Scotland Yard Detective Bureau, Joyce speaking, how may I direct your call, please?”
She listened for a few moments and replied, “The principal of the Bureau has a space in his diary today at 2PM. Would that be acceptable? That’s wonderful, Mr. Harvey. I will book you in. Good day.”
It was a mild spring day in Southern California, and ex-Chief Detective Inspector Miles Tresco, formerly of Scotland Yard, but now living in Los Angeles was enjoying the weather as he walked back to the office of the detective agency he had founded several years back: the Scotland Yard Detective Bureau.
How had a former Scotland Yard Chief Detective Inspector come to be living in Los Angeles and operating a successful detective agency named in honor of his former employer?
He’d been far too young for the trench warfare of what had previously been known as the Great War, or somewhat prematurely as it had transpired, the war to end all wars. He’d become a police constable in the Metropolitan police, following in the tradition of his father and his mother’s side of the family, both of whom had ancestors who had joined the Met shortly after its founding.
He had found an aptitude for detective work, so he had become a Detective Constable and rapidly rose through the ranks due to hard work, a keen intelligence and a soupçon of luck.
He had been brought to the attention of Edward Parker, who was the head of the Special Branch in the early 1930s. They were expanding the Special Branch and someone had realized that Irish separatists were only a part of the security threat facing the modern Britain, so the remit of Special Branch was expanded to cover communists, Bolsheviks, anarchists and other sundry political extremists, including fascists and Nazis who were coming to prominence in Germany and Italy.
By the start of World War II, Miles Tresco had become a Detective Chief Inspector and helped to close down two Nazi spying rings in Britain.
When America joined the war, it was realized that British intelligence needed to liaise with their American counterparts and it was decided to install FBI officers at Scotland Yard. Some of the city and county police forces throughout the UK and install Special Branch officers from Scotland Yard with FBI branches in the USA. There was an officer in New York, two in Washington DC at the FBI headquarters and two in California, one in San Francisco and one in LA. Although they were to liaise with the FBI, they operated out of the British embassy and the local consular offices.
After the war had ended, Tresco had decided that he didn’t want to return to Britain with its pea souper fogs (and people in LA thought they had it bad with poor air quality!), the poor weather and the continued post-war rationing, so he decided to retire from the Met and open a detective agency in LA. This meant he had to take out American citizenship, but that wasn’t something that particularly concerned him.
He decided that he would employ former British police officers as far as possible. Eventually, after advertising in magazines aimed at current and former police officers, he found a retired Liverpool City officer, another former Met officer like himself, someone who had served in the Plymouth City police and a retired Glasgow City detective.
He had found a woman, Joyce Travers, to run the office who had recently become bored with working at the British government’s LA consulate. Besides which, they’d recently intimated that her tour of duty would soon be over and she hadn’t liked the idea of returning to Blighty for much the same reason as Tresco, so the opportunity to stay in LA was something of a Godsend to her.
He had met with Paul Harvey, and although he felt that there was something a bit ‘off’ about him, he took him on as a client.
“Interesting to have a client that doesn’t involve a cheating spouse,” he had quipped to Joyce.
“Never say never,” she replied, a smile on her face.
Several weeks later, he was conducting the investigation on behalf of his client.
Harvey, his wife and daughter and the daughter’s fiancé were living in a large house in large grounds that looked more reminiscent of an English country manor than a house in LA, with landscaped gardens front and back in a traditional English style. How could Harvey afford such a property? Treso would file that question away for later thought.
Harvey had received some threatening letters through the US Mail. They were typed and had LA postmarks, except for several that had been posted in Eastern states, though all composed on the same typewriter, at least as far as Miles could see.
“Do you have any idea who might be behind this?” asked Tresco as they sat in Harvey’s study that overlooked the rear lawn.
He shook his head. “No, I’m afraid I don’t. I’m just an ordinary businessman. It’s a far cry from what I was doing back in the war. I was a member of the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, mainly based within the USA, though I did get to see some action in the latter part of the war in Italy. What about your service?”
“I was a representative of the Special Branch with the FBI in LA,” Tresco said. “I decided to stay on in LA after the war, took early retirement and decided to launch my own detective agency.”
“So you were involved in espionage, too?”
Tresco laughed. “Not really. There wasn’t really that much going on in LA, to be honest. The major spy network busts happened in the Eastern states. Though we did take down a modest network in LA. Apparently, they were given the job of sabotaging the US film industry, but their spymaster was, in reality, someone who’d been turned by the FBI.” Tresco had fudged several issues. No need to give out all the details, after all.
“Is it possible that these threats are involved with your work with the OSS back in the war?” Tresco added. “Are you still linked with the OSS, or the CIA as it’s now called?”
Harvey shook his head. “No, I’m just like you, out of the game and back into civilian life.”
Tresco nodded, he didn’t reveal that he still worked with the FBI, although as a confidential informant. Some things are best left unsaid.
