Shadows of War by Michael Ridpath Page A

McCaigue. ‘So I would be careful, if I were you.’
    ‘Can you get back in touch with Hertenberg?’ Van asked.
    ‘I think so,’ said Conrad.
    ‘Good,’ said Van. ‘Speak to Mrs Dougherty about getting back over there as soon as possible. And in the mean time, Major McCaigue will debrief you more thoroughly.’

12
    Westminster, London
    Sir Henry Alston, baronet, Member of Parliament and merchant banker, strode through St James’s Park, with Freddie Copthorne struggling to keep up. Alston liked to walk through London; he frequently covered the distance from his flat in Kensington to Westminster or even the City on foot, and with taxis so hard to find in these days of petrol rationing, he was getting plenty of exercise.
    St James’s Park, once the prettiest of London parks, had changed over the previous few months. Part of it was the season: the flowers had been slain by autumnal frosts, and wind and rain had stripped the trees of their leaves. But the war had taken its toll too: the lake had been half drained, the railings had been removed from the pathways for the munitions factories, and green spaces were scarred with waterlogged zigzagged trenches, into which people were supposed to dive if there was an air-raid warning. No one did: the ditches were wet and filthy, and besides, not a single German bomb had yet fallen on the city.
    It was a grey day, but the park was quite full. At least half the walkers were in uniform. Whereas two months before almost everyone would have been carrying gas masks, now no one was. Alston’s eye was caught by a tall dark-haired Wren, elegant in her naval uniform, walking with a shorter, plainer friend. He watched as she chatted animatedly, her teeth flashing as she smiled. They were almost upon her when she looked up, saw him, and for the briefest moment an expression of horror touched her face before she turned away.
    As they passed, Alston heard an indistinct whisper from the friend. He felt a familiar surge of anger. You would have thought that by now he would have got used to the effect his face had on people. One side, his left, was almost perfect: high cheekbone, a smooth jaw with the hint of a dimple at the chin, a straight nose, fair hair falling to a mop at his brow. In his youth it was said he looked like Rupert Brooke. But the other side was a twisted mess of white and pink scar tissue, through which, miraculously, a living blue eye stared. The humiliation of the girl’s flinch was made worse by that all-too-brief period of his adulthood before his disfigurement when he had become accustomed to surreptitious admiring looks from girls more beautiful than the Wren. Silly woman.
    ‘Have you heard how Chamberlain is going to reply to the King of the Belgians?’ Freddie asked, referring to the peace proposal of a couple of days before.
    ‘A big fat raspberry, from what I can tell,’ said Alston. ‘If he ever gets out of bed.’ The Prime Minister had been laid low with gout for a couple of days. ‘The Dutch and the Belgians are clever enough to realize that if this war carries on, their countries will be squashed. Why can’t we?’
    ‘You don’t think we will be squashed, do you?’
    ‘We might be. But that’s not the point. The point is that we can divide the world between us. Germany takes the continent of Europe and Britain keeps our empire and the high seas. We leave each other alone.’
    ‘But would Hitler really leave us alone?’ Freddie asked.
    ‘Of course he would,’ Alston said. ‘He as good as told me himself when I saw him with Rib last year.’ Alston had met Joachim von Ribbentrop in Berlin when he had travelled to Germany on bank business in the early 1930s, and kept in touch with him when Ribbentrop became German Ambassador to London in 1936 and then Foreign Minister back in Berlin. Ribbentrop had introduced Alston to Hitler the previous spring in an attempt to give the German Chancellor a better idea of the opinion of the British ruling classes