Secret Army - Robert Muchamore Page 0,3
of his nose.
*
Two miles away Charles Henderson sat in the more comfortable surroundings of the Empire and India club dining room in Pall Mall. The place had seen better days. The wood-panelled walls bore ancient paintings of maharajahs, while the stuffed bear by the door had a sad face and had lost most of its fur.
Both Henderson and his dining partner wore uniform. Henderson had the gold-cuffed blazer of a naval commander. His companion wore more utilitarian RAF garb, but bore the much superior rank of an Air Vice Marshal. Between them lay bowls of watery curry and a single mound of saffron rice.
‘Bloody awful.’ Henderson sucked a mouthful of lukewarm potato and stringy lamb from his spoon.
Air Vice Marshal Walker nodded. ‘The food at boarding school was better than this. What was your school by the way, Henderson?’
‘Burghley Road Grammar,’ Henderson admitted.
Walker raised one eyebrow. It was uncommon for someone from a working-class background to become a naval officer and rarer still for him to be accepted into a gentlemen’s club like the Empire and India.
Henderson felt the need to explain. ‘Married above my station,’ he said jovially. ‘My father-in-law put me up for club membership.’
‘Of course,’ Walker smiled, as he let his spoon do the nodding. ‘How is your wife? Joan, isn’t it?’
Henderson shifted awkwardly. ‘Eccentric,’ he explained. ‘We lost a daughter to tuberculosis and she’s never been herself since.’
‘Are you still living in Mayfair?’
Henderson shook his head. ‘The bombing played havoc with Joan’s nerves. We’ve let the place to a Jewish couple from Frankfurt and we’re living up at the training campus.’
‘Yes,’ Walker said, as he eyed something in his curry suspiciously. ‘These boys of yours, how has that been going?’
Henderson cracked a broad smile. ‘They’re great. I found a Japanese drill instructor in an internment camp, and he’s licking the boys into shape. We’ve got six trainees in the first batch and they’re shaping up wonderfully. Superintendent McAfferty is on the road recruiting more boys, to form our second unit.’
‘Does that look like a mouse dropping to you, Henderson?’ Walker asked, as he pulled a small brown pellet from his bowl.
‘I wouldn’t know, sir,’ said Henderson, as he tried not to smile. ‘If you’re going to eat the food here it’s best not to put too much thought into it. And to be fair, it hasn’t killed me yet.’
‘It’s spices, innit!’ a flabby waitress said as she loomed over the table and scowled at the wall clock. ‘What do you expect if you order this funny foreign muck? Now, if you want a sweet you’d better hurry up ’cos I’m off home before blackout and all the tables gotta be cleared ready for dinner.’
Walker flicked the brown pellet back into his curry and pushed the bowl away. ‘Perhaps you could send the sweet trolley over?’
The waitress grunted. ‘There’s spotted dick or fruit crumble. We haven’t had a sweet trolley since four months back.’
‘What kind of fruit?’ Henderson asked, and immediately regretted it.
‘The kind that comes in a big tin marked fruit.’
Walker held his stomach. ‘Do you know, I suddenly feel rather full? I’ll just have some coffee.’
The waitress pointed towards a table at the back of the room. ‘In the pot, self service.’
Henderson and Walker both laughed as the waitress waddled away with their plates.
‘The staff here are appalling,’ Walker said grinning. ‘Whatever happened to our white-gloved waiters and silver service?’
‘Off fighting the Boche,’ Henderson smiled. ‘Speaking of which, I was rather hoping that you could help me cut through some red tape. My boys will need parachute training if they’re going to infiltrate occupied France, but the RAF parachute training school is throwing up all kinds of barriers.’
Walker paused to take this in. ‘Listen, Henderson,’ he said firmly. ‘Frankly, myself and several others at the Special Operations Executive feel that this whole scheme of yours to train up boys for undercover work is rather far-fetched.
‘You have more experience of working undercover in France than anyone else. We feel you should be at headquarters in Baker Street coordinating operations. I’d like you to become my second-in-command. That’s a two-rank promotion and you’d be running all undercover operations in the occupied portion of France.’
Henderson was dealing with a senior officer and had to reply tactfully. ‘Sir, if those are my orders I’ll report to headquarters and do the best job I can. But with the greatest respect, I’m a field agent not an administrator. Meetings bore me and bureaucracy tends to rub me up the wrong way.’
‘I’d