Based on Tresco’s decades of experience, he immediately suspected that the author of the letters was probably someone close to home. Maybe even within the Harvey household?
His daughter was a student, although she was, like her fiancée, on summer break. Tresco had met them all at the house. He had felt that Harvey was a little “off,” though no more so than some other OSS officers he’d met.
The daughter was young, dark haired and pretty. The boyfriend, who went by the name Peter Bird, had rubbed Tresco up the wrong way. There was something about him that Tresco did not like. At all. He was an arrogant blond young man who was, or so he claimed, from old money back in Philadelphia. There were alarm bells ringing in Tresco’s head about him.
Tresco found Mrs. Harvey interesting, but not as bright as one might expect. He was also intrigued by the fact that she and Bird had been making eyes at each other at dinner. This wasn’t noticed by Harvey or his daughter. Years as a police detective had taught him what to look out for, but a possibility of an affair between the two? That needed to be investigated. He remembered his joke to Joyce and grimaced to himself. Because it looked like it would involve a cheating spouse after all.
He got his team to do background checks on the whole family. This made it easier for him to concentrate on looking at what was happening at the house.
A week into the investigation and matters were going well for Tresco, but he realized they would not be ending well for his client if the truth was anywhere near what he suspected.
Paul Kelly was the former Liverpool City Police officer who had joined Scotland Yard Detectives very soon after Tresco had founded it. Despite having lived in the USA for well over a decade, he still had his Scouse accent. “How’s it going, Tommy?”
“Not bad, Miles. Not bad. I’m still not sure how you do it, but you were right to be a bit suspicious about the lad: her boyfriend. He’s not kosher at all.”
“Why? How’d you mean?” asked Tresco. “To be honest, you have caught me a bit off guard as though I’d had a bad feeling about Peter Bird, he sort of reminded me of someone or something, but I hadn’t expected anything too serious to come about, based on my copper’s intuition. Please tell me what you learned about him.”
They were sitting in the main office. Only the two men and Joyce Travers were there. The other staff were out on jobs.
“Miles, I checked out the home address of Bird and I got a local Private Eye there to check it out for us. It’s an empty lot. It’s been empty for nearly 20 years, back in the mid-1930s. He asked around with the neighbors, and it turns out that the house was blown to bits in an explosion. The town is in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country.”
“Damn!” was Tresco’s reply. “Any idea what happened?”
“According to our contact, the house was a regular meeting place for a group that rivaled the German American Bund, the German American Kartell. It was smaller but more militaristic. Although there was no proof found after the blast, it was said by neighbors that the basement of the house was used to store explosives.”
“Now, why would Peter Bird use that empty lot as his address?”
“Also, I had our contact check out Bird’s university registration. Turns out he’s not registered as a student and, get this, there doesn’t even seem to be any record of Peter Bird existing in any address in the city that I could find.”
“That’s… odd. But not surprising. At least, not to me. Perhaps too much time in Special Branch?” He laughed at his own joke.
Joyce spoke up, tentatively. “Miles, you know you said you were suspicious and you thought that the fiancé reminded you of someone?”
“Yes, I do Joyce.”
“Well, is it possible that it’s something to do with your Special Branch files?”
For a split second, Tresco looked shocked, then said, “Damn it, Joyce! You could be right! Let’s take a look, now!”
Tresco had obtained and built up over a large volume of files during his time as the Special Branch liaison officer in LA, and because it’s what officers in intelligence gathering police departments tend to do, after the war he had kept the records under lock and key in his office.
His files had been kept in good order by himself and Joyce, and he was able to locate what he wanted after only a moderate length of time.
“Bloody Hell! It seems I was right when I said I sort of recognized Peter Bird. He has a strong resemblance to someone I helped the FBI arrest in 1943: Albert Vogel. He was part of the Operation Pastorius attempt to bring about sabotage in California.”
Joyce said: “And isn’t Vogel the German word for Bird?”
“Yes, you are correct, Joyce. Not very sensible to use a false address associated with your German family and use a false name based on your own family name. I believe Vogel had a son called Peter, so I’m presuming he is Peter Vogel?”
“What are you going to do now?” asked Tommy.
“Mr. Harvey is on a three-day business trip to San Diego, his daughter will be away shopping in the city with her bridesmaid. That leaves Bird or Vogel at home with Mrs. Harvey. Let’s see what happens today, shall we?”
Their meeting had taken place in the early morning, so it was still before 10AM when he arrived at the Harvey residence. Although as an American citizen Tresco was allowed to own and carry a pistol, he had a concealed carry permit, he rarely went armed on a job. This time he had donned his shoulder holster and taken his Walther P38 with him.
He parked his car, his pride and joy 1937 SS Jaguar sports saloon, on a street a little way from the house and entered the considerable grounds of what was a fairly large estate through a fence, approaching the house as unobtrusively as he could.
