Sant of the Secret Service: Some Revelations of Spies and Spying

“Look carefully at the book showing in the mouth of my work-bag,” she signalled, “and get a copy at once. It belongs to Heinrich, and I have just borrowed it from his room. He may be back at any moment – he has only just gone out – and I must replace it at once.”

She had casually left the mouth of her work-bag open. It revealed the title-page of an open book, published, as I saw, about seven years before. The title was Royal Love Letters. I had never heard of the volume, but I made a note of its title.

Madame Gabrielle, with an excuse, quitted the room for a few moments, taking the book with her in her bag. On her return she began talking pleasantly about general subjects, but she was listening keenly, I could see. Soon we heard the front door slam, and a heavy shuffling tread crossed the hall and went up the stairs.

“Blind Heinrich,” she telegraphed; “I was only just in time. He is terribly watchful, and would certainly have noticed if the book had not been on the table where he left it. I often wonder whether he is as blind as he pretends to be. You had better go; if he comes in here for tea, it is quite possible he may recognise you.” A quarter of an hour later we were walking along Westbourne Grove together, and Gabrielle told me the history of the mysterious book. For several days, she said, she had been following Heinrich, who had suddenly developed an amazing interest in second-hand bookstalls. He had gone into shop after shop in various parts of London, asked a single question apparently, and come out again. At length she had managed to overhear him ask at one shop for a copy of Royal Love Letters. The shopkeeper had not the volume in stock, and, as the request was such a peculiar one for a man of Heinrich’s temperament, Madame Gabrielle determined to run risks and follow him daily. He entered six more shops, making the same request at each, and at length, in a dingy little by-lane in Soho, managed, to his evident glee, to get what he wanted, and carried it back to Hereford Road with obvious satisfaction.

“Why that particular book, and why so much trouble to get it?” said Madame Gabrielle. “What do you make of it, Mr Sant?”

I made nothing of it, except that there seemed to be good reasons why I should get a copy at once. If Royal Love Letters interested Heinrich Kristensten so deeply, it might well be that it would not be wholly without interest for me.

My first care was to ring up Hecq on the official telephone and give him full particulars respecting Heinrich’s sudden interest in an obscure and practically unknown volume published and forgotten seven years ago. It was quite clear that this was a hint we could not ignore, but I confess I failed to see how it helped us. But I was soon to learn more; Hecq’s quick brain had seen a possibility which I had overlooked.

At seven next morning, before I was out of bed, my telephone rang, and Hecq once more spoke to me.

“I have been searching the papers, Sant,” he said, “and I have found out something that will interest you. Listen carefully. In the Petit Parisien five days ago there was an advertisement for the recovery of a lady’s gold trinket. I have it here. I’ll read it to you,” and he read:

Perdus Ou Trouvés.

Perdu Mét. Opéra Breloque Or.

Vialet 28 Marigny R. 100.

“Yes,” I said, “I hear you. But what has that to do with me?”

“Listen,” said Hecq. “There is nobody named Vialet at that address; we found that out at once. I have had nearly fifty of my people examining every advertisement in the Paris papers issued just before Heinrich began to display an interest in Royal Love Letters. Now we have found out that the advertisement I have just read to you conveys in cryptogrammic form the message, ‘Buy Royal Love Letters.’ It would take too long to explain it, but the paper containing that advertisement would be on sale in London the very day on which, according to Madame Gabrielle, Heinrich began to haunt the second-hand bookstalls on his peculiar quest. Rather curious, is it not?”

Curious it certainly was, and once more I found myself confronted with a further enigma. Why on earth should the book be advertised in cryptogrammic form in a French newspaper? How did Heinrich come to see the advertisement, and how did he know the key to the code? No doubt the paper had accepted the innocent-looking advertisement without the slightest suspicion that it was anything but the genuine announcement it purported to be. It was impossible to overlook the coincidence between the appearance of the advertisement and Blind Heinrich’s sudden deep interest in a forgotten book.

