Black August Read online

  BLACK AUGUST

  Dennis Wheatley

  Edited by Miranda Vaughan Jones

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 The Prophet of Disaster

  2 The Tramp of Marching Men

  3 ‘Eat, Drink, and be Merry, for …’

  4 Love, Cocktails, and the Shadow of Fear

  5 The Structure Cracks

  6 The Exodus from London

  7 Nightmare Day!

  8 Nightmare Night!

  9 ‘Burn Them! Burn Them!’

  10 The Mysterious Convoy

  11 The Taking of the Shark

  12 Piracy

  13 The Bluff is Called

  14 Mutiny at Sea

  15 With Women on Board

  16 Latitude 51° 49’ N Longitude 2° 06’ E

  17 Strange Sanctuary

  18 The King of Shingle Street

  19 Death in the Cards

  20 A Beacon in the Darkness

  21 Gregory ‘Reaps the Whirlwind’

  22 ‘The Strongest Shall Go Down into the Pit’

  23 The Terrible Journey

  24 The New Justice

  25 The Devil Rarely Gets His Due

  26 September Moon

  A Note on the Author

  TO

  JOAN

  With all my love and thanks

  for her help and encouragement

  during a hard but magnificently

  successful year

  Introduction

  Dennis Wheatley was my grandfather. He only had one child, my father Anthony, from his first marriage to Nancy Robinson. Nancy was the youngest in a large family of ten Robinson children and she had a wonderful zest for life and a gaiety about her that I much admired as a boy brought up in the dull Seventies. Thinking about it now, I suspect that I was drawn to a young Ginny Hewett, a similarly bubbly character, and now my wife of 27 years, because she resembled Nancy in many ways.

  As grandparents, Dennis and Nancy were very different. Nancy’s visits would fill the house with laughter and mischievous gossip, while Dennis and his second wife Joan would descend like minor royalty, all children expected to behave. Each held court in their own way but Dennis was the famous one with the famous friends and the famous stories.

  There is something of the fantasist in every storyteller, and most novelists writing thrillers see themselves in their heroes. However, only a handful can claim to have been involved in actual daring-do. Dennis saw action both at the Front, in the First World War, and behind a desk in the Second. His involvement informed his writing and his stories, even those based on historical events, held a notable veracity that only the life-experienced novelist can obtain. I think it was this element that added the important plausibility to his writing. This appealed to his legions of readers who were in that middle ground of fiction, not looking for pure fantasy nor dry fact, but something exciting, extraordinary, possible and even probable.

  There were three key characters that Dennis created over the years: The Duc de Richleau, Gregory Sallust and Roger Brook. The first de Richleau stories were set in the years between the wars, when Dennis had started writing. Many of the Sallust stories were written in the early days of the Second World War, shortly before Dennis joined the Joint Planning Staff in Whitehall, and Brook was cast in the time of the French Revolution, a period that particularly fascinated him.

  He is probably always going to be associated with Black Magic first and foremost, and it’s true that he plugged it hard because sales were always good for those books. However, it’s important to remember that he only wrote eleven Black Magic novels out of more than sixty bestsellers, and readers were just as keen on his other stories. In fact, invariably when I meet people who ask if there is any connection, they tell me that they read ‘all his books’.

  Dennis had a full and eventful life, even by the standards of the era he grew up in. He was expelled from Dulwich College and sent to a floating navel run school, HMS Worcester. The conditions on this extraordinary ship were Dickensian. He survived it, and briefly enjoyed London at the pinnacle of the Empire before war was declared and the fun ended. That sort of fun would never be seen again.

  He went into business after the First World War, succeeded and failed, and stumbled into writing. It proved to be his calling. Immediate success opened up the opportunity to read and travel, fueling yet more stories and thrilling his growing band of followers.

