Chapter 25: Spring Trap

“READY!” PC Brown hissed to us, but it was far too dark this early in the morning for me to read his lips. Mary tugged my sleeve twice, the signal that we had agreed and I was alert and ready.

Mary and I were given the opportunity to call on known criminal contacts of Curly Cavenagh, which Mary’s husband, the late Brad Gold had identified as being connected with active Nazi sympathisers who were affecting the war effort resisting the Axis Powers’ domination of Europe and North Africa.

I would have liked to have kept Mary out of this but she insisted she take full part. The advisor from MI6 said we should continue as a team, as were those involved in the police and double agents in SIS.

Captain Jordan assured us that his cell was secure and that they were watching us like a hawk providing protection. Jordan indicated that they had identified several agents who were believed to be part of the double agent set-up but we had trusted Army and non-Metropolitan Police units on standby to arrest them when the time was right, basically 5am on Thursday morning on a freezing cold February day in foggy London Town.

Jordan explained that they had needed to give these agents enough rope to hang themselves, but allowing specific communications from Mary and I, naming suspects and what they were suspected of doing.

During the previous night’s discussions after the briefings, Captain Jordan admitted that MI6 were very worried about the Afrika Korps being shipped to Libya on 12 February 1941 to shore up the Italian Nazi defences and use the area as a base from which to launch attacks on our bases in Egypt, the Middle East and our naval and Air Force capabilities in Gibraltar, Malta and Cyprus. At the same time the British, mostly through a Royal Navy blockade, were trying to support a campaign by the Greek Army to oust the Italian invaders of Greece, who in recent weeks, during January 1941, were the first army of the Allies to repel an Axis invasion. The concern was that if Greece fell, Cyprus would be in the jaws of the pincer between Europe and North Africa, including Egypt.

The problem for Mary and I’s team was that Cummings’ whereabouts had not been clearly identified as he hadn’t reported into New Scotland Yard since last Friday, nor had he returned to his home address over the past couple of nights, although several options for where he might be were suggested. We had to split up into smaller teams to ensure that we hit all the known targets at 5am.

It was about two hours after the all clear from the night’s bombing sounded that we gathered in front of Reg North’s warehouse. It was still dark.

I was more accustomed to moving around London in the blackout than Mary was, but occasional kerbstones were marked with whitewash and each of the iron lamposts had three white rings painted round at eye level to reduce chances of walking into them.

There was no moon but the sky was clear with a crisp hint of frost in the air and the stars were out, so we managed to feel ourselves about well enough. It wasn’t due to be dawn for another half hour.

Alongside Mary and I was an older local bobby, PC Brown in uniform and he looked like he had been brought out of retirement, and a younger Detective Constable from the South Midlands, called Doug Eggerson, who told us he had only transferred from uniform a few months ago. The rest of the team were spread thinly around four other addresses thought likely.

We were briefed that Reg North was a petty smuggler and Black Market trader who had a small warehouse behind his house bordering on the side of the Thames, with its own wharf. His known associates included Cavenagh and Cummings.

Of the five sites our team were spread thinly to hit their targets at 5am, this was only one that tied Cavenagh and Cummings together, so we asked to accompany this group.

So, at 5am, our small team knocked on the door of Reg North and were prepared to charge in as soon as the door was opened.

Rather than confronting a sleepy man in his pyjamas, however, we were pulled inside and found ourselves face-to-face with the missing Mitch Mullinger and the crooked Doctor Finlay, who both pointed revolvers at us.

The door was closed behind us by our former driver, Rawlings, who also showed us that he was armed, immediately after he coshed Eggerson and laid him out unconscious on the floor. Meanwhile Mullinger and Finlay covered PC Brown, Mary and I with their revolvers.

Rawlings grinned at me, “I said I’d bloody well get you, Onslow ... and your girlfriend.”

I was asked to drop my cane and remove my revolver and also drop it on the floor, as was Brown. They seemed to know that Mary was armed with the revolver I had relieved from the policeman wen Bert was arrested, and Mullinger asked her to drop it on the floor.

I loosened my tie around my throat but left the knot tied as Mary and I were led through the house into the thirty foot by sixty foot warehouse behind it. The warehouse was full of stacked shelves of cardboard boxes and wooden packing cases. We left PC Brown behind to be tied up by Rawlings, who by then had already secured the unconscious DC Eggerson, leaving them in the house.

Finlay placed our revolvers in a table in the warehouse.

Mullinger roughly led Mary to a half-glazed office on the right hand side of the warehouse and pushed her through the door before returning to where Finlay and I stood.

Rawlings joined us carrying a hard backed wooden kitchen chair and roughly forced me to sit in it where he tied my hands behind my back around the back of the chair, and then tied my legs together at the ankles, the rough twine running over my socks, in the manner that reminded me of how Bradford Gold had been bound before meeting his fate, via bath and river. I shivered at the thought.

Through the office windows I could see Cummings rise from where he was sitting, but I could hear nothing except a heavily muffled fraction of what was happening immediately around me.

Once I was securely tied, Mullinger waved dismissively at Rawlings, turning to Finlay, asking, “We’ll go get rid of the coppers, how long you reckon before Onslow starts singing like a canary?”

“At least half an hour,” I read on Finlay’s lips, “do you think you’ve got time?”

I couldn’t see Mullinger by then, as he had walked level with me, laying a hand on my shoulder, so I didn’t have a clear enough view of his lips, but I assume he had replied along the lines of something like, “Yeah. Plenty of time, I don’t want to miss anything.”

