Douglas read his report, with asides and explanations where needed. Kellerman’s prime concern was to justify money spent, and Douglas always wrote his reports so that they summarized the resources of the department and showed the cost in Occupation Marks.
When the formalities were over, Kellerman opened the humidor. With black-market cigarettes at five Occupation Marks each, one of Kellerman’s Monte Cristo No 2s had become a considerable accolade. Kellerman selected two cigars with great care. Like Douglas, he preferred the flavour of the ones with green or yellow spots on the outer leaf. He went through a ceremony of cutting them and removing loose strands of tobacco. As usual Kellerman wore one of his smooth tweed suits, complete with waistcoat and gold chain for his pocket watch. Typically he had not worn his SS uniform even for this visit by the photographer. And Kellerman, like so many of the senior SS men of his generation, preferred army rank titles to the cumbersome SS nomenclature.
‘Still no word of your wife?’ asked Kellerman. He came round the desk and gave Douglas the cigar.
‘I think we have to assume that she was killed,’ said Douglas. ‘She often went to our neighbour’s house during the air attacks, and the street fighting completely demolished it.’
‘Don’t give up hope,’ said Kellerman. Was that a reference to his affair with the secretary, Douglas wondered. ‘Your son is well?’
‘He was in the shelter that day. Yes, he’s thriving.’
Kellerman leaned over to light the cigar. Douglas was not yet used to the way that the German officers put cologne on their faces after shaving and the perfume surprised him. He inhaled; the cigar lit. Douglas would have preferred to take the cigar away with him but the General always lit them. Douglas thought perhaps it was a way of preventing the recipient selling it instead of smoking it. Or was it simply that Kellerman believed that, in England, no gentleman could offer a colleague a chance to put an unsmoked cigar in his pocket.
‘And no other problems, Superintendent?’ Kellerman passed behind Douglas, and touched the seated man’s shoulder lightly, as if in reassurance. Douglas wondered if his general knew that his internal mail had that morning included a letter from his secretary, saying she was pregnant and demanding twenty thousand O-Marks. The pound sterling, she pointed out, in case Douglas didn’t know, was not the sort of currency abortionists accepted. Douglas was permitted a proportion of his wages in O-Marks. So far Douglas had not discovered how the letter got to him. Had she sent it to one of her girlfriends in Registry, or actually come into the building herself?
‘No problems that I need bother the General with,’ said Douglas.
Kellerman smiled. Douglas’s anxiety had led him to address the general in that curious third-person form that some of the more obsequious Germans used.
‘You knew this room in the old days?’ said Kellerman.
Before the war it had been the Commissioner’s procedure to leave the door wide open when the room was unoccupied, so that messengers could pass in and out. Soon after being assigned to Scotland Yard, Douglas had found an excuse for coming into the empty room and studying it with the kind of awe that comes from a schoolboy diet of detective fiction. ‘I seldom came here when it was the Commissioner’s room.’
‘These are difficult times,’ said Kellerman, as if apologizing for the way in which Douglas’s visits were now more frequent. Kellerman leaned forward to tap a centimetre of ash into a white china model of Tower Bridge that some enterprising manufacturer had redesigned to incorporate swastika flags and ‘Waffenstillstand. London. 1940’ in red and black Gothic lettering. ‘Until now,’ said Kellerman, choosing his words with care, ‘the police force has not been asked to do any political task.’
‘We have always been completely apolitical.’
‘Now that’s not quite true,’ said Kellerman gently. ‘In Germany we call a spade a spade, and the political police are called political police. Here you call your political police the Special Branch, because you English are not so direct in these matters.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘But there will come a time when I can no longer resist the pressure from Berlin to bring us into line with the German police system.’
‘We English don’t take quickly to new ideas, you know, sir.’
‘Don’t play games with me, Superintendent,’ said Kellerman without changing the affable tone of voice or the smile. ‘You know what I’m talking about.’
‘I’m not sure I do, sir.’
‘Neither of us wants political advisers in this building, Superintendent. Inevitably the outcome would be that your police force is used against British Resistance groups, uncaptured soldiers, political fugitives, Jews, gypsies and other undesirable elements.’ Kellerman said it in a way that conveyed the idea that he didn’t consider these elements nearly so undesirable as his superiors in Berlin thought them.
‘It would split the police service right down the middle,’ said Douglas.
Kellerman didn’t answer. He reached for a teleprinter message on his desk and read it, as if to remind himself of the contents. ‘A senior officer of the Sicherheitsdienst is on his way here now,’ said Kellerman. ‘I’m assigning you to work with him.’
‘His duties will be political?’ asked Douglas. The SD was the SS intelligence service. Douglas did not welcome this sinister development.
‘I don’t know why he’s coming,’ said Kellerman cheerfully. ‘He is on the personal staff of the Reichsführer-SS and will remain directly responsible to Berlin for whatever he has to do.’ Kellerman inhaled on his cigar and then let the smoke drift from his nostrils. He let his Superintendent dwell upon the facts and realize that the new man presented a danger to the status quo for both of them. ‘Standartenführer Huth,’ said Kellerman finally, ‘that’s this new chap’s name.’ His use of the SS rank was enough to emphasize that Huth was an outsider. Kellerman raised his hand. ‘Under the direct orders of Berlin, so that gives him a special…’ he hesitated and then let the hand fall, ‘…influence.’
‘I understand, sir,’ said Douglas.
‘Then perhaps, my dear chap, you’d do everything you can to prevent the indiscretions – more particularly the verbal indiscretions – of your mentor downstairs from embarrassing us all.’
‘Detective Sergeant Woods?’
‘Ah, what a quick mind you have, Superintendent,’ said Kellerman.
Some said there had not been even one clear week of sunshine since the cease-fire. It was easy to believe. Today the air was damp, and the colourless sun only just visible through the grey clouds, like an empty plate on a dirty tablecloth.
And yet even a born and bred Londoner, such as Douglas Archer, could walk down Curzon Street, and with eyes half-closed, see little or no change from the previous year. The Soldatenkino sign outside the Curzon cinema was small and discreet, and only if you tried to enter the Mirabelle restaurant did a top-hatted doorman whisper that it was now used exclusively by Staff Officers from Air Fleet 8 Headquarters, across the road in the old Ministry of Education offices. And if your eyes remained half-closed you missed the signs that said ‘Jewish Undertaking’ and effectively kept all but the boldest customers out. And in September of that year 1941, Douglas Archer, in common with most of his compatriots, was keeping his eyes half-closed.
The scene of the murder to which, as Detective Sergeant Harry Woods had predicted, they were called, was Shepherd Market.