Eye of the Needle - Ken Follett [32]
Bloggs whistled. “I didn’t know it was quite that big. I suppose the doubles say we’re going in at Cherbourg, but really it will be Calais, or vice versa.”
“Something like that. Apparently I don’t need to know the details. Anyway they haven’t told me. However, the whole thing is in danger. We knew Canaris; we knew we had him fooled; we felt we could have gone on fooling him. A new broom may mistrust his predecessor’s agents. There’s more—we’ve had some defections from the other side, people who could have betrayed the Abwehr’s people over here if they hadn’t been betrayed already. It’s another reason for the Germans to begin to suspect our doubles.
“Then there’s the possibility of a leak. Literally thousands of people now know about the double-cross system. There are doubles in Iceland, Canada, and Ceylon. We ran a double-cross in the Middle East.
“And we made a bad mistake last year by repatriating a German called Erich Carl. We later learned he was an Abwehr agent—a real one—and that while he was in internment on the Isle of Man he may have learned about two doubles, Mutt and Jeff, and possibly a third called Tate.
“So we’re on thin ice. If one decent Abwehr agent in Britain gets to know about Fortitude—that’s the code name for the deception plan—the whole strategy will be endangered. Not to mince words, we could lose the fucking war.”
Bloggs suppressed a smile—he could remember a time when Professor Godliman did not know the meaning of such words.
The professor went on, “The Twenty Committee has made it quite clear that they expect me to make sure there aren’t any decent Abwehr agents in Britain.”
“Last week we would have been quite confident that there weren’t,” Bloggs said.
“Now we know there’s at least one.”
“And we let him slip through our fingers.”
“So now we have to find him again.”
“I don’t know,” Bloggs said gloomily. “We don’t know what part of the country he’s operating from, we haven’t the faintest idea what he looks like. He’s too crafty to be pinpointed by triangulation while he’s transmitting—otherwise we would have nabbed him long ago. We don’t even know his code name. So where do we start?”
“Unsolved crimes,” said Godliman. “Look—a spy is bound to break the law. He forges papers, he steals petrol and ammunition, he evades checkpoints, he enters restricted areas, he takes photographs, and when people rumble him he kills them. The police are bound to get to know of some of these crimes if the spy has been operating for any length of time. If we go through the unsolved crimes files since the war, we’ll find traces.”
“Don’t you realize that most crimes are unsolved?” Bloggs said incredulously. “The files would fill the Albert Hall!”
Godliman shrugged. “So, we narrow it down to London, and we start with murders.”
THEY FOUND what they were looking for on the very first day of their search. It happened to be Godliman who came across it, and at first he did not realize its significance.
It was the file on the murder of a Mrs. Una Garden in High-gate in 1940. Her throat had been cut and she had been sexually molested, although not raped. She had been found in the bedroom of her lodger, with considerable alcohol in her bloodstream. The picture was fairly clear: she had had a tryst with the lodger, he had wanted to go farther than she was prepared to let him, they had quarreled, he had killed her, and the murder had neutralized his libido. But the police had never found the lodger.
Godliman had been about to pass over the file—spies did not get involved in sexual assaults. But he was a meticulous man with records, so he read every word, and consequently discovered that the unfortunate Mrs. Garden had received stiletto wounds in her back as well as the fatal wound to her throat.
Godliman and Bloggs were on opposite sides of a wooden table in the records room at Old Scotland Yard. Godliman tossed the file across the table and said, “I think this is it.”
Bloggs glanced through it and said, “The stiletto.”
They signed for the file and walked the