Next day I started out in search of a copy of Royal Love Letters. Of course I failed to get one: it had been out of print for years, as it had been published privately and comparatively few copies had been printed. However, I sent wires to some twenty provincial dealers in second-hand books, and at noon next day had a reply from a dealer in Birmingham, offering me a copy for four and sixpence. I wired the money, and next morning received the shabby little volume. Little did I realise what a dividend my investment of four shillings and sixpence was going to pay me!

On reading the book through, I found it was merely a monograph on the published love letters of various royal personages. It was as dull as the proverbial ditch-water, and I was not surprised at the difficulty both Heinrich and myself had experienced in securing copies: the wonder was that any had escaped the fire or the waste-paper basket. But the very fact made Heinrich’s interest in the book the more suspicious. It conveyed nothing to me, it is true, about Gotha raids on London, but did it convey anything to Heinrich, or was it the means of conveying anything from him to someone else?

I called up Madame Gabrielle on the ’phone, and after she had arrived and examined the volume, we went out to lunch at the Ritz. Across the table I told her of the curious advertisement in the Petit Parisien, whereupon she exclaimed:

“Why, Kristensten reads that paper regularly. I often see him with it. He goes down practically every column of it with his big reading-glass!”

“That settles two points, anyhow,” I said. “The first is that he uses that paper for receiving, and perhaps for sending messages. The second is that he knows the spy-cipher used in drawing up the advertisement. I am beginning to feel that this out-of-print and forgotten book will, if we watch carefully, supply us with a very interesting line to follow.”

And, ringing up Hecq, I told him about the latest development. He was keenly alive to the possibilities of the new situation.

Chapter Twelve

The Secret of the Ribbon

Our new discovery seemed to me so remarkable that I lost no time in impressing upon Madame Gabrielle the imperative necessity of the closest possible scrutiny of Blind Heinrich’s actions. I was more than anxious that we should not lose sight of him for an instant, and that I should be kept fully informed of his every action. For by this time I was firmly convinced that, through some medium which we had yet to discover, he was in some way keeping up communication with the more active agents of the enemy. And if we could but discover the channel through which the stream of communications flowed, it would not be long, I felt sure, before we had the key to the mystery in our hands.

Suddenly, and without any obvious reason, Heinrich completely changed his habits. Hitherto always on the move, he took to remaining indoors all day, hardly ever going out except for a short stroll in the evening. He met no one and apparently spoke scarcely a word to anybody. What his numerous pupils thought of his sudden neglect of them I cannot say. But it was clear enough that something important must have occurred to induce him thus suddenly to abandon what was, professedly at any rate, his sole means of livelihood.

I was discussing him – he was almost invariably our sole topic of conversation nowadays – with Madame Gabrielle as she sat in my room one morning.

“I cannot conceive of any reason,” I said, “why Heinrich should have so suddenly changed the entire routine of his existence. It looks to me as though either something very important has happened or that he is expecting important news. Yet he receives no messages; he never gets even a letter or a telegram.”

“There is only one fact that is peculiar,” said the smart Frenchwoman. “You know I have been looking after him pretty closely lately. Well, whenever he goes out, though he appears to wander about quite aimlessly, he invariably contrives his walk so that it takes him through Lembridge Square. He never misses.”

“Does he always go the same side of the Square?” I asked.

She replied in the affirmative, and I decided to have a look round the Square for myself at once.

That same afternoon found me on the scene of Blind Heinrich’s daily walk. The Square itself varied little from hundreds of others in London: it showed every evidence of dreary respectability common to half the squares in London. Two things, however, attracted my notice.

In the ground-floor window of one house was a big brass cage containing a grey parrot, which was insistently emitting the hideous noises common to the parrot tribe. In a similar window about a dozen houses away was a case containing some old-fashioned wax flowers beneath a glass dome, evidently a survival from the ornamental style peculiar to the early Victorian epoch to which, indeed, the whole dreary Square seemed to belong.

There was nothing to offer a lucid explanation of why Blind Heinrich should choose such a path for his daily ramble. There were dozens of other far more attractive promenades within easy walking distance. Yet here, unless my instinct entirely misled me, was the solution to our riddle.