  He had an extraordinary World War II, being one of the first people to be recruited into the select team which dreamed up the deception plans to cover some of the major events of the war such as Operation Torch, Operation Mincemeat and the D-Day landings. Here he became familiar with not only the people at the very top of the war effort, but also a young Commander Ian Fleming, who was later to write the James Bond novels. There are indeed those who have suggested that Gregory Sallust was one of James Bond’s precursors.

  The aftermath of the war saw Dennis grow in stature and fame. He settled in his beautiful Georgian house in Lymington surrounded by beautiful things. He knew how to live well, perhaps without regard for his health. He hated exercise, smoked, drank and wrote. Today he would have been bullied by wife and children and friends into giving up these habits and changing his lifestyle, but I’m not sure he would have given in. Maybe like me, he would simply find a quiet place.

  Dominic Wheatley, 2013

  1

  The Prophet of Disaster

  The bright July sunshine gave the ultimate degree of brilliance to the many coloured flowers in the Stationmaster’s garden. From a field not far away the sweet scent of clover drifted in through the windows of the waiting train, and in the drowsy heat the hum of insects came clearly to the man and girl seated in one of the third-class compartments.

  They were strangers and had not spoken, yet he had been very conscious of her presence ever since she had scrambled in, just as the train was leaving Cambridge.

  For a time his paper had absorbed him. It seemed that the curtain had gone up on the last act of that drama entitled: The Tragedy of Isolation,’ which the United States Government—forced by the pressure of their less educated masses—had produced in the middle 1930’s.

  From that time onwards America had been driven more and more in upon herself, while Europe rotted, racked and crumbled. Now, faced with critical internal troubles of their own, the States had finally closed the door upon the outside world by a sweeping embargo; prohibiting all further exports to bankrupt Europe which could no longer pay, even in promises; refusing entrance on any terms to all but their own nationals, and enforcing a rigid censorship on their news.

  The girl was staring out of the window at a placid cow, which ambled down a lane beyond the station under the casual guidance of a ragged boy, who swished now and then at the hedgerows with his stick. As the young man glanced at her his quick blue eyes took in the headline of the paper lying at her side:

  ‘FURTHER SABOTAGE BY POLES—MORE GERMAN GARRISONS WITHDRAWN’

  and his mind leapt back to the previous summer. With superb generalship, the veteran officers of the German army had carried out a classic campaign, subduing the whole of Poland in the short space of ten weeks while the French army looked on, biting their nails with fury yet impotent to help their allies, being themselves in the throes of that revolution which terminated the nine months’ reign of the Fascist puppet-king, Charles XI of France.

  And now Poland was slowly driving out the conqueror, compelling the Germans to concentrate their forces in the larger towns by interference with supplies, the destruction of waterworks, electric plant, railway lines and bridges.

  ‘Where will it all end!’ he speculated for the thousandth time; starvation rampant in every city in Europe—millions of unem
ployed in every country eking out a miserable existence in so-called Labour Armies on state rations; Balkan and Central European frontiers disintegrating from month to month, while scattered, ill-equipped armies fought on broken fronts, for whom, or for what cause, they now scarcely knew; Ibn Sa’ud’s dynasty dominant in the near East, gobbling up the Mesopotamian kingdoms created by Britain after the first Great War, and, with the simple, clear-cut faith of the Koran for guide, turning their backs contemptuously upon the protests of the Christian powers, now impotent to stay their Moslem ambitions.

  France was rapidly becoming Communist; Germany in a desperate plight, her commerce at a standstill, and only kept from open Bolshevism by martial law.

  England had kept out of the strife for the last ten years; the will of the people for once dominating the folly of the politicians, but creeping poverty was driving her horribly near the precipice, and if the United States could no longer help, another month might see her too in a state of anarchy.

  Looking out upon the little wayside station and the country all about it flooded with sunshine, serene and peaceful, it seemed impossible—yet he knew it to be true.

  The clang of a couple of milk-cans farther down the platform shattered the silence, a whistle blew, and the train—an unhurried local—chugged on in the direction of Ipswich.

