Be Not Afraid Read online

  “That will not be difficult. I have the address of their home in Nish.”

  Himmler swallowed. He had never left Germany. “But what about my chickens?”

  “We will find someone to look after your chickens, Heinrich. And you will only be gone a few weeks. This is party business. Carry it out successfully and I will see that your name is brought before the Führer. Then your feet will be on the ladder of success.”

  Himmler licked his lips. Josef Goebbels had just been chosen, by Hitler himself, to head the Berlin branch of the Nazi Party. Anyone with his recommendation could go far.

  “Tell me what I must do,” he said.

  Part One

  The Feud

  “Be absolute for death; either death or life Shall thereby be the sweeter.”

  William Shakespeare

  The First Attempt

  Berkeley Townsend drew rein and brought his panting mount to a halt on the rise overlooking his family home. A cavalryman in his army days he never felt happier than when in the saddle, and he always ended his morning ride with a gallop, which was good for both Hannibal and himself. Now he could allow himself a few minutes to enjoy the view and to contemplate the possibility of snow. It was already a cold winter, even at the beginning of December.

  The house was isolated, a mile from the next dwelling. No longer a farm, it retained its outbuildings, and Maria Lockwood, the Serb-born maid and housekeeper, had a run full of clucking chickens. Chickens apart, it was a peaceful place; the ideal retreat for a man with a past.

  Tall and powerfully built, with greying black hair and aquiline features relieved by a ready smile, just as his somewhat stern personality was alleviated by his equally ready wit, Berkeley Townsend was trying to get used to the idea that he was retired. This was partly because he was not yet fifty and felt as vigorous as at any time in his life. It was also because he could not be certain that he was retired. At the end of the war the British government had determined that they could no longer employ a man like him in this brave new world. He had accepted that, having personal matters to attend to. But then Whitehall had discovered that they could not do without him. So they had called him back into service. For one last assignment, they had said.

  When one is recalled for one last assignment, there is always the likelihood of another last assignment.

  He wondered what they really thought of him. But then, he often wondered what he thought of himself. It had all been wildly romantic in the beginning. As a subaltern desperately wounded by a Dervish spear at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, he had assumed his military career was over. But his talents had been noticed, in particular by Colonel Gorman, an officer on Kitchener’s staff. Gorman it was who had persuaded him to remain in the army, when his wound was finally healed, as a riding instructor and draughtsman; he was brilliant at delineating fortresses and military establishments with pencil and paper.

  Just happy to be able to stay in uniform, Berkeley had never suspected where Gorman was going, and more personally important, what this would mean to him. Promoted general, Gorman had been placed in charge of military intelligence and felt he possessed the very man to head his team in the field.

  Spying in those far-off days had been fairly genteel, Berkeley recalled with some nostalgia. He had travelled the length and breadth of Europe – part of the training on which Gorman had insisted had been languages, and Berkeley spoke German, French, Italian and Serbo-Croat fluently – apparently an English gentleman on a perpetual grand tour. In reality he was observing the armed forces with which he came into contact and making sketches of their establishments and fortifications. Until that day in 1908 – in the Hungarian Carpathians as they had then been – when he and his faithful servant Harry Lockwood had gone to the rescue of a beautiful woman being maltreated by Austrian soldiers, and, as he had often reflected since, launched themselves into space.

  He had had no idea that Anna Slovitza had been an anarchist and a terrorist, a member of the Black Hand, a secret organisation dedicated to opposing Austria’s ambitions in the Balkans. When he had learned the truth it had been too late; he had already fallen in love with both Anna and her even more beautiful daughter Caterina.

  Gorman, always the pragmatist, had decided to take advantage of the emotional and legal morass into which his protégé had fallen. With the Balkans clearly approaching a crisis, he had wanted a man with his finger on the pulse. Accepting a commission in the Serbian army as the Balkan wars started but suspected of being a terrorist in his spare time, Berkeley had spent several years feeding London all the information he could obtain. He had known all along that his triple existence had to end in tragedy, but the deaths of both Anna and Caterina and his blood feud with the Karlovys had become submerged in the far greater tragedy of the war. It was only when he returned to Serbia in 1920 to sell the old Slovitza house, that he discovered the feud was still very much in existence.

  He had supposed that with the help of his friend Colonel Savos of the Belgrade police he had coped with the situation, but he had underestimated the opposition. The Karlovys had become affiliated to another terrorist group, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation, far more powerful and widespread than ever the Black Hand had been. They had kidnapped his eldest daughter Anna, meaning to draw him back into their orbit. Well, they had done that, but without truly understanding the nature of the beast they had in their turn aroused. His career, as a soldier and as a government assassin, had required him to kill, coldly and dispassionately, people he had not known and who therefore had no real existence for him. But in his pursuit of Anna, which had taken him four years, he had been angry. He had laid a trail of blood across Europe which had terminated in Grippenheimer’s vicious harem.

  He regretted none of it, even if it had cost the life of his oldest and closest friend. But Lockwood would not have had it any other way, and it had brought Anna home.

