Mayhem in Greece Read online

  DENNIS WHEATLEY

  MAYHEM IN GREECE

  FOR

  HELEN

  A long overdue ‘thank you’ for

  securing me my first review in the

  Sunday Times, and for many years

  of friendship.

  And for my good friend,

  JOHN

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 Portrait of a Hero (?)

  2 The Budding Author

  3 Unorthodox Behaviour

  4 ‘When First we Practise to Deceive’

  5 Hero Number One

  6 The Amateur Cracksman

  7 A Dreadful Half-hour

  8 ‘Stop Thief! Stop Thief!’

  9 Midnight Conference

  10 Who Knows What is Round the Corner?

  11 Enter the Lady

  12 Making Hay while the Sun Shines

  13 You Have Been Warned

  14 Of Hades and a Double Bed

  15 The Villa Dione

  16 The Biter Bit

  17 Of Troy and a Submarine

  18 The Amateur Photographer

  19 A Bolt from the Blue

  20 No Holds Barred

  21 Twelve Hours to Live

  22 Wanted for Murder

  23 On the Run

  24 The Persistent American

  25 A Trap is Set

  26 The Show-down

  Epilogue

  A Note on the Author

  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

  Portrait of a Hero (?)

  Had Robbie Grenn been a normal young man it is reasonable to assume that, instead of sitting in the sunshine outside a restaurant overlooking the blue waters of the Aegean, he would have been doing a job in an office or have become an officer in one of the fighting Services. Moreover, he would not have been able to understand a conversation in Czech he overheard there, which led to pain and grief for a number of people and sudden death for several others.

  But Robbie was not quite normal. He was what is termed ‘a late developer’; although it was the private opinion of his uncle, Sir Finsterhorn Grenn, the British Ambassador in Athens, with whom he had been living for the past year, that ‘poor Robbie’s brain will never develop sufficiently for him to be of much use in the world’.

  The root of the trouble was that, at the age of six, Robbie and his parents had been victims of an air crash. Both his parents had been killed, and the head injuries he had sustained had at first caused his life to be despaired of. Being a strong, healthy child, he had pulled through, but the set-back had been so serious that he had had to learn to talk, and even walk, again.

  His uncle felt very strongly that Robbie might still have caught up had it not been for the two women who took charge of him. They were his elderly, utterly devoted nurse, and his mother’s sister, Aunt Emily, who had brought him up at her home in Cheltenham. For several years after the accident, Nanny Fisher had not taken a single day off. She had waited on him hand and foot, refusing to allow him to do the simplest things for himself, from fear that the least strain might prove too much for him. Aunt Emily had, from time to time, urged that Robbie was now well enough to look after himself; but she was a much weaker character than Nanny Fisher, so her protests had been over-ruled.

  It had been out of the question to send him to kindergarten, and even when he had entered his teens the two women shrank from sending him to school. He was a most lovable little boy, but mentally far behind his age, and his movements were still ill-co-ordinated; so they could not bear the thought of him becoming the butt of other children. First governesses and then tutors had been engaged to educate him privately but, apart from teaching him to read, write and do simple sums, they found great difficulty in instilling much knowledge into him. This was not altogether because his brain was slow, but because years of coddling by Nanny Fishe
r had ingrained in him a chronic laziness. He could not be made to concentrate upon his lessons.

  On the other hand, he could concentrate perfectly well when it called for no effort on his own part. He loved being read to, particularly fairy stories and, later, romantic legends such as those about the Knights of the Round Table, the great French champion Bayard, and the mythical heroes of ancient Greece. He loved music also—although only the popular kind, for he had never been introduced to any other—but he would sit for hours playing his gramophone, and needed to hear a tune only once to be able to hum it.

  It was from the latter gift that there arose the only accomplishment he possessed. One day, when he was buying records, he included among his purchases, owing to the fascination that chivalry had for him, one in French, because it was a selection from the Lays of the Troubadours. No doubt his ear for music explained the speed with which he picked up the phrases. Two days later, to Aunt Emily’s astonishment, she came upon him singing the songs from memory, with an impeccable accent.