Day after day I followed the old fellow’s route. I even went so far as to shadow Heinrich himself more than once and verified Madame Gabrielle’s observation. No matter which way he started out, he never failed, on either the outward or homeward journey, to pass along that particular side of the Square. Yet he never spoke to anyone, and I was morally certain that no signal was ever made to him from any of the houses.

On the fourth day I noticed a slight fact. The ring on the top of the parrot’s cage was tied with a big bow of yellow ribbon. Three days later it was altered to dark blue. On the eighth day it had returned to yellow again.

Why these changes? Were they signals?

That night enemy aircraft crossed the south-east coast, but their attempts to reach London were defeated by the terrific fire of the anti-aircraft guns and by a swift concentration of our fighting aeroplanes, which broke up several successive squadrons, and sent the raiders hurrying home again.

Several of my capable assistants then took over the task of finding out all that was known regarding the house in Lembridge Square. Forty-eight hours later I had a full report. I learned that the man in whose room the parrot lived was one of the mysterious band who foregathered to meet Kristensten in the empty house in Harrington Street. He was then dressed as a special constable, a part which, by the way, he had no right whatever to play. He bore the thoroughly English name of Mostyn Brown, and was in business in the City as the agent of a Manchester firm of cotton merchants. Apart from the fact of his presence that night in Harrington Street, nothing that the most exhaustive inquiries revealed suggested in the smallest degree any association with agents of the enemy. To all appearances he was a perfectly respectable City man, in no way different from thousands of others. But – there was a very big but: what was his business in the dead of night in an empty house in the West End in company of a suspected German spy?

A few days later the men who were keeping the houses in Lembridge Square and Hereford Road under surveillance sent me a strange report, which set me thinking deeply. By some means – whether he suspected he was being watched or whether a lucky chance favoured him, we never knew – Blind Heinrich managed to elude the unwearying vigilance of Madame Gabrielle and arrived alone, evidently in a hurry, at Westbourne Grove. Here he hailed a taxi and was driven to Waterloo Station. There at the booking-office on the loop-line side he had met a short, fat man, to whom, after a brief conversation, he handed a bottle wrapped in white paper. They remained in conversation a few minutes longer and then parted. The fat man was followed to the tube railway and thence to King’s Cross, where he had bought a ticket for Peterborough, and left by the five-thirty express.

Why Peterborough, I wondered? There were certainly no facilities there for anyone engaged in Germany’s nefarious work. But attached to the report was a snapshot – taken secretly, of course – which showed me at once that the little fat man was apparently a sailor, “camouflaged” hastily in a badly fitting overcoat and a cloth cap. That gave me a further clue. I took down a Bradshaw, and, glancing at the train by which the little fat man had travelled, made an interesting discovery. It was the Newcastle express. I began to see why the mysterious little man had booked to Peterborough. That afternoon I ascertained that the parrot’s cage in the house in Lembridge Square sported a broad ribbon of yellow satin. At midnight I rang up Hecq at his house at St. Germain, and asked him to send Aubert the detective over at once.

An hour after midnight came another air-raid alarm – the second to coincide with the appearance of the yellow ribbon.

Now one coincidence of this kind may mean nothing. Two begin to be suspicious. A third is convincing. I found my suspicions deepening into certainty.

Directly the air-raid warning was given, our watchers in Harrington Street were keenly on the alert, but, though they watched all night, there was no meeting of the mysterious men in the empty house. I guessed the reason. The raiders were again driven back before they could reach the Metropolis, and, therefore, there was no news to be gathered for transmission to the authorities in Berlin. Everything now pointed with increasing certainty to the house in Lembridge Square as a focus of enemy activity.

Directly the “All clear” had been sounded over the London area, Heinrich left Hereford Road, and, according to Madame Gabrielle’s report to me, hurried round to the house of the grey parrot. He remained there about half an hour, and then retraced his steps home in the waning moonlight.