  Weary unto death with his thoughts of folly, bloodshed and disaster, the young man glanced again at the girl and caught her eye for a second. The thought that she might be willing to talk offered a most pleasing distraction. He pulled off his soft hat and flung it on the seat beside him, disclosing a crop of auburn hair; then he leaned forward, his hands clasped between his knees and smiled at her:

  ‘I see you’ve finished your paper—am I being rude, or would it amuse you to talk for a bit?’

  She regarded him steadily for a moment from beneath half-lowered lids. He looked a nice young man—blue-eyed and slightly freckled; he wore a suit of brown plus-fours, ancient but still retaining the cachet of a good tailor—and his hands were well cared for.

  ‘Why not?’ she said lightly; ‘being a lazy person I left it to the very last moment to get up this morning and forgot my book in the rush to catch the train, so you may fill the gap and entertain me if you like!’

  ‘Splendid! My name’s Kenyon Wensleadale—what’s yours? That is unless you’d rather remain anonymous?’

  She shook her dark head: ‘It is Ann Croome.’

  ‘What a nice old-fashioned name,’ he said; ‘and may I ask if Mistress Ann Croome often travels on this antiquated line?’

  ‘No, only I’ve been staying with a friend in Cambridge—one of the four year students at Girton, and I’m spending the rest of my holiday at Orford; the air-buses were full, so I thought it would be quicker to come this way than via London.’

  ‘It is too; though not much since they’ve fitted the main lines with the mono-rail. Were you at Girton yourself?’

  ‘Yes, came down last year—I’m a full-blown secretary now!’

  ‘And how do you like it?’

  ‘It’s a bore sometimes, especially on the sunny days; but at least it means independence. The only alternative is a life of good works on a microscopic allowance with an aged uncle at Orford; in fact, if my firm crashes I shall have no choice, and I’m afraid they may before long.’

  ‘Things are pretty bad, aren’t they?’

  ‘Bad?’ Ann’s dark eyebrows lifted, wrinkling her broad forehead, ‘they couldn’t be much worse!’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘I’m afraid they are going to be before we’re very much older. This American business …

  ‘Oh, I’m sick to death of America! The whole of my young life the papers have been crammed with what America is going to do—and what America hasn’t done—and what the jolly old Empire is going to do if America doesn’t!’

  ‘Yes, that’s true. Still, this embargo is going to be the very devil; it looks like the last straw to me.’

  ‘I don’t know; if we took a leaf out of their book and stopped lending money to bankrupt countries, things might improve a lot.’

  ‘Ah, that’s just the trouble. England isn’t self-supporting, and if we can’t keep our trade with the outside world—we’re done.’

  ‘I wonder? Germany is sticking to her moratorium, and so is Spain. People are dying by the thousand every day in Central Europe!—they can’t buy bread, let alone the things we are making, and the Balkans are in such a mess that the papers say we have even refused to supply them with any more munitions to carry on their stupid war. So what is the good of all this commercial nonsense if there are no customers left who can pay for what they buy?’

  ‘There is still the Empire—the Argentine—Scandinavia—Belgium, Holland, Italy—lots of places.’

  She frowned. They say the Italian state ration just isn’t enough to live on.’

  ‘I know, but Mussolini laid the foundations of the new Italy so well that they will pull through somehow. He is one of the few who will survive when the history of this century comes to be written.’

  ‘And Lenin.’

  He laughed. ‘Lenin, eh?—you know, you don’t look like a Bolshevik.’

  ‘Don’t I?’ she smiled mischievously, ‘and what do Bolsheviks look like? Are you one of those people who imagine that they all have straggly hair and dirty finger nails?’

  ‘No—not exactly—’ he wavered, ‘still …’

  ‘Well, as it happens I’m a Marxist, and I think Lenin was a greater man than Mussolini.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really,’ she mocked: the set of her square chin with its little pointed centre showed an unusual obstinacy in her otherwise essentially feminine face.