  That night, on her knees beside her bed, she gave fervent thanks to God for having solved a problem that had long worried her in secret. Robbie was an only child, and had inherited from his father a quite considerable sum which, on being handed over by his trustees when he was twenty-one, would provide him with a very adequate income. But Aunt Emily was one of those spinster ladies for whom the spread of Socialist ideas held a constant nagging menace. As a kindly and charitable soul, she was glad to see poorer people benefit from the Welfare State. But it was she and her kind who were paying for it. The nationalisation of the railways had robbed her of an appreciable part of her own income, and such horrible bogies as Local Government Compulsory Purchase Orders, further Rent Restriction Acts and the possibility of a Capital Levy caused her sleepless nights at times.

  Such matters for dread might not be just round the corner, but she felt there was good cause to fear that, sooner or later, another Socialist Government might well bring in measures which would deprive her poor, helpless Robbie of most of his money. However, a man who could speak several languages could always make a living. Next day she bought him a set of English-French phrase records, and persuaded him to start learning French. He took to it like a duck to water.

  Robbie was then seventeen and he was delighted with his new achievement. More records were bought and he became so intrigued that he agreed to have language tutors. Within a year he could talk French and German fluently. But Aunt Emily was not content with that. She held the optimistic belief that before many years had passed the West and the East would settle their differences and the Iron Curtain be lifted. Then trade with the countries behind it would increase enormously. Few English people had even a smattering of their languages, so a man who could speak them well would be assured of a highly-paid job.

  Being by no means a fool, Robbie willingly accepted his aunt’s idea. He still stubbornly refused to study mathematics, grammar, geography and other subjects he found dull, but devoted several hours a day to learning languages, and later reading books in them. By the time he was twenty-one, he had mastered Polish, Czech and Hungarian, and was doing well in Spanish and Italian. Moreover, although his general education remained extremely sketchy, he had subconsciously absorbed, from the books he read, a considerable amount of knowledge about European countries, their literature, music and art.

  Soon after he came of age Aunt Emily fell ill and, seven months later, to his terrible distress, died of cancer. His only close remaining relative was his father’s brother, Sir Finsterhorn Grenn, who had just been appointed British Ambassador to Athens. For some weeks after his aunt’s death Robbie had been completely broken up; so, on the assumption that he was still incapable of looking after himself, Sir Finsterhorn had, a shade reluctantly, mooted the idea that Robbie should accompany him and his wife to Greece.

  Lady Grenn had also, at first, been far from enthusiastic about this idea, as she feared that to have a young man who was not quite normal as a permanent guest at the Embassy would prove a constant embarrassment. But Robbie had seized so eagerly on the tentative suggestion that they had felt compelled to make it a definite invitation and, after he had spent a few days in their company, Lady Grenn had found her fears groundless.

  He was very shy and a little awkward in his movements, appearing even more so on account of his size; for the underdevelopment of his brain seemed to have been compensated for by physical growth. He was well over six feet tall, strong-limbed and enormously broad-shouldered. From under Aunt Emily’s protective wing he had seen so little of the world that at first he found it difficult to talk to strangers, but once drawn out he could be interesting and infectiously enthusiastic about his own subjects. He had, too, one asset that more than compensated for his simple mind: he radiated honesty, kindness and willingness to do anything within his limited powers to help others. In consequence, Lady Grenn soon grew very fond of him, and he of her, although she could never, for him, take the place of his beloved Aunt Emily.

  His year in Greece had greatly broadened his horizon, as well as adding yet another language to his repertoire. He had also become capable of going about on his own, buying his own clothes and doing many things that he had never attempted to do while in England. Although he had never been abroad before, on his arrival he had not felt like a stranger. So many of his hours had been spent reading and re-reading the Greek myths and legends that he felt that he had returned to a land that he already knew well. Indeed, with his highly romantic nature, sometimes he almost persuaded himself that he had caught a glimpse of one of Zeus’s giant limbs among the clouds, or of a satyr darting behind an ancient olive tree in some woodland glade.

