V for Vengeance Read online

  V FOR VENGEANCE

  Dennis Wheatley

  Edited by Miranda Vaughan Jones

  for my friend

  ROLAND LE BRETON

  As a small memento of the many pleasant hours we have spent together, and in the hope that we may yet crack some good bottles of wine in France again.

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 The Killers Come to Paris

  2 City of Despair

  3 The Man Who Should Have Died

  4 Those Who Fight On

  5 Transportation to Death

  6 S O S to Gregory Sallust

  7 Defiant London

  8 Henri Denoual’s Island

  9 Hitler Youth at Play

  10 The Enemies of Antichrist

  11 Coffin for One

  12 The Unexpected Snare

  13 A Friend in Need

  14 The Vein of Luck Runs Out

  15 Into the Lion’s Jaws

  16 ‘Set a Thief…’

  17 A Quisling Entertains

  18 Unhappy New Year

  19 Sabotage and Love Scenes

  20 The Great Conspiracy

  21 Race Against Time

  22 Sitting on Dynamite

  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 Duke 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 Killers Come to Paris

  Madeleine Lavallière stood with drooping shoulders outside the main doorway of the Hôpital St. Pierre. She had just said good-bye to the lean, dark-haired Englishman who was going down the steps. As he half-turned to speak to the driver of his taxi she thought again how ill he looked.

  Sister Madeleine was a professional nurse, and she had been called four nights before to Gregory Sallust’s hotel, where she had found him still suffering acutely from the effects of a deadly poison. He was still not fit to travel; yet there seemed to be a flame in the man which drove him relentlessly to pursue the secret war job upon which she had gathered that he was engaged. It was that alone, she knew, which had determined him to attempt to reach Bordeaux, instead of taking the easier road, like other English people who had been hurrying out of Paris to St. Malo, or Cherbourg and so home.

  The stream of refugees had stopped now, and the sunny streets were practically deserted. It was three o’clock on the afternoon of June the 14th, 1940, and at that very moment the Germans were beginning their formal occupation of Paris with a triumphal entry through the Arc de Triomphe and down the Champs-Elysées.

  Gregory stepped into the taxi, and Madeleine half-raised her hand to wave him good-bye; but he did not look back, and as she lowered it again she smiled a little bitterly. She had learnt from his ravings, while delirious, that he was in love with some woman called Erika, and it had piqued Madeleine that he had hardly been conscious of herself. It wasn’t that she had actually fallen in love with him, because she was in love with her own dear Georges, but she was an attractive girl—in fact, so attractive that her good looks rarely failed to arouse the interest of her male patients, and sometimes even proved an embarrassment to her—so it had hurt her vanity just a little that the Englishman had not even appeared to notice her deep blue eyes, dark, silky curls, and full, beautifully curved mouth. In some faint way he resembled Georges, and although she loved Georges very dearly and was entirely faithful to him it was now so many months since she had seen him that she would not have minded a mild flirtation with her late patient, had he shown the least willingness.

  She even confessed to herself that for her own peace of mind it was as well that she had not accepted Gregory’s offer of a lift in his taxi to Bordeaux. A surge of distress suddenly shook her, and the tears came into her blue eyes as she thought again of the Germans, who at that moment were entering fallen Paris. In these last days events had followed one another so swiftly that it was as yet hardly possible to realise the terrible succession
of defeats which had been inflicted upon the Allied Armies and that beautiful Paris now lay at the mercy of her brutal enemies. Madeleine would have fled before them, as half the population of Northern France had already done, had she not known that her invalid mother could not possibly survive such a journey. For her there had been no alternative but to refuse Gregory’s offer and remain.

  As she began to walk down the steps in front of the hospital she thought again of the shocking tragedy, entirely unconnected with the war, which had brought her there. That morning a lively middle-aged man had arrived to see Gregory at the St. Regis. He had proved to be a Bolshevik General named Stefan Kuporovitch, who, a few months before, had decided to shake the dust of Soviet Russia off his feet and return to Paris, with which he had fallen in love a quarter of a century earlier when he had visited it as a young Czarist officer before the Revolution. The hazards of war and many adventures since had prevented his reaching Paris until that very morning, and he had been as eager as a boy, although the Germans were already at the very gates of the city, to sit again at one of the marble-topped tables outside a café in the Rue Royale and drink his apéritif with a pretty girl.

