The Spies of Shilling Lane, page 30
The Pendulum.
Mrs. Braithwaite stood outside deliberating whether to follow her inside. After all, she could hardly keep her cover in a pub where everybody knew her name.
But what really bothered her was why Florrie was in there. Did the criminals know her? Did she have friends there? Was she connected in some way to the black market?
Did the criminals know that Florrie was a fascist?
She hurried over to the telephone box opposite and quickly dialed a number.
A man’s voice came on the end of the line. Baxter. “Hello, why are you so terribly late? The play starts at six.”
That was the code.
Mrs. Braithwaite replied, “I was caught up in a queue for lamb chops.”
“Where are you?” he said hurriedly.
“Florrie knows, and now she’s gone into the Pendulum,” she whispered. “I can’t follow her in there. They know me too well.”
“I’ll be there in half an hour.”
She put the receiver down and began snooping around the pub, trying to look into the windows, listening to any conversations she could hear.
This wasn’t how the plan should have worked at all.
56.
After the torturous episode in the gentlemen’s lavatory, Mr. Norris watched as Cummerbatch walked out of the Ritz and asked the doorman to hail him a taxi. Mr. Norris had no choice but to follow suit.
“Could you hail me a taxi, please?” he asked the doorman, hoping he’d used the correct terminology. He’d never spoken to a doorman before, let alone requested that one hail him a taxi.
As soon as the doorman stepped toward the road, a taxi halted beside him.
“Thank you,” Mr. Norris muttered, nipping inside and telling the driver, “Would you be so kind as to, er, follow that taxi?”
After a little confusion about which taxi they were to follow—Piccadilly was awash with black cabs—Mr. Norris felt sure that they were heading toward Clapham.
But as Cummerbatch’s taxi sped through Clapham High Street, past the butcher’s shop, and toward Clapham Common, Mr. Norris realized with a thud precisely where he was being taken.
The Pendulum.
57.
Betty, having made her telephone call, walked hastily to the cloakrooms in Charing Cross Station, where she passed across a cloakroom ticket and received, in exchange, a large black bag.
Taking the bag, she jumped onto a bus for Clapham, alighting at the high street, bag in hand, and made for the black door beside the butcher’s shop.
The place looked deserted. Caution was paramount, so she hid in the alleyway opposite for a few minutes, checking for a sign of life. Nothing.
Then, the lock-picking device in her hand, she walked swiftly and casually over to the black door and had it open in a matter of seconds. As it pushed ajar, she listened for voices, any sort of noise, but it was silent. In she crept, pulling the door closed behind her.
The musty smell made her recall all too vividly her imprisonment in the place. Whether she made light of it or not, she’d been terrified.
“Hello?” she called, just in case. Better to know she wasn’t alone while she was on the stairs beside the door.
But there was nothing.
Gingerly creeping down, she went into the main room, looking for a good place to plant the bomb. Inside the meeting room were a number of tall cupboards, underneath which she was hoping to find a loose floorboard.
She didn’t intend for the bomb to go off. It only needed to be found, eventually. It was her means of getting Cummerbatch to the venue, and he’d smell a fish if it wasn’t unearthed somewhere. Yet it had to be well enough hidden to flummox them until the meeting began. If they found it too soon, they’d let Cummerbatch know, and he would simply go back to work. Their plot would have failed.
No, it had to keep them on their toes until the meeting itself.
Pulling a cupboard away from the wall, she tugged at a floorboard, using a screwdriver she’d brought along to wriggle it loose. Then she lowered the hefty bomb into the narrow space beneath, where it fit snugly. Checking that the timer was set for half past eight—if necessary she would evacuate before then—she replaced the floorboard and the cupboard. Then she swiftly retreated to her hiding place, which was in the cupboard under the stairs, behind some old boxes and building planks.
Now all she had to do was wait.
58.
Mrs. Braithwaite watched from behind a tree as a taxi pulled up outside the Pendulum. A portly man clambered out, whom she instantly recognized from his description: Cummerbatch.
“Wait here!” he ordered the taxi driver, before striding in.
Was he going in to meet Florrie?
Mrs. Braithwaite now knew that, whatever else she did and didn’t do, she had to get inside the pub. Without Betty and the others there, it was up to her to be their eyes and ears.
She had to find out what was going on.
There had to be a back door to the pub. She darted from behind a tree to the corner of the building, running up the back until she came upon a door. Creeping up, she turned the handle. It was unlocked. She pushed it ajar.
“I saw you take the money,” an angry-sounding voice came from behind the bar.
“You saw nothing, mate!” a harder, threatening voice said.
She pushed her nose through the crack to see two barmen arguing, one of them raising a fist.
Seizing her chance, Mrs. Braithwaite slid in, keeping herself low and worming her way through the back room into the area behind the long bar that ran across the rear of the pub.
Popping her head up and down so that she could see over the bar, she instantly spotted them not five yards away from her. Cummerbatch was standing beside Florrie, his hand on her waist.
Had Florrie seduced Cummerbatch, too?
