Chapter 22: Sunday 9Th February 1941

I AWOKE to a soft kiss on the lips before Mary got up and the thick black curtains were thrown open to the morning light. I blinked and could make out a vision in front of me, a haloed silhouette of a female form in the bright white light of the window. She moved back to the side of the mattress where I lay on the floor of my brother-in-law’s home office.

When my eyes focused better, I saw the unbelievably beautiful Mary Jones, even with tousled hair and no make-up, barely dressed in pale blue shimmering silk pyjamas, embroidered with two red dragons on the front and red tails curled around the wide elbow-length sleeves. She dipped gracefully, to collect a robe from where she had shucked it to the floor last night, and slipped it on, while peering down as she dipped her dainty feet into her silk slippers. Her mouth was moving, but it was clearly a tune she was partly singing, partly humming to herself, continually pursing and unpursing her lips as if she was kissing every syllable of whatever words or tune passed her luscious lips.

I didn’t hear it, of course, but she reacted to a soft knock on the door, by lifting her head and moving smoothly to the door and opening it to her maid from the hotel, standing there expectantly. Milly smiled as sweetly as she could, smiling with her eyes as much as her lips, and the rheum clouding my eyes had cleared enough to make out that she said, “Mornin’, you two sleepy heads, the tea and toast is nearly ready, an’ Jack has left instructions that you could both share his bacon, as he’ll be away in the filling station until at least an hour before lunchtime.”

Mary gave Milly a welcome squeeze, turned to me and mouthed, “I’m off to wash and change, honey. You better dress warmly, it’s trying to snow outside.” And together they were gone.

Hettie was alone in the kitchen when I entered, washed and dressed. We embraced and greeted each other ‘good morning’.

“Jack took the police car ignition key,” Hettie explained, “and is quietly moving it into a lock-up behind our commercial garage up on the London Road. Fortunately, the snow is light and wet, only settling on the grass and bushes, not on the road, so there are no tracks to show where the police car has come from and been. The wet snow is likely to keep people indoors on this Sunday morning, except for the more desperate among the churchgoers. Jack will get one of the petrol pump attendants to run him back; they don’t open the petrol station on Sundays until noon and only for a couple of hours. With petrol rationed there isn’t the demand there once was, nor as much in the storage tanks as we used to hold.”

After breakfast, I wanted to talk more with Mary about what she had discovered from the diary. We wrapped up warm, and I borrowed a long black oil cloth duster coat that Jack had hanging up on the hall stand that looked like he hadn’t worn for some years and needed re-oiling, particularly along the creases and folds, but I thought it would keep the worst of the weather off.

Mary wore a smart tan gabardine Burberry trench coat that she had brought all the way over with her from America, yet, I pointed out to her, that they were made over here in England only about thirty miles from where we were walking, and the design was based on what I and a million other soldiers wore in the trenches during the Great War.

“You’re a mine of knowledge, Edgar. It is a lovely coat, warm and waterproof, and a favourite of mine during the winter and I brought it here knowing it would be cold and damp at this time of year. Look, from the diary I’ve written a list of the initials Brad used to remind him of his appointments, there are more than thirty names in all.” Mary said as we walked through a small park that I had perambulated on a previous visit to the area.

I could tell, from the lack of expelled vapour in the cold air, that she silently mouthed her words to me and sensed from the shortness of the vowels that she talked as my assistant Mary rather than my boss Marcia.

“I have grouped them in the combinations in which they appear to see if there were any patterns. Some combinations only appear with the same other names and never alone, some are regular every week. There is only one name that is described by a single letter, ‘C’. Do you have any idea who that might be?”

“Yes, that’s the head of the Secret Service, currently a civil servant called Sir Eric Desmond. He’s just a pen pusher really, an administrator, not a former active agent.”

“Mmm,” she looked at her notes, “there is also an ‘ED’, but Brad only spoke with him once during the year up to 4th October, when he stops crossing out the names and times. But ‘C’ he speaks to on the telephone every Sunday at noon, in about two hours’ time. Are they one and the same person, I wonder?”

“How do you know they speak on the telephone, does he write down their numbers?”

“No, Brad has one of those memories that easily remember telephone numbers. He finds them easier to recall than lines in his scripts. In the diary he marks them with ‘call XX’ or ‘XX calls’, to show whether he is expecting a call from them or whether he calls them himself. The rest are ‘meets’ or ‘mtg’. With some initials he has venues hinted at, and these are also initials, but for three or four one-off meetings he has written out the full address.”

