I opened them, and in both the General Anzeiger and the Tageblatt were exultant articles on the success of the air raid upon the metropolitan area a few nights before. They were, of course, luridly “written up,” but they contained a great deal of perfectly accurate information, as I knew by the secret reports shown to me directly after the raid.
How could the enemy know? Of course, the blazing accounts of the terror and panic supposed to have been created in London could have been written up anywhere. But how was it that not only were the localities in which the bombs had fallen accurately specified, but in several instances details were given of the exact damage to certain buildings? By no possibility could the latter information have been the result of an effort of Teutonic imagination. The enemy knew; proof of it was there in cold print. How did the news reach the Wilhelmstrasse so quickly?
It was certainly not by wireless, for every message was picked up and decoded by our own stations. That the news had not passed through the great German wireless stations of Norddeich, at the north of the Elbe, or Nauen, near Berlin, was certain. Here was a pretty problem set for solution.
As I sat alone in my room that evening, having dined at my club and returned to the enjoyment of slippers, a novel, and a good cigar, I reflected on the task I had in hand. I realised, of course, that my suspicions of Blind Heinrich might be entirely unfounded, but I had at the moment nothing better to go upon, and I decided that, in view of his known association with Gould, whether he was mixed up with the matter we now had in hand or not, a close watch upon him might provide some facts of interest.
Upon my arrival in London from Paris, I had sought out Blind Heinrich, who was now living in a boarding-house in Hereford Road, Bayswater, close to Westbourne Grove. In the same house was now living a dainty little woman, a Belgian refugee, who was in very straitened circumstances. According to her own story, she had become separated from her husband, a rich merchant of Brussels, before going on board a boat at Ostend, during the terrible flight from Belgium in 1914. Since then she had been unable to obtain the slightest information about him, and did not know even whether he was alive or dead.
For nearly three years, she related, she had remained in terrible anxiety, which was rapidly wrecking her nerves and her life. As a refugee, a pitiful victim of the catastrophe which had befallen her beloved country, she was existing upon English charity. She called herself Madame Taymans, and her old address in happier days was in the Rue de Namur in Brussels. But her real name was—Gabrielle Soyez!
Few women in the world could so perfectly adapt themselves to the ever-changing demands of the Secret Service as Madame Soyez. In her present circumstances she was absolutely at home, for she had been educated in part at a convent near Gembloux, and could assume the Belgian accent to perfection. It was an easy matter, therefore, for her to pass for what she pretended to be.
In Hereford Road the Frenchwoman had established herself on my instruction for the purpose of keeping a watchful eye upon the quiet, long-haired, half-blind violinist, who, to all appearances, was eking out only a meagre existence, and whose clothes were of that shabby-genteel brand which usually betrays respectable poverty. But we knew enough of Heinrich’s affairs to be convinced that the shabby-genteel rôle was deliberately assumed for purposes of deception. A splendid musician and a born teacher, Heinrich could command his own terms, and, as a matter of fact, he made a good deal of money. More than this, he was well known in high circles of Society, where his teaching abilities gave him the entrée to a large number of the best houses. And, of course, no one ever suspected that the half-blind old fiddler, crawling from house to house in the aristocratic quarters in which he found most of his pupils, was in reality the alert and dangerous agent of the enemy which subsequent events revealed him to be.