  Only one thing marred his complete happiness: Sir Finsterhorn’s insistence that he should take up some form of work. Anxious to please his uncle, he had allowed himself to be initiated into various simple jobs about the Embassy, but in none of them had he given satisfaction. He had never been trained to follow a routine and found keeping set hours intolerable. Moreover, as he had no interest in these tasks, his mind wandered while doing them, so he proved more bother than he was worth. Since coming to Greece, he had taken to alternating his reading about mythical heroes with luridly-covered paper-backs of the gangster-sex variety. That he should quite often lie on a mattress in the garden reading such trash, or simply dreaming the hours away, intensely irritated the hard-working Ambassador, and caused him every few weeks to return to the charge. But Robbie could be neither coaxed nor bullied into sticking to anything for more than a few days and, as he had ample money of his own, there were no means of forcing him to do so.

  Yet his uncle’s periodic upbraidings greatly distressed him, and at length he had been inspired by an idea which he hoped would put a stop to them. To the astonishment of everyone present at the time, he had announced his intention of writing a book. It was to be about the gods, goddesses and heroes of ancient Greece. Regarding him as quite incapable of producing such a work, his hearers were, at first, completely nonplussed; but they refrained from saying that the subject had already been done to death. Then, rather than hurt his feelings, they hastily began to encourage him to undertake this project.

  So there was Robbie, now twenty-three years of age—a big, burly young man with a slight stoop and a rather round face, the most outstanding feature of which was a pair of big brown eyes that looked as if, at any moment, they might light up with a kindly smile—sitting, on a fine morning in mid-March, at a table near the edge of the yacht harbour at Piraeus, the great port of Athens.

  This harbour, known as Toyrcolimano, consisted of a small, nearly landlocked bay protected by tall cliffs. Upon one of them an ancient castle had been replaced by the Royal Greek Yacht Club, and down in the harbour a hundred or more yachts, ranging from eighteen-footers to millionaires’ sea-going vessels, lay at anchor. Below the cliffs, in a semicircle, were ranged half a dozen or more restaurants, and across the road each enjoyed a section of the wharf on which to set out tables sha
ded by colourful umbrellas.

  Unlike the great commercial harbour that lay a mile away on the far side of the city. Toyrcolimano looked out on to the Gulf of Athens. To the south-west, through the forest of yacht masts, rose the misty outline of the island of Aegina, and the most easterly promontory of the Peloponnesus. To the south, the Gulf stretched away, so deep a blue that it recalled Homer’s phrase, ‘the wine dark sea’. In that direction, it was broken only by the grey bulk of an aircraft carrier and half a dozen warships attendant on her.

  It was with the intention of going aboard the carrier that Robbie had that morning come by bus from Athens. The previous evening, as the Fleet was in for a few days, the Ambassador had given a cocktail party for its officers. As such official receptions were a regular feature of life at the Embassy, Robbie was no longer nervous at them. In fact, he had by then been trained by Lady Grenn to look out for guests who were standing alone, introduce himself and help to see that they enjoyed themselves. As no one of any importance ever took much notice of him, he had a fellow-feeling for others who looked ill at ease, and took pleasure in making them feel at home. On this occasion he had done the honours for a young lieutenant named MacLean and, before they parted, MacLean had invited him to lunch the following day in the wardroom of the carrier.

  When he accepted, MacLean had simply said: ‘That’s fine. Then if you’ll be at the jetty at half past twelve, I’ll come off in a launch and pick you up; then I’ll take you for a run round the Fleet before we go aboard for lunch.’

  Robbie had assumed that MacLean meant the jetty at the Yacht Club end of Toyrcolimano Bay, as on previous visits he had seen naval officers landing there. He arrived there only five minutes late, but there was no sign of MacLean. Glad that he had not kept his new friend waiting, he sat down and dreamily watched the traffic plying back and forth from the warships. A few pinnaces put in at the jetty, and twenty minutes passed, but there was still no sign of MacLean. Seeing that it was now nearly one o’clock, he enquired of a petty officer for the lieutenant, to be told to his dismay that only senior officers were privileged to land at the Yacht Club jetty. Junior officers, ratings, liberty boats and stores were all landed or taken off at the main harbour on the far side of the headland.