  Gregory had suggested that he should take Madeleine, and she had gone with the Russian to Weber’s, where by his gaiety and a succession of champagne cocktails he had for an hour succeeded in taking her mind completely off the awful doom which was so rapidly approaching her beloved city. Then, just as they had been about to return to the St. Regis, Kuporovitch had stepped off the pavement. A passing car had knocked him down, and his skull had been fractured in two places. They had taken him to the St. Pierre; she had fetched Gregory, and they had just heard the doctor’s report. It was thought unlikely that Kuporovitch would regain consciousness, and virtually certain that he would be dead before the morning. Before leaving, Gregory had forced several mille notes into her hand with the request that she would arrange for his poor friend to receive a decent burial.

  Early that day she had not even known of the Russian’s existence, but he had proved a friendly person, and the horror of being a witness at close quarters to a fatal accident had shaken her profoundly; so that this personal tragedy added to her intense depression as she walked homewards through the silent, sunny, shuttered streets of stricken Paris.

  Madeleine lived with her mother in an apartment on the top floor of a large block in the fashionable Rue St. Honoré. It was not that they were at all well-off, as Madame Lavallière had only the small pension of the widow of a minor official in the Ministry of the Interior and Madeleine such money as she could earn by her professional nursing; but Paris differs greatly from London in that in the French capital rentals are not always necessarily high in the smartest districts. Such matters are mainly governed by the floor upon which one lives, and in the great old-fashioned blocks that form the bulk of central Paris the first floors are often offices or luxury apartments inhabited by the very rich, while the top floors of the same buildings are frequently let at very modest rentals.

  The lift went up only to the fourth floor, and Madeleine wearily climbed the remaining three flights of steep stone stairs. As she let herself into the flat her mother called to her from the bedroom. Madame Lavallière had been afflicted with a stroke some fifteen months before and now being partially paralysed was permanently confined to her bed. When Madeleine had regular work and was out nursing, Madame Bonard, the wife of the concierge, looked after Madame Lavallière’s simple needs, but she came in only in the mornings to clean the flat and cook a midday meal, then in the evenings to get supper, as the invalid had an apparatus by her bedside with which she could make coffee for her breakfast and the afternoon. On hearing the door open at such an hour she knew, therefore, that it must be her daughter who had come in to see her.

  Going into the bedroom Madeleine threw her hat upon a chair and shook back her dark curls. She even managed to raise a smile for the wasted figure with the grey wispy hair, who lay propped up in the large old-fashioned bed.

  ‘My job is finished,’ she said. ‘My patient has just left for Bordeaux, so I shall be able to be at home with you now during these bad days until things become a little more settled.’

  ‘That is good, ma petite,’ the invalid nodded. The miserable life to which she was condemned was apt to make her querulous, and she often nagged at Madeleine for going out to work, although this was unjust, as without Madeleine’s contribution to the little family budget they would have been hard put to it to carry on; but she was genuinely fond of her daughter and now obviously relieved to think that she had come home for a spell.

  She then asked for news, and Madeleine gave her what little there was. No one in Paris knew what was happening outside it. The more optimistic still believed that the French Army was intact and that at any time General Weygand might yet launch a counter-offensive which would roll the enemy back, but optimists were rare in Paris in those days, and a terrible defeatism seemed to have closed like an icy hand upon the hearts of most of its remaining inhabitants.

  ‘So the Germans are here,’ the old woman gave a heavy sigh. ‘I have heard nothing since this morning, but I was already becoming anxious about you. Thank God that you have come home! You must stay here, Madeleine—in the apartment, I mean—and not go out again. The streets will no longer be safe with these beasts in them, and for a pretty girl like you—promise me that you will not go out!’

