The German Numbers Woman Read online

  To prove he was earning his keep he took the weather for that part of the Mediterranean: ‘Aegean and south of Crete sectors, northwesterly wind, Force 5, increasing. Scattered showers, moderate visibility, slight sea, outlook changeable,’ and so on for another half sheet. If the ship was known about, its progress could be realistically monitored. Should any message be due from its master he would keep watch on the maritime channel. Maybe the ship had nothing to do with them at all, but every scrap of information had to be passed on in case it was useful. He phoned the signals through, then posted them for confirmation in the box at the end of the lane.

  Back in his room he thought it hard to know how long his spying could go on. Sooner or later an astute organisation like Interpol would wonder if their plain-language signals were being intercepted. Didn’t they know someone was always listening, and that hand-sent morse wasn’t secure? Seemed not. Maybe they were being cunning, running fictional texts so as to fox people like him, plotting to lure the mob into a trap. What a web of deceit he would have spun in their place, the best and neatest spider in the business, purely on the offchance, so subtle, so complicated, so certain to get the drug smugglers to a pre-arranged spot where launches and armed helicopters would be lurking on red alert – with an alacrity that chilled his spine.

  Circumstances and accident had put him on the opposite side, because his intelligence reports were better paid, not to mention the boat trips. Working for law abiders would have been more permanent, possibly more absorbing, not to mention – he laughed out loud – there being a pension at the end. Well, they could stuff their perks and pensions. All he knew was that drug running would go on forever, and the money was better for whoever got involved.

  The trouble was that sooner or later Interpol would modernise its communications, though he would try to keep up with them. They would go radio teletype, or send a message in a single burst which couldn’t be deciphered, but he would be ready for them because the clever and enterprising Japanese already had decoders on the market, and one was on its way from a shop in the north of England. He would only be defeated if they came up with a cipher he could not break, one-day message pads impossible to disentangle. It would be little enough trouble for them, and he was expecting it at any time. Five-letter groups would rip across the screen of his decoder, money spent for nothing, bugger-all left but to confess to his contacts in London that their spy branch would be closing down, at least on the telegraphy spectrum.

  For a month or so he might pass on messages out of his imagination, based on the knowledge he’d so far acquired. He would tell them about phantom boats heading for secret coves, and ghostly small aeroplanes alighting on disused airfields, or the arrival of teams from Colombia about to flood the airports of western Europe with false-bottomed suitcases stuffed with the latest paradise powders.

  The chaos would set them to hunt him down and kill him, unless he never went to sleep and sat at the window with his two-two rifle beamed in the lane. Boys’ Own stuff. He would explore the aether for other stations. There was always something to pick up, with scanners coming on the market.

  Trouble was you couldn’t tune in to every frequency at once, though maybe the blind man who had been doing it for far longer had stumbled on a few items Richard didn’t know about, wavelengths or stations providing priceless gen he couldn’t have found by himself. Blind Howard might be someone who, in his innocence, would boastfully babble on about what he had alighted onto like a cloth-footed fly in his darkness. Any signals fed to the boss would keep the pay-cheques coming, so it might be the best idea he’d had for a long time.

  Amanda came in with cups of tea.

  ‘This is my lucky day.’

  ‘You can say that again, though I don’t know why you sit all the hours God sends at that bloody silly radio.’

  ‘I’m hoping to find out how long I’ve got to live.’

  ‘Tell me if you do. I’ll want to know.’ She laughed, and sat in the large padded armchair, balancing her cup. His table was laden with books full of figures and letters she didn’t understand, notepads, and three (three!) radio sets. He had placed the table in front of the window so that he could look out while listening. The floor was covered with a tough grey cord, though the strands were shining through under his table at the wear from his nervous feet. The windowless wall was taken up by a chart of the radio facilities of the British Isles, a map of northwest Europe, and a chart of the Mediterranean. He liked playing captain on the bridge, between his yachting trips. ‘I expect you’re going to live forever, anyway, so why bother to find out?’

