As they ate – a very tasty lamb stew Veseli had prepared – they talked. Cal was only partly engaged in the general conversation, mostly background to where he was going and the people who mattered there, while he also had to consider the likelihood of anyone in the Czech borderlands knowing him – unlikely given he had operated in Hamburg.

Still, it would be a good idea to subtly alter his appearance, which could be done in small ways – the wearing of glasses, a different type of hat and even a haircut, though there was no time to grow a moustache.

Eventually, when the light of the day was fading, it was necessary to say farewell to Veseli and return to Prague. A lot of his thinking, in the back of the car, was how long it was going to take him to compose another telegram to Peter Lanchester outlining what he was about to do.

Also, if he was going to involve Corrie Littleton he would have to talk to her, and the sooner the better.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Noel McKevitt and Sir Thomas Inskip were not, in the strict sense, friends; the social milieus in which they moved were too far apart but they did share a certain philosophy, which made their conversation of more import than mere gossip. First of all they were united in their staunch Protestant faith – the vicar of their local church had introduced them – and secondly Sir Thomas had at one time been part of the intelligence community, which to McKevitt meant he was reliable.

Such an occupation had long been left behind by the older man; Inskip, a high-flying lawyer by profession, was a member of the Government, having been given by Stanley Baldwin, the previous incumbent of Number 10, the office of Minister of Defence Procurement, this despite the generally held opinion that he possessed a staggering degree of military ignorance.

Churchill, who had lobbied for the creation of what was, in effect, a minister for rearmament, had expected the job would be given to him. Baldwin thought differently; he had no desire to have someone so bellicose in his government, quite apart from the signal such an appointment would send to the dictator states he was determined to mollify.

Once deprived and Inskip appointed, a furious Churchill, with his usual facility for the killer phrase, had called it ‘The most cynical appointment since Caligula made his horse a consul.’

Inskip’s other trait was a blind loyalty to the serving prime minister, which manifested itself as strong support in the Cabinet for the policy of appeasement. Having lost ministerial office once in the National Government landslide at the start of the decade, Sir Thomas was not about to act in a way that would find himself out in the cold again, and it had to be said his aims were honourable.

Though he had never been a front-line soldier, he harboured, along with many of his contemporaries in age and experience, a horror of a repeat of the blind slaughter of 1914–18, the evidence of which, in maimed ex-soldiers, widows and unmarried women, was still very obvious even after all these years, a subject he had laboured long the night before at the Downing Street dinner for the French delegation.

In some sense Sir Thomas had helped to form McKevitt’s thinking on Czechoslovakia, a country he had insisted was impossible for Britain and France to defend, an opinion he was willing to share with anyone who would listen, and who should be more inclined to do so than the man appointed by the head of MI6 to oversee matters in that country?

‘Mark my words, Noel,’ Inskip had pronounced after church one day. ‘If we seek to aid that country we will end up with stalemate and a repeat of the Western Front, with all the death such a futile exercise produced. I would not sacrifice a single soldier for such a policy and thankfully neither will the PM.’

McKevitt did not question Sir Thomas’s assertion, he took it as fact, assuming, which was quite natural, that a man who spent much of his time with soldiers, seamen and airmen discussing their needs, with a quite brilliant legal brain, had been given a bona fide opinion by those who would have to execute such a course of action.

Yet it was also the case that McKevitt saw war as predictable; you could not hold the Berlin Desk and watch the rise to power of the Nazis without accepting that conclusion. In Hitler’s magnum opus he demanded Lebensraum for the German people. If one nation needed to expand it could only be at the expense of another.

In addition, and this had been his primary intelligence target, within the higher reaches of the German General Staff it was a common gossip that another war was inevitable, with the date of 1945 almost pencilled in as the time at which they reasoned Germany would be ready both economically and militarily to confront their old foes.

If it was to come, then McKevitt was of the opinion it should be when Britain was ready for it, perhaps with the Americans as allies. In the meantime Hitler needed to be diverted to the east and as far as the Ulsterman was concerned he could go as far as he wanted in that direction.

Yet it was axiomatic that the department for which he worked would have to expand dramatically over the next few years to confront a range of emerging dangers and McKevitt had enough personal arrogance to see himself as ideally suited to head the more powerful entity.

Sir Hugh Sinclair had been good in his time but he was now sixty-five and must be nearing retirement, so when he was worried about being sidelined in a way that obviously diminished his standing, it was quite natural to call at Inskip’s office and express his concerns.

‘Sir Hugh is up to something in my backyard, Sir Thomas.’

‘I judge by your tone you have no idea what that is?’

‘While I see my superior as deserving of my respect, sir, I am also a servant of the government of the day, and what concerns me is that he is stepping outside his brief of support for the declared policy and at a very dangerous time.’

That had no need to be mentioned; even the proponents of the ‘policy’ were becoming uncomfortable with the word ‘appeasement’, which had originally been coined as a description of the need to satisfy the legitimate concerns of the dictator states. In a couple of years it had morphed into a means, in too many minds, to let them do whatever they wished to avoid conflict.

‘Deliberately so?’

‘We occupy a murky arena, Sir Thomas, so I would not wish to be so specific. But if my concern is genuine I have no means of finding out the truth. Right now I believe he might be colluding with the Government of Czechoslovakia to produce some rabbit that will force our country into an anomalous position.’

That too required no spelling out; the press, with the exception of the Daily Mail and The Observer, was split on appeasement, with even The Times occasionally posing awkward editorial questions, while the public mood was febrile and uncertain. In the social circles in which Sir Thomas moved – his club, his legal chambers and the drawing rooms of people of property – it had unqualified support.

But out in the country, certainly in the industrial north, the mood was not, by the accounts he was receiving, the same. His position involved him in visiting the factories and workshops where armaments were being designed and produced, an unpleasant task to a man as fastidious as he but one that could not be avoided. Even some of the military officers he was obliged to deal with were beginning to voice doubts.

‘If he is engaged in such a venture, Noel, then he is exceeding his brief. Are you sure he is not just seeking information in the normal manner?’

‘If he was doing that in Central Europe, Sir Thomas, he would go through me.’