  And then the difficult part had begun. A girl who has for four years, beginning when she was just twelve, been shunted from brothel to brothel, man to man, cannot be rehabilitated overnight. There had been so many difficulties to be overcome, not least the cocaine habit which had been induced by her various masters to keep her in subservience. It had taken several months, but slowly she had been weaned off the drug. Even so she had not been able to go back to school; Berkeley did not suppose it would ever be practical for her to have a job or live a normal life.

  But at least she was happy, he thought. And Lucy was proving a treasure.

  He reached the head of the drive which led off the main road – on a ridge above the farmhouse – and was startled by the sound of a car engine. He hadn’t noticed the vehicle before; the road was tree-lined and it had been parked in the shadows. But it had definitely been overlooking the house and was now driving away at speed.

  Possessing as he did a past which he had no desire to intrude into his present, Berkeley frowned as he walked the horse down the hill.

  Lucy was waiting for him as he dismounted in the yard. “There’s coffee in the house,” she said.

  He kissed her. Theirs was a strange relationship. Lucy was only half his age, a tall, slender young woman with black hair which she had allowed to grow out from a fashionable bob when she had discovered that was what he would like. They had married because, having retired, he wished a wife, and because she had found him a romantic figure. Of course, she did not know the truth and never could; she supposed he had been merely a roving military attaché. He had wondered from the beginning if he would be able to carry it off, if he might not talk in his sleep, if it was possible for a husband to keep such a secret from a wife. The problem had become acute when he had been called out of retirement for that last job. But Lucy had accepted it was simply to regain Anna, particularly when he had come home with the girl and, like everyone else, she had put down Anna’s kidnapping to masculine perversion.

  Now they walked up to the house hand in hand. When they had first married, they had bought a place of thei
r own, but on the death of his father early this year, she had willingly agreed to sell the new house and move into the old, isolated farmhouse to be with Berkeley’s mother. The children, having lived almost all their lives there, had been happy about that. Lucy’s baby, and his own fourth child, had been born just after Anna’s return, and was now crawling; they had named him Howard after his other grandfather. Berkeley thought that Lucy was happy but Anna’s problems hung like a low cloud over them both. And now this strange car . . .

  “You didn’t have a visitor while I was out?” he asked.

  “No. Were you expecting one?”

  “No,” he said.

  He had no intention of alarming Lucy, but the waiting car, so anxious not to be identified, coming on top of another incident a week ago, definitely indicated that they were being watched.

  By whom?

  *

  The house was quiet in the middle of the morning; Berkeley missed the sound of barking dogs. He kept meaning to replace his two old friends, both recently died, but had not yet got around to it. Both John junior and Alicia junior were away at school and would not be home for the Christmas holidays for another fortnight. Maria Lockwood, Harry’s widow, waited to take Berkeley’s hat and whip. Like her erstwhile mistress, Caterina, Maria was Serbian, but hers had been a happy life, both before and after her marriage to Berkeley’s servant – until last November. She bore no grudge for Harry’s death but her face was masked by tragedy. Her children also were out at school; they were day pupils in Northampton, riding in and out on their bicycles . . .

  All three of them cocked their heads as the morning peace was broken by a short, flat explosion, followed immediately by another. Maria offered no comment and hurried back into the kitchen. “Will she ever stop?” Lucy asked.

  “It makes her feel better,” Berkeley said.

  “You mean she imagines she’s shooting at a man? One of the men?”

  “I should think that’s very likely.”

  She shuddered. “Young girls, playing with guns . . . owning a gun . . . it terrifies me.”

  “She’s never going to shoot at you, my love,” Berkeley pointed out and followed her through the drawing room to the conservatory, where his mother sat. She had aged enormously since the death of her husband and looked every day of her seventy-two years.

  Berkeley leaned over and kissed her cheek as he squeezed her hand.

  “She’s out there,” Alicia Townsend said. “Firing her gun.”

  Berkeley went to the door and opened it, watched his daughter coming towards him. He enjoyed looking at her; any man would. Anna was now nineteen, fully grown. Her long hair was the magnificent auburn he remembered from her mother and grandmother, her body was perfectly shaped for her below average height.

  Her face was exquisite, or should have been with its perfect features and lustrous dark eyes, but the lips were usually tight and the eyes fathomless. It was impossible to gauge what might be going on behind that beautiful mask but he knew that her ghastly experience had been laid on top of a personality that had always been both enigmatic and disturbing. She was half Serbian and, unlike her younger brother and sister, she could remember that country and the mother who had died so tragically, a death she had long refused to accept. Berkeley had never probed into her experiences during the four years she had been a plaything for so many men; imagination was grim enough. He could not blame her if she hated his entire sex, or perhaps the entire world. That she had asked him if she could own a gun – he had licensed it in his own name, along with his Browning automatic – and spent hours firing the Smith and Wesson revolver to become a crack shot would be regarded by most people as a deplorable hobby for a young girl, but Berkeley believed it was helping her to overcome the nightmares in her mind. He could only rely on time, kindness and utter normality . . . and on the fact that, however kind Lucy was, Anna only smiled when she looked at him.

