“Well, I’ve had the letter and the banknote in my hand. Our managing-director found the correspondence, and showed it to me before he handed it over to Scotland Yard.”
“Well, I must say that I’ve never suspected either of them as traitors,” declared the Admiralty official. “I liked young Sainsbury very much. He was a smart young fellow, I thought, and I know that Jerrold held him in very high esteem.”
“Ah! my dear Trustram,” remarked Rodwell, with a sigh, “nowadays, with an avalanche of German gold doing its fell work in England, it is, alas! difficult to trust anybody. And yet it is all the fault of the Government, who seem afraid to offend Germany by interning our enemies. If I had my way I’d put the whole lot of them under lock and key, naturalised and unnaturalised alike. It is in that where the peril arises, for, in my opinion, the naturalised Germans in high places are suborning many of our men to become traitors and blackmailing them into the bargain—alas! that I, an Englishman, should be compelled to express such an opinion regarding my compatriots. Here you have two cases in point where apparently honest, well-meaning and patriotic Englishmen are branded as spies, with evidence—in one case certainly, that of Sainsbury—sufficient to convict him.”
“When will his trial be? Have you heard?”
“No. You will be better able to discover that. It will, of course, be a secret court-martial.”
“In that case we shall never know either the nature of the charge—or of his defence.”
“Exactly,” replied Lewin Rodwell, with grim inward satisfaction. “We shall only know the sentence.”
Charles Trustram drew heavily at the fine cigar his host had given him, and sighed. The terrible charges of treason against his dead friend and young Sainsbury were indeed astounding. Yet he, as an official, knew full well that the Director of Intelligence did not take such steps as had been taken without some very firm and sound basis for prosecution. The Department generally erred upon the side of leniency, and always gave the accused the benefit of the doubt. That there was to be a court-martial was, indeed, a very significant fact.
“I suppose you are sending out troops to the Dardanelles?” remarked Lewin Rodwell carelessly, after a short silence. “I saw the announcement in to-day’s papers?”
“Yes. It will be a far tougher proposition than we at first believed. That’s the general opinion at the Admiralty. We have three troop-ships leaving Southampton to-morrow, and four are leaving Plymouth on Friday—all for Gallipoli.”