outside I was an hour early. I went in the first on the right and closed the door. I sat there in the darkness for a moment and then the grill slid open.
‘Yes?’ a voice asked softly.
I answered automatically. ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.’
‘You certainly have, my old son.’ The light was switched on in the other box and Liam Devlin smiled through at me.
He looked remarkably well. In fact, rather better than he’d seemed the last time I’d seen him. Sixty-seven, but as I’d said to Ruth Cohen, lively with it. A small man with enormous vitality, hair as black as ever, and vivid blue eyes. There was the scar of an old bullet wound on the left side of his forehead and a slight, ironic smile was permanently in place. He wore a priest’s cassock and clerical collar and seemed perfectly at home in the sacristy at the back of the church to which he’d taken me.
‘You’re looking well, son. All that success and money.’ He grinned. ‘We’ll drink to it. There’s a bottle here surely.’
He opened a cupboard and found a bottle of Bushmills and two glasses. ‘And what would the usual occupant think of all this?’ I asked.
‘Father Murphy?’ He splashed whiskey into the glasses. ‘Heart of corn, that one. Out doing good, as usual.’
‘He looks the other way, then?’
‘Something like that.’ He raised his glass. ‘To you, my old son.’
‘And you, Liam.’ I toasted him back. ‘You never cease to amaze me. On the British Army’s most wanted list for the last five years and you still have the nerve to sit here in the middle of Belfast.’
‘Ah, well, a man has to have some fun.’ He took a cigarette from a silver case and offered me one. ‘Anyway, to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?’
‘Does the name Dougal Munro mean anything to you?’
His eyes widened in astonishment. ‘What in the hell have you come up with now? I haven’t heard that old bastard’s name mentioned in years.’
‘Or Schellenberg?’
‘Walter Schellenberg? There was a man for you. General at thirty. Schellenberg – Munro? What is this?’
‘And Kurt Steiner?’ I said, ‘Who, according to everyone, including you, died trying to shoot the fake Churchill on the terrace at Meltham House.’
Devlin swallowed some of his whiskey and smiled amiably. ‘I was always the terrible liar. Now tell me what is this all about?’
So, I told him about Ruth Cohen, the file and its contents, everything, and he listened intently without interrupting.
When I was finished, he said, ‘Convenient, the girl’s death, you were right about that.’
‘Which doesn’t look too good for me.’
There was an explosion not too far away and as he got up and opened the door to the rear yard, the rattle of small arms fire.
‘It sounds like a lively night,’ I said.
‘Oh, it will be. Safer off the streets at the moment.’
He closed the door and turned to face me. I said, ‘The facts in that file. Were they true?’
‘A good story.’
‘In outline.’
‘Which means you’d like to hear the rest?’
‘I need to hear it.’
‘Why not.’ He smiled, sat down at the table again and reached for the Bushmills. ‘Sure and it’ll keep me out of mischief for a while. Now, where would you like me to begin?’
Brigadier Dougal Munro’s flat in Haston Place was only ten minutes’ walk from the London headquarters of SOE in Baker Street. As head of Section D, he needed to be on call twenty-four hours a day and besides the normal phone had a secure line routed directly to his office. It was that particular phone he answered on that late November evening as he sat by the fire working on some files.
‘Carter here, Brigadier. Just back from Norfolk.’
‘Good,’ Munro told him. ‘Call in on your way home and tell me about it.’
He put the phone down and went and got himself a malt whisky, a squat, powerful-looking man with white hair who wore steel-rimmed spectacles. Strictly a non-professional, his rank of brigadier was simply for purposes of authority in certain quarters and at sixty-five, an age when most men faced retirement, even at Oxford, the war had been the saving of him, that was the blunt truth. He was thinking about that when the doorbell rang and he admitted Captain Jack Carter.
‘You look frozen, Jack. Help yourself to a drink.’
Jack Carter leaned his walking stick against a chair and shrugged off his greatcoat. He was in the uniform of a captain in the Green Howards, the ribbon of the Military Cross on his battledress. His false leg was a legacy of Dunkirk and he limped noticeably as he went to the drinks cupboard and poured a whisky.
‘So, what’s the situation at Studley Constable?’ Munro asked.
‘Back to normal, sir. All the German paratroopers buried in a common grave in the churchyard.’
‘No marker of course?’
‘Not at the moment, but they’re a funny lot, those villagers. They actually seem to think quite highly of Steiner.’
‘Yes, well, one of his sergeants was killed saving the lives of two village children who fell into the mill race, remember. In fact, that single action was the one thing that blew their cover, caused the failure of the entire operation.’
‘And he did let the villagers go before the worst of the fighting started,’ Carter said.
‘Exactly. Have you got the file on him?’
Carter got his briefcase and extracted a couple of sheets stapled together. Munro examined it. ‘Oberstleutnant Kurt Steiner, age twenty-seven. Remarkable record. Crete, North Africa, Stalingrad. Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves.’
‘I’m always intrigued by his mother, sir. Boston socialite. What they call “Boston Brahmin”.’
‘All very fine, Jack, but don’t forget his father was a German general and a damn good one. Now, what about Steiner? How is he?’
‘There seems no reason to doubt a complete recovery. There’s an RAF hospital for bomber crews with burns problems just outside Norwich. Rather small. Used to be a nursing home. We have Steiner there under secure guard. The cover story is that he’s a downed Luftwaffe pilot. Rather convenient that German paratroopers and