  As now. She threw her arms round his neck, still holding the hot gun, and hugged and kissed him. “May I go into town this afternoon, Papa?”

  “Don’t tell me you have a date?”

  Oh, that one day she should have a date.

  “I have my Christmas shopping to do,” she said seriously, “and no money.”

  “You shall have money,” he assured her. “We’ll go into town together.” He looked at his wife. “Will you come?”

  Lucy hesitated for just a moment, then shook her head. “I have the menus to see to.”

  She felt it beneficial for father and daughter to spend as much time as possible together.

  *

  “This time next year you are going to be twenty years old,” Berkeley remarked as he drove the Austin Seven into Northampton.

  “Does that make me an adult?” Anna watched the streets unfolding in front of them.

  “Not in the eyes of the law, I’m afraid.”

  “But old enough to be doing something with my life,” she suggested.

  “That’s up to you.”

  “What would you like me to do, Papa?”

  “I can’t possibly tell you what you should do with your life.” Berkeley parked the car.

  “You told me once that your ambition for me was to grow up and marry an English gentleman. That was before . . . I went away.”

  “And, as I remember, you weren’t very keen on the idea, even then.”

  “Even then,” she said, half to herself. “Papa . . . please tell me how Mama died. The truth.”

  Berkeley sighed. But his attempts to shield her in the past had turned out disastrously. “She was captured by the Austrians after the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and tortured. When they left her alone in her cell, she hanged herself.”

  “And you?”

  “I was very close. But I could not get to her in time.”

  “Did she assassinate the archduke?”

  “No. She tried, but failed. It was one of her associates who fired the fatal shots.”

  “Did she and her associates do wrong, Papa?”

  “Well . . . as a result of that murder, something like twenty million people died. On the other hand, it is possible to say that the war was coming anyway. The Black Hand merely precipitated events.”

  “Were not the Austrians hateful people?”

  “They were the masters in the Balkans before the war. All masters are hateful to those they rule.”

  Anna smiled. “You are a philosopher, Papa. You have become a philosopher.”

  “Meaning that I wasn’t always?”

  “I would have said there was a time when you would have shot first and asked questions afterwards.”

  “Not a lot changes,” he remarked. “Let’s go shopping.”

  *

  He followed her through the department stores, picking up the bills. With his pension and the golden handshake from the government, together with his large fee for that last assignment and the proceeds from the sale of the houses in Sabac and Northampton, he was well off if not wealthy, and it was a pleasure to indulge her. She had been back in England for the two previous Christmases, but she had not wished to go out and be seen. This was another step in her general rehabilitation and he was delighted.

  They had accumulated a large collection of parcels and boxes and were leaving the last store when Berkeley experienced an uneasy feeling. Years of living on a knife-edge had made him peculiarly sensitive to stares or unwanted attention, and he had been alerted by the watching motor car that morning. Now he turned his head sharply and saw a young man observing him from a little way along the street. This was the same boy he had seen on his last visit to town but at that time he had not thought too much of it. And now there was no reason to suppose he had been watching him; far more likely that he had been gazing at Anna and was embarrassed to be caught out. But there had been something familiar about his face.

  In any event, it was growing dark, and he had disappeared into the gloom and the crowd. Berkeley was escorting Anna down the side street lead
ing to where the car was parked, when he suddenly heard a rush of movement behind him.

  “Run,” he snapped and swung round, dropping the parcels he was carrying. In the lane there was no street lighting and the figure approaching him at speed was not really distinguishable, but even in the gloom Berkeley could make out the gleam of steel in his hand.

  He whipped off his hat and struck it downwards as the knife was thrust at him. The bowler caught the blade and deflected it, and Berkeley swung his fist, connecting with the side of his assailant’s head who tumbled to his hands and knees. Berkeley kicked the hand holding the knife. The would-be murderer gasped as the knife flew away into the darkness, then he had rolled over and gained his feet, and was running away as hard as he could.

  “Papa!” Anna was only a few feet away.

  “I told you to get out of it,” Berkeley said.

  “That man tried to kill you.”

  “If it was a man,” Berkeley said thoughtfully.

  “Are we going to call the police?”

  “Not right this minute; let’s go home.” He gathered up the scattered parcels, took her to the car and unlocked it.

  They drove out of Northampton. Anna was silent for some minutes, then she asked, “Do you have a lot of enemies, Papa?”

  Berkeley grinned. “Ever heard of a chap called Richelieu?”

  “He was a cardinal, who ruled France in the seventeenth century.”

  “That’s right. He was a pretty tough egg. There is a legend that when he was on his deathbed his confessor asked him if he would forgive his enemies. And Richelieu replied, ‘I have no enemies; I have killed them all.’”

  Anna glanced at him. “But you have not killed all yours.”

  “I suppose I’m not as tough as Richelieu. But I’m getting a little old for that sort of thing.”

  “You’re not old,” she said. “I don’t want you ever to be old. And the way you handled that thug was magnificent.”