talk to him privately?”

She stiffened. “Do you mean Neil might have been in touch with foreign agents, Commander Shaw? Why, that’s just ridiculous! He just isn’t—”

“No,” Shaw broke in. “I don’t mean that—at least, I certainly don’t mean to suggest he’d ever had initiated anything of that sort. But, you see, I do find it hard to believe the Communists would be planning anything that might say, destroy Skyprobe IV
unless
they had first contacted your husband with a view to getting him to part with information—or whatever it is they want—while he was still on the ground. After all—he’s a pretty valuable property to both sides. He’s not expendable. Do you follow?”

Her mouth was still tight. “Yes,” she said. “I follow, all right. But there wasn’t anything like that, I assure you. He’d have told me—I know he would. And if there had been anything likely to go wrong, and if Neil had known about it, or if approaches, as you call them, had been made to him . . . well, he’d scarcely have cleared the flight at all, would he? He’d have reported to NASA or CIA or someone and called it off!”

“It was just an idea,” Shaw murmured, “and obviously a poor one! In any case, this threat may not exist at all for all I can say at the moment.” He didn’t want to add to this woman’s worries by reminding her that Danvers-Marshall was still liable to pressures on account of the girl in Poland and that, if approaches had been made, he could hardly report them unless at the same time he was prepared to reveal that he had come in on a dirty ticket years before. In the light of what he had heard, and of what Latymer had told him the previous day, Shaw was currently unhappy about Neil Danvers-Marshall; but all he said, when he got to his feet, was: “I don’t think I need bother you any more for now, Mrs. Danvers-Marshall. You’ve been a lot of help, and I’m grateful.” He paused, then said casually, “As a matter of fact, though, there is just one more thing. Do you know a man called Rudolf Rencke, by any chance?”

“Rudolf Rencke?” She frowned. “Heavens, what a name . . . no, I’ve never heard of him. Should I have?”

He shrugged. “Not necessarily.” He turned for the door, but she stopped him.

She asked, “What about Neil. . . afterwards?”

“Once we’ve bowled this thing out and the capsule’s down safely?” He felt she was going ahead a little too fast, perhaps. He wanted to let her down lightly for now, even at the expense of a white lie. He went on, “I’m bound to report what you’ve told me, you’ll realize that, and I can’t forecast the official reaction. But I doubt if after all these years they’d drop a man of the Professor’s stature just because of an omission in his original security statement, still less make any charges public.” He didn’t add that that would apply only if Danvers-Marshall hadn’t in fact had any contact with hostile agents that he had failed to report; he left her to fill that in for herself.

* * *

By lunch-time Shaw was back in London.

Wasting no time he drove through to the car park at Tower Hill, where he left the Wankel. He walked quickly through to Houndsditch where half way along he took a turning to the left. He crossed the road, went on for another thirty yards, then entered a dismal-looking shop over which was a fascia board inscribed
P. J. Fetters. Stamps—Coins—Curios
. A bell gave a tinny sound as he pushed the door open. There was a musty smell, a smell compounded of dust and mothballs, decay and mildew and damp. Shaw waited at the counter; behind it, a door led into P. J. Fetters’s private apartments but no P. J. Fetters appeared. Shaw went back to the door and operated the bell again. He returned to the counter and banged on the wood. When this produced no result he went behind the counter and opened the inner door and he found P. J. Fetters stone cold dead on the floor of a shadowy room overfilled with stuffy Victoriana.

P. J. Fetters had been an old man with silver hair. That hair was covered now by a black skull cap, a fitting tribute to the dead. Shaw knew all he needed to know about him. He had been a White Russian, and one of the founder-members of the NTS in London. His name at birth had been Serge Neruyin, and his father had been an officer of the Czar’s court at St. Petersburgh. Shaw looked quickly round the room. On either side of an empty fireplace were armchairs, dilapidated and overstuffed with bulging horsehair. The small space was burdened with a proliferation of P. J. Fetters’s wares—stamps mounted on sheets of squared paper, coins in frames and in specially fitted velvet-lined presentation boxes, curios ranging from stuffed baby crocodiles and the coloured shells of sea urchins to fearsome-looking weapons from all over the world. In a cage in the grimy window a dispirited canary sat glumly on its perch, staring at P. J. Fetters’s body with beady-eyed unhopefulness of ever again being fed. The floor and the general clutter of stock in the area below the suspended cage were liberally sprinkled with discarded birdseed husks.

Shaw bent down by the body, which was lying face downwards on the floor amid the clutter it had owned in life and debris from ransacked desk drawers and cupboards. There was a small hole in the back of the shabby jacket and when Shaw rolled the body over he saw the blood on the shirt-front around another tiny tear. The weapon had been the same as before, only this time the steel shaft had been withdrawn before the killer had left.

Shaw laid the body gently back. There was nothing he could do for P. J. Fetters now, but there was just a chance that the old man’s possessions might still yield up a few secrets—if the killer hadn’t done his job properly, that was; an unlikely enough thought.

Shaw began a quick but methodical search of the room. When he was about half way through and had found nothing the telephone bell rang. He reached for the instrument, pushed his handkerchief over the mouthpiece, and said in a brilliant imitation of an old man’s high, shaky voice, “Ya?”

There was a pause then a girl’s voice said in a foreign accent, “I am speaking to Mr. Fetters?”

Shaw said, “Ya . . . Mr. Fetters.”

“Ingrid Lange, Mr Fetters.” The voice was cool and competent. “It is about the translations. You understand?”

“I onderstand, ya.”

Again there was a pause, then the voice went on, “Savoy Hotel, in one hour. Please come to my room. This is convenient?” He assented and the girl rang off. He put back the instrument, frowning. This sounded interesting. He completed his search; it took him another twenty minutes and he still drew a blank. He looked down once again at P. J. Fetters, shrugged, and went out into the shop, closing the door of the private room behind him. As he went out into the street the shop bell gave its tinny knell. Shaw walked back to Tower Hill, not hurrying, keeping a sharp watch for anything likely to be a tail. He couldn’t identify one, though in fact it was only too possible that Spalinski’s and Fetters’s killer would assume he would be contacting the agencies of the NTS.

On the way through he stopped at a telephone box and rang Scotland Yard. This done he got into the Wankel and drove off, using a roundabout route, for the Strand and the Savoy Hotel.

* * *

By this time the men in the capsule had reached a high degree of weariness and apathy. They had had all the sleep they wanted and their condition was due more to the fight against their weightless state and to the sheer boredom of prolonged space travel. Schuster and Morris talked together a good deal—Danvers-Marshall seemed the odd man out. He hadn’t the shared link of an Air Force background, and up here in space the difference of nationality also seemed in some curious way accentuated. In the early stages he had found plenty to do and he had in fact been fully occupied; now, with much of his data collected and ready to be fed into the computers, he had time on his hands; and time, in space, hung heavily. The eyes of all three men were now red-rimmed and shadowed, and eyelids dropped constantly. All three, even though they had each other’s company, were feeling the effects of the utter alone-ness of space; to them this was perhaps their biggest enemy as they half-drowsed their way through the universe, passing time and again over the friendly voices of the ground stations so many miles below, making their routine checks, obeying medical orders and taking their ration of xylose tablets as necessary. At times they had all suffered from space-sickness, a feeling like sea-sickness brought on by the effects of weightlessness. It did curious things to their equilibrium, and Danvers-Marshall had had odd sensations of hanging upside down, or of being crouched like an animal on the floor.