He felt a coldness grip him as if his organs had been suddenly packed in ice. He felt his bowels turn and flex with a powerful urge to shit.
He stopped the questions screaming at him. Not now. Not now. Later.
He turned back to Glockner. He seemed to have passed out. His eyes were closed and his breathing was shallow. With an effortful heave, Lysander righted the chair and Glockner’s head lolled, a length of thick saliva falling from his mouth and dangling there, swaying like a lucent pendulum.
Lysander untied him quickly and dragged and laid him back on the rug again. He unplugged the flex and wound it round his palm before stuffing it in his pocket. He found Glockner’s attaché case on the floor by the desk and flipped it open, sliding the wad of 25,000 francs into an internal pocket. He closed it and replaced it on the floor. He gathered up the lengths of rope and the scouring pads and threw them in his grip along with the libretto of Andromeda und Perseus. He had a final check of the room and the kitchen. He smoothed some ripples in the rug and straightened the books on the second shelf from the top so there was no noticeable gap. He closed the glass door. An unconscious man on his back, with not a mark on him. 25,000 francs inside his attaché case. A standard lamp without a flex. Solve that mystery.
He stood for a moment in the hall, running through everything for a final time. Thank you, the Hon. Hugh Faulkner, thank you. He felt himself beginning to shiver. It was terrifying how easy it had been – no blood, no effort, even – just some logical thought and the application of electric current. Stop. Concentrate. From his grip he took a light Macintosh and a flat cotton golfing cap and put them on. The man leaving the building wouldn’t look like the man who entered. He pulled the door to behind him, leaving the key in the lock on the inside. He went down the stairs calmly, meeting no one and was glad to note that the concierge was still at church and the little boy had left his post. Lysander stepped out on to the street and strode away. He looked at his wristwatch – 10.40 – he hadn’t even been in Herr Glockner’s apartment for an hour.
4. The Fiend
He spent the afternoon painstakingly decoding the Glockner letters – it kept his mind on the job. As the contents slowly revealed themselves – it was laborious work – it became obvious to him that what was being detailed in them was the movement of munitions and matériel from England to various sections of the front line.
On one page: ‘Fifteen hundred tons HE six inch to St Omer to Béthune.’
On another: ‘Twen five thou coffins to Allouagne.’
And more of the same: ‘One mil five thou three oh three Aubers Ridge sector’; ‘Six field dressing stations villages behind Lens’; ‘Ammo railheads St Venant Lapugnoy first army Strazeele cavalry’; ‘Sixteen adv dressing stns Grenay Vermelles Cambrin Givenchy Beuvry’; ‘Fourteen trch mortar La Bassee canal’.
The list grew in astonishing, minute detail as he worked steadily through the close columns of numbers in the six letters. Assuming that the dates were recorded when these letters were intercepted, he reasoned, then this data would give a very intriguing picture of the focus of an impending attack. Artillery shells, small arms ammunition, food and rations, signalling equipment, field hospitals, pack animals, transportation – it seemed almost too random but anyone who knew what was involved in a ‘push’ would be able to read the signs and narrow the sector down with remarkably precise accuracy.
It was also clear to him that this information must have been generated far behind the lines – the scale and the quantities applied to armies and brigades, not regiments and battalions. Battalions drew their supplies from dumps that these movement orders fed. And even further away – there was mention of ten batteries of 18-pounder guns being shipped from Folkestone to Havre and then entrained for Abbeville; a loco shop was being established at Borre; a new forage depot at Mautort; summary of shunts at the Traffic Office, Abbeville; total of remounts sent from England to the First Army in May. Some of these facts and figures would be known to senior supply officers in France but the range and the scope of the knowledge displayed in the Glockner letters spoke instead – as far as Lysander’s ill-informed mind could determine – of a far greater overview of the whole movement and ordnance operation for the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front. The writer of these coded letters wasn’t in General Sir John French’s high command in St Omer, he reckoned, but safely at home in the War Office or the Ministry of Munitions in London.
He put his pen down and, with some unease, picked up the source text – Andromeda und Perseus. He turned to the title page, noting with some relief that this edition wasn’t the same as the one he had. It had been published in Dresden in 1912, a year before his trip to Vienna, and had the title and author as simple text on the cover with no illustration. He knew that the fatal Viennese performances of Toller’s opera were not its premiere, so he assumed that must have taken place in Dresden, whence this copy originated . . .
Malign coincidence? No, impossible. As obscure texts went, Andromeda und Perseus was about as recherché as you could find. But the more questions he asked himself about the conceivable provenance of this, the key text in the PLWL cipher, the more confused and troubled he became. Why this particular, forgotten opera? And how come he was the one to discover it? The unwelcome thought came to him that the only other person he knew who possessed a copy of this libretto was one Lysander Rief. And what did that imply? . . .
He decided that it was pointless speculating further. He had to return home and, with Munro and Fyfe-Miller, thoroughly analyse all the ramifications of this discovery. There was nothing much he could do on a Sunday afternoon in Geneva – the Hôtel des Postes closed at midday so he’d have to wait until tomorrow to telegraph Massinger in Thonon. It opened at 7.00 in the morning – he would be there. He sealed his transcripts of the six letters in an envelope and wrote his name and the Claverleigh Hall address on the front. Best for the precise details to be kept out of everyone’s hands for the moment, he reckoned, at least until he had decided what to reveal – or not – about the key to the cipher.
He went out for a stroll in the late afternoon, thinking that perhaps he would have liked to have talked over the matter – discreetly – with Florence Duchesne but he realized that he didn’t know where she lived. Then again, perhaps it was best that she knew as little as possible.
He took a tram across the Arve River and disembarked at one of the entrances to the Bois de la Bâtre on the far bank from the city. He wandered into the thick woods and left the pathway to find a secluded spot – far from any picnickers or strolling families – and patiently burned Glockner’s copy of Andromeda und Perseus a page at a time. He kicked the small pile of frail ashes here and there, stamping them into the turf as though they might somehow be reconstituted and read once more. He was beginning to think that the crucial course of action was to keep the cipher text a secret that only he knew – he wasn’t quite sure why, but out of the jabber of questions and answers that raged in his mind an instinctive way forward seemed to be emerging. Make himself the only keeper of the secret – who knew, in that case, what others might inadvertently reveal? The minute he saw Massinger he would be asked for it – he was fully aware of that – still, he had plenty of time to concoct a plausible story.
He ate an omelette in a brasserie by the steamer jetties and checked the departure times of the express steamers that did a round trip of the lake in a day. He drank too much wine and found his previous clarity of purpose begin to cloud as he wandered the streets, as if suddenly cognizant of the fact that, this Sunday morning in Geneva, he had tortured a man and extracted information from him. What was happening to him? What kind of fiend was he becoming? But then he thought – was ‘torture’ the right word? He hadn’t bludgeoned Glockner’s head to a bloody pulp; he hadn’t mangled his genitalia, or torn out his fingernails. He had given him every warning, also, every chance to speak . . . But he was disturbed, as well, he had to confess – disturbed by his own swift ingenuity and resourcefulness. Maybe it was the very absence of blood – and of mucus, piss and shit – that made his own . . . he searched for the word – device – that made his device so distancing and therefore easier to live with. What he had done seemed more like an experiment in a chemistry laboratory than the wilful inflicting of pain on a fellow human being . . . But then another voice told him not to be so stupid and sensitive: he was under orders, on a mission and the knowledge he had gained by his clever, robust and admittedly brutal actions had been vital for the war effort and, conceivably, could save countless lives. Of course it could. He had been told in no uncertain terms – do your duty as a soldier – and he had.