  He faced her, hoping not to miss anything good on the waveband while talking. ‘Is that what you want?’

  ‘I love you, don’t I?’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘I must, if I say so.’

  ‘I love you, too.’

  ‘There’s nothing like hearing good news.’

  She often threw at him that he never talked, so he disproved her now by dredging up the incident while driving back from Bracebridge. ‘I saw this woman in a lay-by. Her car had a flat tyre, so I pulled in and changed it for her.’

  ‘Your good deed of the year. Was she pretty?’

  ‘I suppose she had been in her time. She was still good looking, but a bit over forty.’

  ‘A really good deed, then. I’ll bet you didn’t know she was that old before you pulled in.’

  ‘No, but I was glad I helped her. We went to The Foxglove afterwards for a drink. It turned out that she was married, to a man who’s been blind since the war. He got shot up in a bomber. Sounds a lonely old cove, but the coincidence is that he’s also an ex-wireless operator, and spends all his time listening to morse. She begged me to call on them when I could, and talk to him. I’d cheer him up, no end, she said.’

  ‘Another good deed?’

  ‘I might do it.’

  ‘Why not? Before your next trip, I suppose.’

  ‘I don’t have one lined up at the moment.’

  ‘As long as you let me know when you have.’ She stood, kissed him on the lips, as if in thank you for the story. ‘I must be off now. I’m going to call on Doris in Angleton.’

  ‘Have a nice time.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  In such a good phase she was bound to.

  ‘Love you,’ she called.

  What they got up to he couldn’t imagine. Probably went to a pub and had a jolly time. His mood for eavesdropping had misted away. The front door banged. Her car bumped over the ruts on the lane. He liked being alone, not listening to the radio. Strange, though, that all his best transcripts came when Amanda was in the house. Maybe she provided the electricity that gave persistence and brought luck. When she was out he was dilatory, got up too often and looked mindlessly at the charts, or switched on the wireless for music, and wondered why the hell he was where he was and doing what he did. Much better to be crewing one of the mob’s small boats, in at the sharp end with all the risks of getting caught, the beer cans going overboard like confetti for a fish’s wedding, and banter to keep you amused on changing watch.

  If anyone asked where he came from he always answered ‘Shithouse-on-the-Ouse.’ You don’t have that sort of accent, they might reply, and he would tell them that’s because I was brought up properly, meaning mind your own business, which they usually did. Where Shithouse-on-the-Ouse was he had no idea, but it must have been a seaport somewhere because the old man had been a pastry cook on a liner, and they were always on the trek from one place to another.

  His father had seen no greater success in life than for Richard to become an officer in the Merchant Service, but Richard could only get as close to that heavy level by going back to college and training to be a radio operator, with which the old man had to be satisfied, and more or less was, since it gave him officer status on board. Poor old sod thinks I’m still connected with it, and would walk off the end of Southport pier if he knew what I was up to.

  His first job was on a trawle
r, but he had to give a hand with the catch now and again, and didn’t like the smell. Then he worked on a series of superannuated tramp steamers that took him around the world, each billet varying from poor to awful, nothing to do but call it experience. As second radio officer on tankers he enjoyed dodging pirates in the Far East. He carried a service revolver, but they were ordered to offer no resistance and just hand over cash, cigarettes and whisky to any cutthroats who got on the ship. He would often lie in wait, a one-man ambush, and regretted that no Lascar mob had ever thought to climb on board in the night, so that he could shoot them down.

  He went from ship to ship, but didn’t get far enough, or quick enough, up the so-called ladder of success. For him there seemed to be no such thing. Maybe there was some defect in his character that others saw but he did not. He wasn’t unhappy. He could wait. Life up and down the Gulf Stream on his last ship was cushy enough, until one evening in Maracaibo, after they had loaded, someone approached him behind a shed on the quayside and offered five thousand pounds if he would take a bundle to an address in England. He hadn’t imagined it to contain soap, and that was a fact, but so much money never came amiss, and he got the packet through without being stopped, the first indication in his life that, while not cut out for honesty, he must have an honest face. He liked the bright light in his head, and the rhythmical buzzing that marked time with his legs as he went through the customs, an experience more intense than any to be got from a taste of whatever the parcel in his kit contained.