“I will have a look later. Are there any meetings that stand out as odd or unusual?”

“Well, I know one of them personally, and I spoke to her using Hettie’s phone this morning, while you were in the bathroom shaving.”

“Who’s that?” my interest piqued.

“I saw several entries for ‘call JM’, then one with ‘call JMac’, then a ‘meet JM & WK at Emb’,” she said, with a level of excitement in her voice. “Jennifer MacArthur is the main contact at the London offices of Gold Pictures Inc. Everyone calls her ‘Jenny Mac’. And I suspected that ‘WK’ was Wilson Keppel at the US Embassy.”

“You say you called her?”

“Sure. She’s one of those professionals that many efficient offices of demanding clients like myself desperately needs, she’s on call all day every day and has been for as long as I have been with the Studio. She knows I’m over here as I have called her a couple of times since arriving. She actually booked my hotel suite for me and turned my U.S. dollars into pounds. The U.K. is a big market for our films and I have briefly been over here a couple of times to help publicise movies, particularly ones that I’ve starred in. Jenny arranged for my smooth entry to the country through Keppel at the Embassy, and she tells me she helped with Brad’s entry although I’ve never spoken with Keppel before. Your Immigration Officers have strict rules on letting Aliens from neutral countries in during war-time, even for short visits.”

“Did she say why your husband was regularly speaking to your Studio office in London?”

“Yes, for regular feeds of small amounts of money, postal orders in particular. Have you ever tried to get money out of a bank when you were abroad? It’s no trouble for Jenny Mac to arrange, and she has kept track of cash payments for Brad, wherever he was and sends accounts to the head office in Hollywood. This was why he always had cash for taking his crew down the pub, and other payments. She confirmed to me this morning that she had arranged for the agent Curly Cavenagh as agent to buy the Denmark Hill apartment and shop in Brad’s name, as well as fund the furnishings right at the start of your war. And she told me that the silent partner of Cavenagh of ‘Cavenagh & Laws’ was Curly’s cousin, who had inherited a fortune from his criminal father but had gone straight years ago and was living off the fat.”

“I wonder if Laws was aware of the Cavenagh connection?”

“I don’t think so, he seemed pretty honest in his description and dislike of him.”

“Yes, he did seem genuine and that his partner was mostly the investor and wasn’t involved day to day. What about Keppel and the American connection, can we go see him?”

“Well, it was Jenny that had arranged the meeting she and Brad had with Keppel and introduced them to each other, back in October, just after he left Bomber Command, but she left the meeting before they actually got down to discuss business, so she doesn’t know why Brad wanted to speak to him, or why Keppel was keen to attend the meeting. I also rang the embassy this morning and someone was there, even on a Sunday. I spoke to the Duty Officer, who told me that as far as he knew Keppel would be in during normal office hours tomorrow.”

“It would be interesting to find out what your husband was up to since leaving Bomber Command. Do you want to see Keppel alone?”

“No, I think we should go together, because if he was so keen to meet with Brad, I am sure he would want to see me. Maybe he’s a movie fan?”

“Really?”

“Well, he was apparently happy to meet Brad in person at Brad’s request, so we may be lucky and he’ll agree to see me. I’ll introduce you as my London adviser.”

I was back at the house, sitting drinking tea, after helping to lay the table and waiting for Hettie to complete cooking lunch, with Mary’s help. With my office telephone gone months ago and having to use public telephones, I had put my New Scotland Yard contact index card in my wallet to ring Bob Cummings from the corner call box. Milly returned my wallet when she brought Mary’s valise to Jack and Hettie’s. Also on that card of Yard contacts were a number of numbers that I had needed to call over my years as a copper, including the home telephone number of Sir Leonard McLean, the Police Commissioner.

I thought long and hard about whether I could trust him with a conversation about my fears about corruption in the Yard like Cummings and his police driver and criminals like Cavenagh.

Bradford Gold seemed to be a pivot at the centre with him speaking to a wide range of influential people and I really had no clue as to what the subject of their concentration was all about.

In the end I decided that I couldn’t act on my own, I had been too far out of the loop since my retirement. I would have preferred to have rung C, the head of MI6 but, due to Gold’s retention of phone numbers, I had no means to contact him nor knew anyone else who could.