  Kenyon Wensleadale smoothed back his auburn hair and made a wry grimace. ‘Anyhow, Lenin made a pretty hopeless mess,’ he countered. ‘Things were bad enough in Russia when they were running their last Five Year Plan, but since that broke down it has been absolute chaos.’

  Things would have been different if Lenin had lived.’

  ‘I doubt it—though they might have taken a turn for the better if the Counter-revolution had come off two years ago.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Ann took a cigarette from the case he held out. ‘I wonder what’s happening there now?’

  ‘When the Ogpu had butchered the remnant of the intelligentsia, they must have gone home to starve with the rest of the population, I imagine, and the whole country is gradually sinking back into a state of barbarism. The fact that their wireless stations have been silent for the last six months tells its own story.’

  ‘I think that the way the capitalist countries strangled young Russia at its birth is tragic, but perhaps it would be best now if the Japs did take over the wreck.’

  He shook his head impatiently. ‘Japan’s far too powerful already with the whole of the Pacific seaboard in her hands from Kamchatka to Malaya. The new Eastern Empire would be the biggest in the world if they were allowed to dominate Russia as well.’

  Ann gave a sudden chuckle of laughter. ‘Ha! ha!—afraid of the old Yellow Peril bogey, eh?’ With a little jerk she drew her feet up under her and leaned forward—a small, challenging figure, framed in the corner of the compartment.

  ‘Yes,’ said Kenyon. But he was not thinking of the Yellow Peril—he was studying her face. The broad forehead, the small straight nose, the rather wide mouth, tilted at the corners as if its owner constantly enjoyed the joke of life—and her eyes, what colour were they—not green or brown, but something of both in their dark background, flecked over with a thousand tiny points of tawny light. They were very lovely eyes, and they were something more—they were merry, laughing eyes.

  She looked down suddenly, and the curve of her long dark lashes hid them for a moment as she went on. ‘Well, who’s going to stop the Japs?—we can’t anyway.’

  ‘No, but it’s pretty grim, isn’t it?—the whole thing I mean. The world seems to have gone stark, staring crazy. Ever since the
end of the 1920’s we’ve had nothing but crashes, and revolutions and wars and dictatorships. God alone knows where it is all going to end.’

  ‘International Socialism,’ said Ann firmly, ‘that’s the only hope, but ever since I’ve been old enough to have any fun some sort of gloom has been hanging over the country. Half the people I know are living on somebody else because their firm has gone broke or their investments don’t pay. I’m sick of the whole thing—so for goodness’ sake let’s talk of something else.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he smiled, ‘one gets so into the habit of speculating as to what sort of trouble is coming to us next! Do you live in Suffolk?’

  ‘No, London—got to because of my job.’

  ‘Whereabouts?’

  ‘Gloucester Road.’

  ‘That’s South Kensington, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it’s very handy for the tubes and buses.’

  ‘Have you got a flat there?’

  ‘A flat!’ Ann’s mouth twitched with amusement. ‘Gracious, no! I couldn’t afford it. Just a room, that’s all.’

  ‘In a hotel?’

  ‘No, I loathe those beastly boarding-houses. This is over a shop. There are five of us; a married couple, a journalist, another girl and myself. It is run by an ex-service man whose wife left him the house. We all share a sitting-room, and there’s a communal kitchen on the top floor. It is a funny spot, but it is cheap and there are no restrictions, so it suits me. Where do you live?’

  ‘With my father, in the West End.’

  ‘And what do you do?’

  ‘Well, I’m a Government servant of sorts, at least I hope to be in a few weeks’ time—if I get the job I’m after.’

  ‘I wonder how you’ll like being cooped up in an office all day? You don’t look that sort of man.’

  ‘Fortunately I shan’t have to be—a good part of my work will be in Suffolk. Do you come down to Orford often?’

  She shook her dark curly head. ‘No, only for holidays. You see, I like to dress as nicely as I can, and even that’s not easy on my screw—so it’s Orford with Uncle Timothy or nothing!’