  Honesty and naivety went together, he had to suppose, because when asked to do the same again he turned the proposal down. The young thug in dark glasses made it plain that if he didn’t take another consignment they would shop him for the first transgression. Richard let the man know he had only refused because he needed a hefty upping in the pay. The man swayed off to use the telephone, which brought a higher up from across the street. To them Richard played a normal hand, merely business sense, showing they dealt with someone hardening to the realities of the trade. Because he seemed no fool they paid half as much again. After the third trip he said let’s be cunning. Nobody’s luck lasts. Let’s find other ways, other routes. From then on he was in too far to either get out or want to.

  He never knew whether being frightened came first or feeling guilty at taking drugs into the country. Success made the query irrelevant. Kids had no self control, or they wanted to see how close they could get to auto-destruct, or they needed to get drunk quicker and travel further out than was possible on half pints of bitter; or they had to blast a way with the dynamite of coke, crack, hash or acid to a part of themselves they wouldn’t understand or very much like when they got there – a method towards self knowledge which, once tried, or even more than twice tried, would stop them ever getting there by normal means such as jogging or swimming forty lengths in the swimming pool, or holding their breath for five minutes. Maybe they ought not to splash out their giros, dole, wages, pocket money, or fat salary from the bank, or corrupt handouts gained by public office, on something so disagreeably lethal. It was a free country, however, so forgive them, Lord, they know only too well what they do.

  But there was no excuse for what he did, nevertheless, plenty of articles in the papers to put him right, should he need it, with such money rolling in. No use telling them anymore that he wanted out. He didn’t. If it wasn’t him it would be someone else, never a shortage to volunteer as a pack mule from the poppy fields. He was up to his neck in it, thousands every trip being good enough reason to carry on.

  For the captain to call him to his cabin had been an out-of-the-ordinary command. He stood up from his table, all six feet four of him, as if he might come forward for the pleasure of throwing him overboard. ‘I want you off, as soon as your contract’s up, which it will be when we get to Southampton in two days.’ The matter was so important he even paused halfway through filling his pipe. ‘You can go to hell in your own way.’

  Richard never knew how he had found out. A response wasn’t called for. The captain was a bastard, straight as they came. No beard or moustache for him, all clean shaven, and no damned nonsense either. One of those menacing peepholes glared as if finding him no better than a dung beetle that had crawled up a hawser to spatter his immaculate ship, too low to shop, though he might have given him to the hangman if he’d had sufficient proof, and if that was the regulation punishment for the crime.

  ‘You heard me. Out of my sight!’ in a tone suggesting he would bark at someone afterwards to mop the floor where his shoes had been placed – and who could fault him? Such a man wouldn’t act without a picture of Richard taking the parcel from his contact. He’d been shopped all right, maybe a couple of times, which finally set the captain onto him. ‘Clear out.’

  A hard spark in the old man’s eye indicated relish for the play whilever he stood there. Better a yes sir, not even that, only an about turn and head on fire with chagrin at his stupidity at having been caught, wondering how many seamen and officers the captain had thrown off ships during his lifetime.

  That was it. No more Merchant Service for him. The more occupations you had, the longer life seemed. There was a lot to learn, so he went into the game full time, and nobody had made the connection with him yet. Few got caught out of many who did it, and he soon gave good if not plenty of unique service, especially with his intercepted wireless material. The only way to get caught – apart from redhanded, which would put him down for twenty years if the consignment was a big one – was if whoever moved the pieces wanted to get rid of him, and put a few words in the right direction. But he would never be such a one, having built up his own intelligence file, and should they ever pull that kind of stunt he’d tear such a large part of the fabric down that the sound of ripping would be in their ears forevermore. He wasn’t the naive tourist recruited in Bangkok or Turkey. If and when he got out of the trade it would be under his own terms, and in safety, the only assurance on his side that he would keep his lips tight forever.