They were talking to two ruffians and seemed to be negotiating a price for the contents of a large box.
The name on the box was C. S. Berry.
Wasn’t that the name of the fruit and vegetable stall in Clapham market?
She frowned. They wouldn’t come all the way to the Pendulum to buy fruit. Food rationing had become ridiculously severe recently, but still.
As she watched, one of the ruffians opened the box and pulled something out. It wasn’t fruit at all.
It was a gun.
Sensing something, Cummerbatch suddenly turned in Mrs. Braithwaite’s direction.
Just in time to see her head bobbing back down behind the bar.
“Come out, my good woman,” he said jovially. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”
Mrs. Braithwaite stood up, though deciding not to move to the other side of the bar. “I just work here,” she muttered, even though it was patently obvious that she didn’t. “I don’t believe we’ve met,” she added, for lack of anything else to say.
Florrie spun around, furious. “She’s the Braithwaite girl’s mother.” Taking in Mrs. Braithwaite’s counterfeit apparel—Cassandra’s fur stole and the wretched hat—she said, “What are you doing here?”
“I’m meeting some friends, actually,” Mrs. Braithwaite replied in the most even voice that she could. “Ah, there they are. Over there!” She looked around for Bobby Mack in his usual corner, but he wasn’t there.
Typical of him to be elsewhere when she needed him!
“I think you should come with us, Mrs. Braithwaite,” Cummerbatch said evenly, holding one of the guns loosely yet threateningly beside his hip, and beckoning her over with his other hand. “We have a meeting to get to.”
Which is why Mrs. Braithwaite found herself being forced into a taxi ahead of Florrie and Cummerbatch and heading at speed toward the butcher’s basement.
59.
Having witnessed Mrs. Braithwaite’s capture in the Pendulum from a position behind the pool table, Mr. Norris watched with horror as they took her off in the waiting taxi. Naturally, he had let his own taxi go—it had been pricey enough as it was, frankly. Mr. Norris was not in the habit of taking taxis.
Yet now, watching them go and uttering a small “Blast!” from under his breath, he came to terms with the fact that he might have lost them.
He thought about trying to telephone Baxter, but Baxter would be in the midst of his own part in the operation: collecting MI5’s senior management, explaining it all so that they could come to witness Cummerbatch’s duplicity.
After pondering for a few minutes, he decided to make his way, quickly, to the butcher’s basement.
“They would, in all probability, go there next,” he muttered to himself as he began walking fast, then running, to the high street.
The pavements were busy again. People coming home from work, collecting children, going to shelters just in case.
As the black basement door came into view, Mr. Norris shuddered with the recollection of his last dealings in the place.
Two blackshirted youths arrived at the door and went in, probably for the meeting, which, according to Mr. Norris’s wristwatch, would begin in around twenty minutes.
If Cummerbatch and Florrie were in there already—which was probable—he would be heading straight into them. Florrie would recognize him, then he, too, would be taken prisoner.
“And what would be the use of that?” he said under his breath.
Taking a deep breath, he knew what he had to do.
He had to go through the back again.
Trotting down and around to the houses at the back, he easily recalled the house behind the butcher’s shop and clambered over the fence, through the garden, and into the backyard.
The window had yet to be mended, so he slipped through quickly. The axe was there in front of him, but he quickly decided it was a bit unwieldy. He’d be better with a smaller, yet very sharp knife that he found beside the butcher’s block. The door to the basement had yet to be mended, too, and he crept through it down the back stairs, voices coming up from a room at the end of the corridor.
“It must be here somewhere.” Florrie’s voice rang out over the others, accompanied by the sound of things being moved around. “Come on. Help me find it, will you.”
Mr. Norris tucked himself inside one of the other doorways, listening hard. He recognized the voice of the professor as well as Mary Montgomery and her vile sister, and a few of the other characters from Chiltern Church.
“What’s she doing here?” one of them said.
“We’re keeping her hostage for tonight,” a booming upper-class voice said. Was that Cummerbatch? “I’ll explain it to you all when the meeting begins.”
Were they referring to Mrs. Braithwaite?
As more people came in, the search for the bomb seemed to become more subdued, although he could still hear the scuffle of moving furniture.
Florrie and Cummerbatch must have come into the corridor for a private word, as suddenly Mr. Norris could hear them much louder and clearer.
“Maybe she didn’t have time to plant it,” Florrie said. “In any case, I don’t know where she would get a bomb at such short notice.”
“I would have thought she’d be here herself,” the deep voice said quietly.
“We’ve looked everywhere. Are you sure she really meant to do it?”
He let out a sigh. “Let’s start the meeting quickly, get them out before anything happens, just to be on the safe side.”
Reentering the room, he clapped his hands together, calling for silence, and there was a scuffle as people found chairs and rearranged themselves for the meeting.
But Mr. Norris wasn’t paying attention.
A noise was coming from behind him. Someone was descending the back staircase, the one he had used to come down from the butcher’s shop.
Petrified, he stayed as still as he could, until, as the figure came closer, he realized with utter relief that it was Baxter.