  Madeleine had already thought of that several times earlier that day with a frightful sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. All that she had ever read of the fate of the inhabitants in conquered cities, tales of the occupation in 1870 and of the brutalities of the Germans in Belgium and Northern France during the invasion of 1914 lent colour to her fears. Those great strong brutal Germans would, she felt certain, loot the cafés and the wine-shops, and once they had become drunk be capable of any mischief. Woe betide the unfortunate French girl who fell into their hands! Mentally she shuddered to think of the horrible fate which almost certainly would overtake many of them that night, but she strove to make light of it.

  ‘I won’t go out tonight at all events,’ she promised; ‘and perhaps not for a day or two. But we must go on living, and with the many wounded there will be much nursing to do. Even the Germans will respect a nurse’s uniform, I feel certain, so you have no need to worry, maman. I shall be able to take care of myself.’

  Madeleine made the coffee and took some brioches from a bag, which had been left ready on the invalid’s bedside table. While they ate these they talked, but only perfunctorily, since both were busy with their thoughts and fears as to what the future held in store for them. When they had done Madeleine took the things into the small kitchen and washed up.

  She had just finished when there came a sharp ring; it was the door-bell of the apartment. Turning, she crossed the living-room to open it, but in the small hallway she suddenly paused to wonder who it could possibly be.

  Madame Bonard did not normally come up to prepare supper when Madeleine was absent until half past seven, and it was not yet five o’clock. Besides, Madame Bonard had a key; yet who could it be, since it was one of Madame Lavallière’s complaints that people so rarely came to see her? Perhaps one of the few old friends who occasionally called to relieve the tedium of her bedridden life had thought of her in this sad hour and come to sit with her for a little. Yet, in such a case, knowing that the invalid could not leave her bed, Madame Bonard would have come up to let them in.

  The bell shrilled again. Madeleine stilled the beating of her heart, reasoning with herself that it was much too soon for the Germans to have instituted any house-to-house visits yet, and stepping forward opened the door. A cry of gladness and surprise broke from her lips.

  ‘Georges!’ and next moment she was clasped tight in her fiancé’s arms.

  He kissed her hungrily for a moment, crushing her to him, then turned and, drawing her into the room, closed the door softly behind him. She noticed then that his face was tired and strained. H
e had no hat, and his clothes were thick with the dust of recent travel.

  ‘What a surprise you gave me!’ she exclaimed. ‘But you are lucky to have found me here. I’ve only just got back from a job, and you know maman can’t leave her bed. Why didn’t you get Madame Bonard to come up and let you in?’

  He shook his head. ‘I haven’t seen Madame Bonard. No one must know I’m here, chérie. I went upstairs in the next block, then over the roof and in through the skylight window on the landing.’

  Her elation left her as quickly as it had come.

  ‘Georges!’ she whispered. ‘What is it? Are you in trouble? Is someone following you?’

  ‘Not yet, I hope,’ he smiled. ‘But they soon may be.’

  And as she stared at him she thought again how his loose masculine figure, dark smooth hair and quick grin gave him a definite resemblance to the Englishman that she had been nursing back to convalescence.

  Although the day was warm he was wearing a light mackintosh, and pulling it off he asked her for a drink. Hurrying to a cupboard she produced a bottle of Denis Mounie Cognac and two glasses. As she set them down on a corner of the table her mother’s voice came, high-pitched and a little anxious, from the bedroom.

  ‘What is it, Madeleine? Who is it with you out there?’

  Madeleine did not wish to alarm her, but for a moment could not think what to reply. Georges was holding his finger to his lips, so it was clear that he too did not wish her mother to know about his visit. Opening the door a little farther she said:

  ‘It is a friend of mine—one of the doctors from the St. Pierre. He was anxious about me now that the Germans are in the city.’ Then she firmly pulled the door shut.

  Georges had poured out two stiff goes of cognac. She sat down beside him, and they lifted their glasses, staring over them at each other in an unspoken toast. The strong spirit made Madeleine’s heart beat faster, but its mellow warmth seemed to give her new strength and momentarily to still her apprehension.