‘Well, let’s hope you don’t have to celebrate Mass or hear confession.’ She laughed. ‘Have another coffee.’
‘Dear God, woman, you’ve given me an idea there. Where’s your briefcase? The file we were looking at earlier? The general file?’
She went into her bedroom and came back with it. ‘Here it is.’
Devlin leafed through it quickly, then nodded. ‘I was right. It’s here in his record. The Steiners are an old Catholic family.’
‘What are you getting at?’
This St Mary’s Priory. It’s the sort of place priests visit all the time to hear the confessions. The Little Sisters of Pity are saints compared to the rest of us, but they need confession before they partake of Mass and both functions need a priest. Then there would be those patients who were Catholic.’
‘Including Steiner, you mean?’
‘They couldn’t deny him a priest and him in a place like that.’ He grinned. ‘It’s an idea.’
‘Have you thought any more about your appearance?’ she asked.
‘Ah, we can leave that for another few days, then I’ll see one of these film people the General mentioned. Put myself in their hands.’
She nodded, ‘Let’s hope we come up with something in those Sea Lion files. The trouble is there’s so much to wade through.’ She got up. ‘Anyway, I think I’ll go back to bed.’
Outside, the air-raid siren sounded. Devlin smiled wryly. ‘No you won’t. You’ll get dressed, like a good girl, and we’ll go down and spend another jolly night in the cellars. I’ll see you in five minutes.’
Schellenberg said ‘A priest? Yes, I like that.’
‘So do I,’ Devlin said. ‘It’s like a uniform, you see. A soldier, a postman, a railway porter _ it’s the appearance of things you remember, not the face. As I say, the uniform. Priests are like that. Nice and anonymous.’
They were standing at a collapsible map table Schellenberg had erected, the plans of St Mary’s Priory spread before them.
‘Having studied these on and off for some days, what is your opinion?’ Schellenberg asked.
‘The most interesting thing is this plan.’ Devlin tapped it with a finger. ‘The architect’s plans for the changes made in nineteen hundred and ten when the Priory was reconsecrated Roman Catholic and the Little Sisters took over.’
‘What’s your point?’
‘Underneath, London is a labyrinth, a subterranean world of sewers. I read once there’s over a hundred miles of rivers under the city, like the Fleet which rises in Hampstead and comes out into the Thames at Blackfriars, all underground.’
‘So?’
‘Seven or eight hundred years of sewers, underground rivers, tunnels, and nobody knows where half of them are until they’re excavating or making changes, as they were at the Priory. Look at the architect’s plan here. Regular flooding of the crypt beneath the chapel. They were able to deal with the problem because they discovered a stream running through an eighteenth-century tunnel next door. See, it’s indicated there on the plan running into the Thames.’
‘Very interesting,’ Schellenberg said.
‘They built a grill in the wall of the crypt to allow water to draw into that tunnel. There’s a note here on the plan.’
‘A way out, you mean?’
‘It’s a possibility. Would have to be checked.’ Devlin threw down his pencil. ‘It’s knowing what goes on in that place that’s the thing, General. For all we know it could be dead easy. A handful of guards, slack discipline.’
‘On the other hand, they could be waiting for you.’
‘Ah, but not if they think I’m still in Berlin,’ Devlin reminded him.
At that moment, Use Huber came in, very excited. ‘You were right to recommend me to check on British right-wing organizations, General. I found details of a man in there cross-referenced to Sea Lion.’
‘What’s his name?’ Schellenberg demanded.
‘Shaw,’ she said. ‘Sir Maxwell Shaw,’ and she laid two bulky files on the table.
Chapter SIX
ROMNEY Marsh, some forty-five miles south-east of London on the coast of Kent, is a two-hundred-square-mile area reclaimed from the sea by a system of dykes and channels started as far back as Roman times. Much of it is below sea level and only innumerable drainage ditches prevent it from reverting to its natural state.