Lord Oakford looked shattered. Thin at the best of times, his face was drawn and wan, the lines that furrowed downwards from the corners of his mouth had become deep ravines. His eyes were dull. The empty arm of his jacket hung limply.
Millie was the second child he had lost; Edward, his eldest son and his heir, had died in a climbing accident on the slopes of Mont Blanc nearly ten years before. For a moment Conrad almost felt sorry for him, but his anger swept that thought away.
‘Well, Father?’
Oakford sighed. ‘She was there to see Theo,’ he mumbled.
‘Theo! Why Theo?’
‘She…’ Oakford couldn’t get the words out. A tear ran down his cheek.
‘I know. It was some hare-brained peace scheme, wasn’t it?’ Conrad said. ‘I refused to go, so you sent Millie along instead.’
Oakford nodded. ‘We wanted to open discussions with the plotters. So that if they did succeed in deposing Hitler, we could make peace. Theo was the conduit.’
‘How long had you been talking to him?’
‘Since the spring. Millie met him in Zurich in April. The conversations came to nothing then, but at least we had a line of communication.’
‘You know I saw Theo earlier this week? He didn’t say anything to me.’
‘We asked him to keep it quiet.’
‘So you, Millie and Theo were conspiring against me?’
‘We were just trying to bring peace. To stop this war before it kills a million people. It was a noble thing Millie was doing.’
‘That’s tosh! She was negotiating with the enemy behind her country’s back. You made her do it. And now she’s dead!’
Oakford hung his head and nodded.
‘How was she killed?’
‘She was stabbed in some sand dunes in Scheveningen. You remember. We went on holiday there once.’
‘Who killed her? Do you know? Was it the Germans? The Gestapo?’
Oakford took a deep breath and raised his eyes to his son. Conrad could tell it took courage for the man, who had become old before his very eyes, to do that, but he was not impressed.
‘I don’t know. She went with a companion, Constance Scott-Dunton. She’s a friend of Henry Alston. I haven’t seen Constance yet, I think she is still in Holland talking to the police there.’
‘The authorities here have been told, I take it?’ Conrad said.
Oakford nodded. ‘By our people in The Hague.’
‘I bet they weren’t happy.’
‘No, they weren’t,’ said Oakford. ‘I’m sorry, Conrad.’
‘Sorry? Sorry isn’t good enough, Father. Sorry is not nearly good enough.’
Conrad couldn’t stand the sight of the broken man in front of him. The stupid, stupid old fool! He had brought all this down upon himself, upon Conrad and upon his mother.
He found her in the drawing room looking anxiously at the door. Her face was red, her cheeks stained. He sat down on the sofa next to her and put his arm around her. She let her head fall into his chest and sobbed, her whole body heaving. Conrad patted her hair. First Edward, now Millie.
Eventually, his mother sat up. ‘Don’t be too hard on him, Conrad.’
‘How can I not be hard on him, Mother? It was his fault she went!’
‘Yes. But he didn’t kill her. Holland is a neutral country. She should have been safe.’
‘She was conspiring with someone who wanted to kill the German Chancellor!’ Conrad protested. ‘That was always going to be dangerous. Father shouldn’t have sent her.’
He almost added: ‘He should have sent me.’ But then he realized he couldn’t. Lord Oakford had tried to send Conrad to Switzerland to see Theo earlier that year, but Conrad had refused, and he had refused the previous week when his father had suggested it again. So Millie had gone instead. And Millie was now dead. Because Conrad had said no.
The stupid, stupid old fool.
‘I’m sorry, Mother. I can’t forgive him. Ever.’
Gestapo Headquarters, Berlin
Walter Schellenberg’s chest was swelling as he entered his office. He fingered the unfamiliar shape of the cross around his neck. He had just been in the Reich Chancellery, marching in with the detachment that had seized the British agents, and had been received in the Führer’s study by the Führer himself. Hitler had made a speech about how the British secret service was the best in the world, how Schellenberg and his colleagues had bested them, and how the German secret service was now building up its own traditions. Two thoughts occurred to Schellenberg: that he still believed it a mistake to have seized Payne Best and Stevens, and that Hitler had forgotten Germany’s own Abwehr. But he couldn’t deny the surge of pride he had felt; they had made fools of the famed British secret service.
Medals were handed out all round, Schellenberg and four of the others received an Iron Cross First Class, and the rest Iron Crosses Second Class.
Payne Best and Stevens were locked up somewhere in the Gestapo building next door. Schellenberg hadn’t been directly involved in their interrogation: the Gestapo were still pretending to their prisoners that Major Schämmel was a real conspirator. The officers who were interrogating them had been unable to unearth even the remotest connection between the two British agents and Georg Elser, the man who had planted the bomb in the beer cellar in Munich. But Hitler had also ordered Schellenberg to discover the name of all British operatives in Holland, and there had been some success there.
Major Stevens had been carrying a sheet of paper on which various Dutch names had been written: the Abwehr had confirmed that some of these were known agents working for Britain. It seemed likely to Schellenberg that the whole lot were.
Only that morning Stevens had admitted under interrogation that the driver, who had escaped, was a British officer named Conrad de Lancey, who had been spotted in Leiden talking to a Lieutenant von Hertenberg. The British knew him to be an Abwehr officer.
Schellenberg was pleased to see that de Lancey’s file was waiting for him on his desk, as he had requested. The Gestapo filing system was its great strength. A vast, meticulously cross-indexed record of the little secrets of thousands of Germans, and, increasingly, foreigners like de Lancey.
Schellenberg picked up the file and leafed through it. Most of the memoranda had been prepared by Kriminalrat Klaus Schalke. Schellenberg remembered him, a big, shambling Gestapo officer who was a favourite of Heydrich’s and had been found murdered in the Tiergarten the previous autumn.
The Hon. Conrad de Lancey had been born in Hamburg in 1911. His father, Viscount Oakford, was a former member of the British government and his mother was a daughter of one of the big Hamburg shipping families. De Lancey had gone to university at Oxford and afterwards had fought for the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. He had arrived in Berlin in the summer of 1938, where he had quickly aroused Schalke’s suspicions. The Gestapo had arrested him with his cousin, Joachim Mühlendorf, who worked for the German Embassy in Moscow and turned out to be spying for the Russians. Mühlendorf had died in custody, but de Lancey had been released. A few weeks later, Schalke had ordered de Lancey’s arrest again. De Lancey had been seen with Lieutenant Hertenberg, and at one point Schalke had suspected Hertenberg of hiding him.
Then nothing.
Schellenberg had scarcely known Schalke at all, but his death that September had caused quite a stir. There were rumours that Schalke had been involved in altering Heydrich’s ancestry, erasing a Jewish grandparent. Or perhaps adding one. The rumours were vague and brief. No one in the Gestapo wanted to know anything about Heydrich’s Jewish roots. The investigation into Schalke’s death had been abandoned on the orders of Heydrich himself and the whispers stopped abruptly. There were some subjects you just didn’t whisper about.