The doctor grinned and reminded him, “No more than half an hour then, remember?”

With that, Mullinger walked past me. I couldn’t hear clearly, but I assumed Rawlings went with him, as they had two tied men to deal with in some way that I didn’t at all like the sound of but could do absolutely nothing about.

I fidgeted a little in the chair but my hands and feet were paired up and bound securely at wrist and ankle but not to the chair leg. Finlay turned to say something, so I was unable to read what he said. I imagined that he had forgotten that I had been deafened the previous day, when I wore a huge cotton pad and bandage around my head; today I had a discrete ear plug secured by a little flesh-coloured plaster.

The office door opened and Cummings dragged Mary out by the arm, bringing her over to where I sat. Mary was otherwise unrestrained, but with me bound to the chair, she was outnumbered two to one.

Her mouth moved in anger but unclear words were uttered as she directed her vitriol at Cummings.

Her eyes were watery as if she was holding back from crying, our position looked pretty hopeless. I tried to smile at her, silently reassuring her that she would be all right. She looked at me blankly but wih her eyebrows raised as if in question, and I replied with a slight nod. She glanced at Cummings and Finley.

Cummings sneered at me. “Mr Onslow, Finlay will inject you in a moment and then you’ll tell me everything. I just want to know what the police intelligence know about the extent of my operation. Don’t worry, I know quite a lot already, most of it anyway. Like Mitch was working as a double agent, for the CIA and pretending to be Cavenagh’s partner in crime. But what you didn’t know is that he’s also a Nazi supporter. As a racist he thinks that the negroes back in the States should be enslaved again as inferior beings and the white Ayrian race, to which he thinks he belongs, should be the dominant race by some god-given right. And I bet Keppel hadn’t told you that Mitch’d been detailed to investigate the smuggling of silver bullion into the States by an East London gang headed up by Curly, the very bloke he was mates with? Did he?”

“No, he didn’t,” I replied.

“But Marcia here did tell you that Gold was as queer as a nine-bob note, though, didn’t she?”

I nodded.

“And that Mitch was his long-time queer boyfriend?”

I nodded again, seeing Finlay out of the corner of my eye approaching me. Finlay pulled up the loose sleeve of my coat, undid and discarded on the floor the cuff links on my shirt sleeve that I inherited from my father and rolled the sleeve up to halfway up my forearm. The struck-off Doctor swabbed my skin with a cotton wad moistened with alcohol, judging from the cold tingle I felt, before returning back to his table to fill his syringe full of truth serum.

Cummings droned on, “I know you thought Gold’s co-pilot Stanton was shot down over Germany, but I bet you didn’t know that Stanton was also his lover...”

I shook my head, “I wasn’t certain but I suspected that might have been the case.”

“ ... or that Stanton was another double agent who had landed his plane safely in German-occupied France rather than fly onto Mannheim, his crew arrested as POWs, and somehow had been smuggled back into England with forged papers and made his way back to London?”

“No, I didn’t know any of that,” I replied. “If I did, I would doubt that his crew would be allowed to become POWs with that information.”

“Yeah, I think you’re probably right, Mr Onslow.”

“Did Mullinger or Stanton tell you that and you believed it, or have you at last started doing some proper detective work?”

“Ha! Fine detective you were, Onslow, you didn’t even know that my family only had to grease a few palms in Recruitment to get me into the detective branch at the Yard, and then it was easy to become your sergeant, as anyone with any ambition knew you were on your way out and shunned you that last couple of years or so.”

“I know that all too well, Bob,” I taunted back, trying to put on a confident smirk of my own, “you were a bloody useless detective sergeant, but I couldn’t find a replacement, so I could get rid of you, no matter how hard I tried.”

He stepped forward a step and clenched and unclenched a fist.

Ha! I thought and laughed at him.

“It wouldn’t do for you to knock me out just before you injected me with truth drug, now, would it, Bob?”

I couldn’t have grinned wider if I had tried. I looked at Mary and nodded at her. she reacted with a small smile and I could see that she pushed her shoulders back and stood up a little straighter.

“I only acted useless when I worked for you, Cummings sneered back, “so I could avoid convicting family and friends, while informin’ them of police operations, like today’s fiasco, so I like to think I was a lot more useful to my people than useless.”

“So our whole operation at dawn this morning is a waste of time, Bob?”

“Oh no, your bunch of bobbies’ll pick up most of the traitors, those that want England to surrender to Germany. We don’t want any o’ that! Sure, we profit from these bloody traitors, but we’re not with them. You’ve got nothing on me, Mr Onslow, so with all those high ranking police officers arrested an’ gone to the gallows, I might even get promoted, perhaps get your old job.”

“You mentioned Stanton, Gold’s co-pilot. So what was Stanton to you, Bob?”

“Ahh! Now you’re askin’!” he sneered, “He was a Gestapo officer who had come over here in the mid-1930s as a young man with some woman spy posing as his mother, pretending to have come direct from East Africa, where he had actually spent time as a boy when it was a German colony. While living in Germany before comin’ here he had been an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth. He acquired forged papers which showed him to be a native Englishman, he was able to join the RAF and had a radio hidden at the base from which he boasted to us that he used to call ahead the routes the squadron was heading to bomb that night, so it was no wonder so many bombers were being shot down and Gold was unscathed until that last time.”