He wasn’t sure what he would see, but after 30 minutes he noticed Mrs. Harvey being led by the hand by Bird or Vogel toward the large garden shed that was 30 yards from the rear of the house.
This turn of events didn’t surprise Tresco (after the interaction he’d seen between the two of them), but he realized that Mr. and Miss Harvey wouldn’t be quite so sanguine about this.
After 30 minutes or so the couple left the shed, adjusting their clothing. Using his monocular, Tresco noticed that Mrs. Harvey looked like a woman in love, but somewhat guilty. Vogel, however, looked smug.
They entered the house by way of the lawn and closed the door behind them.
Moments later, Tresco entered the shed making short work of the lock on the door, using a skeleton key he habitually carried with him.
They had made use of some sacking as a love nest, but that wasn’t what interested him. He noticed that a piece of the dusty wooden flooring looked to be cleaner than the rest, and he swiftly lifted up that section of the floor. He was astonished to find a Luger pistol, a small box, some plastic explosives and what looked to him like one of the Abwehr spy radio sets that had been issued to the Operation Pastorius team back in the war.
There was also a tiny brand new Rooy portable typewriter with an opened pack of typing paper hidden there, too. It became obvious to Tresco who the author of the threatening letters had been.
The war was over. Why would someone who had just been a kid during the war have a spy station set up in the garden shed of his lover’s husband’s home? It didn’t make sense.
He left everything as he had found it, re-locked the shed and went back into the city. On the way, he stopped off at a phone and from memory, dialled the number of the LA FBI office.
He gave his name and code word to the person who answered, and was swiftly connected to Special Agent Dough Gray, his contact who had been his contact when he was the Special Branch liaison officer during the war.
“Miles! Good to hear from you! What do you have for me?”
“Hi, Doug. Got a weird one. Can’t talk on the phone. But can I meet with you and a team, please? You’ll need someone to deal with explosives and firearms.”
“Sure. Give me the address, and we’ll be there as soon as we can. Just like the old days, huh?” he quipped.
“Doug, you have no idea. And I think you might need a search warrant, too.”
Two hours later, they met at the property. Vogel was arrested on espionage charges and Mrs. Harvey began to sob, quietly.
As Harvey was his client, Tresco had sent him a terse telegram inviting him to return home as soon as possible. Somehow he would have to include his wife’s cheating with their daughter’s fiancée. He wasn’t looking forward to that at all.
Vogel was taken in for questioning and, under the threat of the death penalty for espionage (using the case of the Rosenbergs and their recent execution as leverage), he began to answer all their questions.
It transpired that the whole case was a hell of a mess. An uncle of Vogel’s had known of Operation Pastorius, and when his brother and the rest of the team had been arrested he had been able to obtain several Abwehr spy kits, various items of sundry equipment and some of the money that the Abwehr had provided to fund the operation.
Where did Harvey fit in? Whilst he had been on active service in Europe, he, and a small group of OSS officers, had found and murdered an SS courier who had been given the task of smuggling a large amount of precious metals and jewellery to a place of safekeeping.
The SS courier became just another battlefield corpse, and the OSS team arranged for their booty to be sent back to the States.
Somehow, a State Department official who had links to members of the German American Kartell had got wind of what had happened, and he recruited Vogel to ingratiate himself to Miss Harvey by posing as a student at her college and infiltrating the Harvey household.
Emboldened by his success as a spy, Vogel had sent several threatening letters to Harvey. The end game had been to blackmail him into parting with his portion of the stolen treasures.
Vogel and his uncle had planned to use it to relaunch the German American Kartell and take over the US government.
Gray shook his head. “And that, Miles, is the story. They had two spy radios, some small amounts of plastic explosives and a few thousand dollars in counterfeit banknotes. How the hell they thought they’d be able to take over the US government is anyone’s guess.”
“Have you got their man in the State Department?” asked Tresco.
“Yeah, he’s being interrogated by a team actually led by J. Edgard Hoover, himself, or so I have heard. I know we have been running round in circles trying to clear up all the damn Communist spy rings, but finding out that there is actually a holdover from the wartime Nazi spies has really put everyone in a spin!”
Later that evening as the sun was setting casting a golden light in his office, Tresco thought about the case as he sipped a cup of strong tea which he imported from Fortnum and Mason’s, in London.
“Bloody weird case,” he mused to himself. “My employer turned out to be a thief, his wife was cheating on him and his daughter was being cheated on by her fiancée, who didn’t really exist, with her own mother. And he was a man who was a part of a spying network that was really nothing more than a vague fantasy of an old man who should have known better.”
As well as the fee from his client, so long as Harvey could he evade action over the missing treasure he and his buddies had absconded with, Tresco would be getting his stipend from the FBI for his role as a confidential informant. Not a bad result, really, he thought.
He drained his tea, swilled his cup and teacup out, locked up and left. He could go back to his apartment, or maybe some Guinness in that Irish pub? Yeah, that’d be good.