Peril in Paris. Katherine Woodfine
printed card that read simply: CLARKE & SONS SHIPPING AGENTS. She knocked, and when a voice inside called out: ‘Come in!’ she stepped inside the headquarters of the Secret Service Bureau.
Secret Service Bureau HQ, London
‘Oh, it’s you,’ said a sardonic voice.
Captain Carruthers was lounging in his chair, his shirt collar slightly open, his feet resting on the desk beside the typewriter, as he flipped through a stack of reports. ‘What do you want?’
‘I’m here to see the Chief,’ Sophie said shortly. She usually thought of herself as rather a polite person, but Captain Carruthers was always so rude that it was difficult to be anything but rude back.
‘Oh, well then, go through – you know where he is,’ said Carruthers, waving her away without bothering to look up from his papers.
Swallowing down her annoyance, Sophie crossed the room to the door that led to C’s office.
‘C’ was a code-name, of course. She didn’t know what it stood for – perhaps C for Chief, as they often called him, or C for Commander, or even C for Clarke the Shipping Agent, though that seemed unlikely. Lil sometimes joked: ‘I say, I wonder what happened to A and B?’ but Sophie had noticed she never said it to his face. Even Lil was rather in awe of C.
Now, as Sophie always did when she stepped into C’s office, she found herself looking around, thinking of all the secret business that must take place here. Not that there was anything especially mysterious or clandestine about the room itself – in many ways, it looked exactly like the ordinary shipping agent’s office it pretended to be. There was a big desk, stacked all over with piles of papers; a map of the world, dotted with pins; and a big bookcase crammed with fat leather-bound books. At the centre of it all was C himself, busily writing letters in his characteristic green-ink scrawl. To all intents and purposes, he too could have been a perfectly ordinary shipping agent. He looked like any affable older gentleman, with a gold watch chain and the traces of what Sophie suspected was his breakfast boiled egg on his shirt front.
The only thing that was unusual about C’s office was that there was a very large wind-up gramophone playing on a table in the corner, and C was humming along to the melody as he worked. Sophie knew very little about C, besides the fact that he ate soft-boiled eggs for breakfast, but she did know he had a passion for music. She had grown accustomed to having a musical accompaniment to their meetings. Today, she noted, it was Mozart’s Magic Flute Overture that could be heard drifting from the gramophone.
‘Ah, Miss Taylor! Delightful to see you. Well, well, and what have we here?’ C rubbed his palms together in anticipation, as Sophie placed the box on the desk in front of him. ‘Oh, splendid!’ he said to himself as he lifted the lid, pulling away the brown paper with the air of a child with a birthday present. ‘Aha! Code books . . . Signalling manual . . . Ah, yes, this one does look rather important . . . Carruthers!’ he called out in a louder voice.
After a moment’s pause, his assistant slouched in. He looked as surly as always, although C didn’t seem to notice. ‘Take these and check through them for me, there’s a good fellow, and telephone through to Admiral Stevens and let him know we have them. I rather think he might be worried about what’s become of them. Excellent work, Miss Taylor!’
Carruthers accepted the parcel without saying anything, tossing Sophie a bad-tempered glance as he strode back out of the room.
‘Now, tell me, who was Ziegler’s agent this time? The fellow calling himself Dr Muller, was he one of our old friends?’
Sophie shook her head. ‘I’ve not come across him before.’ She described the thin grey man, whilst C scribbled a few notes on the back of an envelope. ‘He wasn’t at all happy to have lost the parcel,’ she finished up.
‘I’m sure he wasn’t,’ said C, with a chuckle. ‘Well, I daresay we’ll meet him again before long. Now, I have a new assignment for you. Not parcels this time, but something rather different, which I think you may find interesting.’
He pushed a folder across the desk towards her, printed with the name PROFESSOR BLAXLAND in large black letters. Flipping it open, she saw several densely typed sheets of paper: lying on top was a photograph of a handsome, well-dressed, middle-aged man. Scribbled beneath the photograph were the words SSB AGENT.
‘This man works for the Bureau?’ she asked, picking up the photograph to look at it more closely.
‘Yes, in a way. Not in the same capacity as you, Miss Taylor, but as what you might perhaps term a consultant. Professor Blaxland had a specific area of expertise that was very useful to us. He was a language specialist, teaching at the Sorbonne in Paris, with a particular interest in codes and ciphers.’
Sophie looked up from the picture. ‘Was ?’
‘I am sorry to say that two days ago, Professor Blaxland was murdered.’ The Chief ’s plump, good-natured face looked sombre as he went on: ‘He was shot in his apartment, in the fifth arrondissement of Paris. It appears to have been a burglary gone wrong – his apartment had been broken into and the intruders were going through his possessions, when he returned and surprised them. The thieves shot him and escaped. However . . .’ C fell silent for a moment, leaving a heavy pause hanging in the air before he continued: ‘My fear is that Blaxland may have been deliberately targeted, and the murder set up to appear like a burglary.’
‘But who would do that, and why?’ asked Sophie.
‘That is exactly what I want you to find out. I am sending you to Paris, Miss Taylor. You leave on tomorrow morning’s boat-train.’
Sophie stared at him, taken aback. Paris? Following suspects; intercepting parcels; trailing Ziegler’s spies through the London streets she knew – she could do all that quite easily. But investigating a murder in an unknown foreign city was something else altogether. Why would the Chief send her on an assignment like that when he had plenty of more experienced and well-travelled detectives working for him – tough former Scotland Yard men, and seasoned private investigators like her friend Mr McDermott?
But C answered her question before she had chance to ask it: ‘You’ll be going undercover, of course, as Miss Celia Blaxland, the Professor’s niece.’ He pushed another folder across the desk towards her and opened it, tapping the photograph that lay on top. Sophie leaned forward to see a portrait of a fair-haired girl of about eighteen years old. ‘As you’ll see from the dossier, she is rather a wealthy young lady. She hasn’t seen her uncle for several years, but she is his only close living relative, so the authorities will not be at all surprised to see her – or, that is to say, to see you. I’d suggest you begin by meeting with his solicitor to find out as much as you can about what happened. It would also be worth talking to his friends and colleagues at the Sorbonne.’
Sophie looked from the Chief, to the photograph, and back again. She had so many questions it was difficult to know where to start. ‘But why the need to send someone undercover?’ she asked at last. ‘Couldn’t the French authorities investigate through official channels?’
C tapped his pen thoughtfully against the desk in time to the music. ‘Blaxland worked for us on the quiet, and I’d rather we kept it that way. I’d prefer our investigation to go unnoticed by either the French or the German authorities, and by the newspapers too, for that matter. With that in mind, you’ll need to be discreet, Miss Taylor. Stay on your guard and, whatever you do, don’t reveal who you really are.’
‘What about the real Miss Blaxland, won’t she turn up and give the game away?’
C shook his head. ‘We’ll take care of that. What I need you to do is to find out what happened to Blaxland. Did someone deliberately orchestrate his death, and if so who and why? Of course, my suspicions may be quite misplaced. It’s perfectly possible that Blaxland’s death was no more than the unfortunate consequence of an ordinary