Thus mystery followed mystery. What was the meaning of the various coloured bows on the parrot’s cage? For that they had a very definite meaning I no longer doubted. It seemed, indeed, tolerably clear that the yellow ribbon betokened a coming raid. And evidently the half-blind old musician was a close friend of the manufacturers’ agent. But who, in reality, was the mysterious Mostyn Brown, and, if he were indeed an enemy agent, how had he managed to elude the close watch that had been set upon him?

It had struck me that the house which sheltered the grey parrot might conceivably conceal a wireless plant of sufficient power to convey a message to a submarine lurking off the coast. Such a plant need not be a conspicuous affair. But one of my agents, posing as an official of the Metropolitan Water Board, had been able to negative the suggestion, and I confess I found myself still hopelessly puzzled as to the means by which information of the damage done by the raiding aircraft was so speedily and so accurately conveyed to the enemy.

By this time Aubert had arrived from Paris, and had taken an obscure lodging in Chessington Street, a dingy thoroughfare off the Euston Road. By appointment I met him late one night at the corner of Grey’s Inn Road and Holborn, and, having explained to him briefly what had occurred, told him to hold himself in readiness for instant action.

The apparent abandonment of the secret meetings in Harrington Street was a source of considerable anxiety and chagrin. I was particularly anxious about them. We had several of those who had taken part in the first meeting under close observation, but had learned nothing about them sufficient to justify our taking strong action. Most of them, indeed, seemed to be of the same apparently blameless type as Mr Mostyn Brown, and it was evident that if they were indeed enemy agents they had been selected or appointed by a master-hand at the game of espionage. And I wanted badly to gain some more information about them.

Madame Gabrielle was ever on the alert, and soon it appeared from her report that the blind fiddler was expecting another raid. The ribbon bow on the parrot’s cage changed to dark blue, and remained so for six days. On the seventh it was replaced by yellow. That night the old man remained in his room reading for hours after all the other inmates had retired. But that night no raid was made.

I now began to think that it would be well if I took the mysterious Mostyn Brown under my own special observation. For a week during the moonless nights I shadowed him closely. I found out that he was a member of a certain third-class City club, frequented by a large number of “pure-blooded Englishmen” who happened to bear German names – of course they had been naturalised – and very soon my name appeared on the club books.

It was not long before I managed to scrape acquaintance with Mostyn Brown over a game of billiards. I cultivated his friendship eagerly, and very soon we were on excellent terms. As a matter of fact, I wanted an invitation to his house, and at last I got it.

I spent there one of the dullest evenings of my life, an evening, as it happened, entirely wasted. Beyond noting that the ribbon on the parrot’s cage had again turned to blue, I saw nothing of the slightest interest.

The next night, however, I made a discovery. Dropping in at the club, I found Mostyn Brown engaged in a game of billiards with a man whom I knew in the club as Harry Smith. A bullet-headed, bespectacled person, with hair standing erect as the bristles of a blacking brush, Smith looked the typical Hun, and I very soon decided in my own mind that Heinrich Schmidt was probably the name by which he was first known to the world.

Suddenly a dispute arose about some point in the game, and in a moment words were running high. Half a dozen spectators noisily joined in the altercation, and the room was a Babel of dispute. I saw my chance.

Taking Mostyn Brown’s side, I suddenly interjected a sentence in German. Apparently hardly noticing the change in his excitement Mostyn Brown replied in the same language, and his accent told me at once that he was not of British birth. There was no possibility of mistake, for, however well the Hun may speak our tongue, he will inevitably betray himself when in a moment of excitement he lapses into his own language.

My suspicions of Mostyn Brown were naturally intensified a hundredfold by this discovery. Of course, I redoubled my efforts, and was in daily conference with certain highly placed people in Whitehall, whose curiosity was now fully roused, as well as with my own agents, the vivacious Madame Gabrielle and the slow, but painstaking and relentless, Aubert. The watch on the suspects became closer than ever, and I was convinced that, try how he might, none of them could move, practically speaking, without full details of what he was doing reaching me in the course of an hour or two at most. And I was ready to strike hard at the earliest moment when decisive action might seem justified.