“Mr. Norris, I thought I’d find you here,” he whispered, coming up beside him. “How is everything going?”
“Not at all good. They’ve got Mrs. Braithwaite. They haven’t found the bomb, though.” He glanced around at him. “I thought you were supposed to be bringing the chaps from MI5.”
“Oh, they’re waiting outside. We have to wait until things get going first. They have to catch Cummerbatch in full swing, you see.”
“Oh, of course,” Mr. Norris said.
“Come on, let’s go closer down the corridor so that we can hear.”
Baxter went first, followed by Mr. Norris, nervously listening as Cummerbatch took to the stage in the meeting room.
“Things are about to change, for us, for the Nazis, and for Britain,” he was saying in booming, celebratory tones.
Within minutes, Baxter had found Betty and pulled her out from beneath the stairs to join them.
“There you are, darling,” he whispered, although something seemed to have changed in his tone.
“Where are the MI5 chiefs?” Betty whispered back. “We need them here now.”
Baxter gave a whistle toward the staircase, and the door crashed open, followed by heavy footsteps coming fast down the stairs.
Mr. Norris looked around in time to see four burly men who didn’t look at all like MI5 chiefs, storming toward them.
“Baxter!” Betty gasped, as one of the thugs grabbed her, plunging her into the meeting room—the door kindly opened by Baxter.
Another thug brought Mr. Norris in, forcing his arms behind his back, his butcher’s knife falling with a clank to the floor.
“I see that Mr. Fox has joined us,” Cummerbatch said smoothly from the front, “with a few more hostages.” He gave a low chuckle.
Mr. Norris could see Mrs. Braithwaite, tied to a chair at the front, her mouth gagged.
“Bring them up here so that we can see them.”
The thugs dragged them up, tying them onto chairs beside Mrs. Braithwaite.
Baxter walked up to Cummerbatch, and they had a short conference in low voices. Baxter then dropped back to position himself beside Betty.
“How could you?” she spat at him.
“Oh, darling. You were never that good a spy, were you?” he said, smiling sadly at her. “That’s why Cummerbatch chose you for this job. He knew you weren’t good enough to catch up with us. Now be a good girl and tell me where you put the bomb.”
“I’ll never tell you.”
“Well, in that case, we’ll all be blown to pieces, you and your dear mother included.” He looked at her coldly, then said, “It’s of no consequence anyway. I severed the detonation cord before giving it to you last night.” He gave her a steely smile. “It won’t go off.”
“How do you know that I didn’t fix it?”
“Because, my dear Betty, you simply aren’t that thorough.”
Cummerbatch was standing in front of the group, which now comprised more than twenty widely assorted individuals. “We might have had a setback in recent days, losing a few of our men, but let it be known that from now onward, this organization will be run like clockwork. There’ll be no more mistakes, no more poorly thought-out schemes.” He looked pointedly at Betty, his voice lowering to a threatening rasp. “No more spies.”
A ripple of applause went through the audience, but he quickly quieted them down.
“Today we will start anew. The führer is beginning the—”
A terrific chorus of gunshots came from the stairs, followed by shouting, men’s voices, and loud footsteps.
Then they broke into the room.
There must have been more than a dozen of them, quickly filtering through to dominate the motley crowd.
It was the police.
Astonished, Mr. Norris watched as they grabbed and handcuffed every member.
“We are arresting you all on suspicion of treason,” the chief inspector called out to the fascists.
Funny, he looks familiar, thought Mr. Norris.
And then he remembered. It was the chief inspector who had come to arrest Anthony Metcalf outside the curiosity shop.
His head shot around to look at Betty.
“Did you…?”
She grinned. “Well, if someone gives you his telephone number, it’s rather rude not to use it.”
60.
It was after ten o’clock that evening by the time they’d finished the initial questions from the police. Betty stood outside Scotland Yard with her mother, who was retying her head scarf, waiting for Mr. Norris before heading back to Shilling Lane. They would have to go back to Scotland Yard in the morning to make an official statement. The police had to have enough evidence to imprison the BUF members for a very long time.
“Betty dear, I’m sorry about Baxter. I know you were very fond of him.” Mrs. Braithwaite put an arm around her. “How did you know?”
“Well, it was more of a calculated guess, to be honest. Baxter mentioned that Mary Montgomery suspected him of having a fling with Florrie, which was a ludicrous suggestion—so ludicrous, in fact, that it almost had to have a grain of truth in it.” She gave her mother a tight-lipped smile. “Mary isn’t a daft girl, so the only reason I could see for her suspecting that Baxter was having a fling was that she had seen them together. After that, it was an obvious next step. Why wouldn’t he have come clean about seeing Florrie if it was innocent? No, there had to be a bigger story.”
“Had they been together for long?”
“From what I gather, Florrie was shared between Baxter and Cummerbatch, sent out to recruit when she could. She didn’t belong to anyone as such, rather she belonged to the group, ran the group in her own way. She was the link that held them all together, the mastermind.”