  Called to the flat on Harley Street, where the crew assembled before a trip, Richard caught a glance of deference from Mr Waistcoat, looking like a prosperous surgeon who had made pots of money pulling the tonsils out of rich Arabs. Richard called him Mr Waistcoat because he wore such a garment of the fanciest design. Richard would like to ask where he got them, except he wouldn’t be seen dead wearing one. In any case, it was best to act as if you knew your place, which at crisis time would be a more ratified locality than such a ponce could ever know about.

  Waistcoat sat on the mock-Jacobean Harrods sofa and, by continuing to manicure his nails and not inviting Richard to sit down, showed his origins as rather different to those which would have led him to becoming an eminent Harley Street surgeon. Neither did the timbre of his voice suggest as much, and Richard wondered how many years in jail had been necessary to make the transformation. He was no longer a person who would feel at ease weaving through the crowds on Oxford Street, but the sort to grow pettish if a Rolls wasn’t waiting to ferry him from place to place. He was one of those who looked as if he didn’t need to shave yet shaved twice a day. As for his age he could be anything between forty and fifty, forty because he had spent twenty years inside, and fifty because he had struck it rich too young, with the canny ruthlessness never to get caught. He put his well-cared-for hands in the pockets of his open navy-blue smoking jacket so that you couldn’t see how short his nails or how burnt his fingers were.

  Either way, he could be tricky and dangerous to argue with, though Richard, strengthened by years in the navy, when he hadn’t given a toss for anyone since he felt indispensable and therefore untouchable, and because his work at the wireless gave him a certain mystery (and due also to the natural power of his self-esteem) felt no need to argue. He stood, waited, and listened out of habit as much as desire, an attitude in no way allowing Waistcoat to think that not being asked to sit down meant anything to him at all.

  Even so, he wasn’t surprised, or didn’t show it, when
a chair was pointed out to him. ‘Take a pew.’

  He didn’t care to sit when Waistcoat stayed on his feet. ‘I’d rather stand. Naval habit.’

  ‘I like that.’ Waistcoat leaned against the mantel shelf. ‘I like it.’

  He would have to like silence as well, till he explained what he wanted. The other man, whom Richard hadn’t so far met, sat four square on an upholstered chair, by a mahogany corner cupboard whose shelves were laden with old pewter mugs and plates. Across the room was an oak chest, and an oak cupboard above containing the same sort of pewter but behind glass. Against another wall was a dwarf chest of drawers with an oval mirror on its top, the whole place like an antiques clearing house, confirming his assumption that Waistcoat had done a course or two in collectables while banged up. He felt an impulse, couldn’t think why, to come in one day with a sledge hammer and take such relics to task, half of which were no doubt fakes, the only way to get confirmation as to what sort of person Waistcoat was.

  A foolish fantasy, of course. Times were good, and the future impossible to imagine, so you hoped it would go on being good, which gave no alternative except to live in the present, and since that was the only way he had ever been able to live, it posed no great difficulty.

  ‘It’s a short boat ride he’s got in store for us this time,’ the other man said, ‘but it ain’t through the tunnel of love.’ Richard thought if that was the case he should size the man up, who introduced himself as Jack Cannister: long greasy hair tied back in a tail, a dark three-day growth, and a ring in his left ear – steel rather than gold. He was in his late thirties, and Richard wondered where he had been dredged up from, though he had worked with worse on the boat jobs so far done. The fairly lavish payment was for sailing with such people, as much as for the quantity of stuff he helped to deliver – whatever Waistcoat might think.

  ‘It’ll be a little boat,’ Waistcoat said.