For the moment, however, there was nothing to be done but watch and wait, tense and expectant, while night by night the moon drew nearer and nearer to the full. Thanks to the information I was able to place before the authorities in Whitehall, there was little chance of the anti-aircraft defences of London being caught napping, while the secret signal I had discovered – the changing of the coloured ribbon on the parrot’s cage at Mostyn Brown’s house in Lembridge Square – would be almost certain to give us warning of any long-arranged raid in force. Apart from the sequel, the worst we had to expect was a sudden dash by a few machines in the event of an unexpected improvement in the weather rendering such a course possible. But with regard to the big raids, involving days of patient preparation, settled weather, and most careful and thorough organisation, we felt tolerably sure that the tell-tale ribbon would give us the warning we wanted. So it proved in the event, and once again the Hun’s trickiness brought his carefully planned scheme to failure.

Chapter Thirteen

How Berlin Obtains Information

At last the day – or rather the night – which we had been expecting came. The sun had risen in a cloudless sky, and all day long had poured down a fierce flood of heat and light. London was stifling. Everyone seemed to be the victim of heat lassitude; tempers were decidedly short, and even the most amiable of people seemed suddenly to have developed raw-edged nerves. Added to all this was an uneasy presentiment of danger; “There will be a big raid to-night,” was the thought in the back of everyone’s mind.

In order to avoid arousing Mostyn Brown’s suspicions that his house was being watched, we had given up, apparently, all observation on the place during daylight. But not in reality. In a house on the other side of the Square, directly facing that occupied by Mostyn Brown, I had hired a room on the third floor, and from the window, with the help of powerful field-glasses, we could keep the house under the strictest watch. We had not even to enter the Square to reach our tower of vantage, for there was a back entrance from an adjoining street.

Towards this eyrie I had bent my steps, and on arriving I found Aubert in a state of suppressed excitement.

“Look!” he said, handing me the glasses, and, taking them from him, I levelled them at Mostyn Brown’s room.

The ribbon on the parrot’s cage had been changed to yellow!

But this was not all. The sun shone full on the window of Mostyn Brown’s house and his room was strongly illuminated. The field-glasses showed us that Mostyn Brown was at home, a most unusual thing in the day-time, and that with him was Blind Heinrich. How Heinrich had got there we could not imagine. Aubert had not seen him enter. They were seated on chairs drawn up to the table, and were poring intently over a book, apparently making memoranda on sheets of paper. As we watched, Madame Gabrielle, habited as a coster girl and carrying a huge basket of flowers, came slowly along the Square, past Mostyn Brown’s house and round past the house in which we were seated.

I saw her flutter a signal, and, with her arm resting naturally on the side of the basket, she rapidly tapped out a message with her nimble fingers.

“Heinrich has been with Mostyn Brown for the past two hours,” she spelt out. “He came straight from Hereford Road and went into the next house from the back.” Evidently there was some way of communication at the rear of the two houses.

I had now no time to waste, and, leaving Aubert and Madame Gabrielle to keep the necessary watch, I hurried off to Whitehall, where I was soon in deep talk with the astute and enterprising chief of the London defences, a keen officer who by sheer merit had forced himself to the very front rank in aircraft service.

“Good!” he said, when I had told him my news. “I think we shall give them a surprise to-night. Perhaps you would like to see how we work. Sit down for a bit.” And he turned to his big table, on which stood a telephone.

For the next half-hour I watched him, fascinated with his sure grasp of London’s intricate defences, and amazed, though I had thought I knew his capability, at the swiftness and decision with which he issued what to me seemed a veritable jumble of orders. To centre after centre of the aircraft defences he spoke a series of numbers, so bewildering in their speed and complexity that an enemy agent seated in the very room could not have gained a scrap of information. Even to me, familiar as I am with almost every branch of code work, it was a veritable revelation.

“I think we are ready for them now,” he said finally, wiping the perspiration from his face, and I could see that even to him the strain had been severe. How well he had done his work all England was to know the next day, though the public never even suspected the magnitude of his task.