The Dominafuhrer - THE GODMOTHER

Episode 68 - I Spy, You Spy

London, October 1937

“Well, that was excellent! I haven’t tasted fish and chips as good as that in years.” Alan Forbes put his knife and fork down on his empty plate and then frowned at Miss Spiteful as she leaned over to top up his wine glass.

“Does your wife never serve them to you?” she asked slyly. “In fact, will she not have cooked a meal for you tonight?”

Forbes frowned again, looked at his watch and then shrugged. “No,” he said flatly, indicating that the subject was not to be pursued.

The conversation as they had both tucked into the food and drank the wine that Miss Spiteful had opened against Forbes’s protestations had been about anything but the matter that had brought him to her door. Miss Spiteful had told him a little about her background and career, which did not seem news to him, and then some amusing stories about some of her clients. The only ones that she had named had been high ranking Nazis and she could almost see his brain filing away the information as she spoke. Then Forbes relaxed enough to recount his own history; a provincial grammar school boy who had got to Manchester University through hard work where he was recruited for the Security Service. He was married with two young children and lived in a south west London suburb; was good at his job but was exasperated by the attitude of his old school tie and Oxbridge colleagues towards his more humble origins. He obviously had not said that last part but Miss Spiteful had noticed the bitter edge to his voice when he recounted the problems that he faced trying to convince his department that some very aristocratic or rich and powerful people were being recruited by Nazis like Bradshaw. She also noticed that he had barely mentioned his wife although she had been shown the photograph of his children that he carried in his wallet.

Miss Spiteful found herself intrigued with this handsome young man. His fair hair was unfashionably long at the back; creeping over his shirt collar; he had a trick of hooding his eyes when he was not facing her but she knew that his eyeballs were turned to wards her and there was a slight pout to her lips that made her want to kiss them. She felt a flush come to her cheeks, her nipples harden and a dampness at the top of her legs. She realised that she had been unconsciously rubbing her thighs together for some minutes but if Forbes had noticed, he gave no sign. She suddenly realised that she wanted to have this man make love to her and felt weak and vulnerable when she needed to assert herself.

“Was that not your wife with you last night?” Miss Spiteful’s voice cracked slightly because her mouth had gone strangely dry.

“No!” Forbes almost spat the words out in anger. “That was my boss’s secretary, Fiona. If I had taken my wife, I would have had to pay for her meal; service rules.”

Miss Spiteful raised her eyebrows but said nothing and it was Forbes who suddenly turned and fixed his gaze on her.

“Now what are we going to do with you?”  His voice had a hard edge to it and, although he had narrowed his eyes to slits, Miss Spiteful felt as they were boring right through her to her spine. This was a different Forbes to the one she had seen before. Any warm thoughts that she had moments before had dissipated to be replace by a cold feeling in her stomach.    

“It is possible that you are not a spy,” Forbes continued. “It is also possible that you are not here to embarrass this country but what is certain is that you are consorting with a group of Nazi sympathisers, one of whom is almost certainly a dangerous spy and traitor. That, in my opinion, still makes you an undesirable alien and I still intend to have you deported.”

He sat back and waited for Miss Spiteful’s reaction.

Miss Spiteful hung her head for a few moments as tried to keep her temper and think fast at the same time. Finally she looked up and stared back at Forbes.

“Have you any idea what it is like to be a German and a Dominatrix in this country; especially one with a clientele like mine? If I plied my trade in Soho, no one would care if I came from Mars but, in Mayfair and Belgravia and Kensington, I am the Invisible Woman. None of my clients will acknowledge me if they meet me on the street, particularly if they are in company and especially if they are with their wives. They all know who I am but to them I do not exist. You English are all hypocrites; everyone knows about everyone else’s affairs but, as long as it does not get out in public, they just ignore it. Some men will take me to their clubs or discreet restaurants but I am never invited to anyone’s home for dinner or a party. Bradshaw is the only one who does not mind being seen with me in public, although some of his circle will still ignore me. The truth is; I don’t like any of them, especially Bradshaw, but I like eating out and I am not going to turn down an invitation from him. I know he is showing me off to make people think that I am his lover but I do not care!”

Miss Spiteful’s voice rose as she ended her impassioned speech slumping back on her chair, as if drained, when it was over. Forbes however remained silent, still giving her his hooded stare and she felt her anger rising again.

“But if he is so dangerous,” her voice hissing as she leaned forward again, “why then have you not arrested him?”  

Forbes’s brow furrowed as he replied. “Because he is very clever and while we know in general what he is doing we do not have the precise details.  People like Mosley, the Joyces, Ramsay, Leese, Admiral Domville. Luttman-Johnson and your table companion last night, Horwood-Grahame are mainly Nazi admirers or anti-Semites. Their organisations; the British Union, the Nordic league, the Right Club and the Greater Britain Movement all operate in the open and are probably less of a problem than the Communist party of Great Britain.”

“Ach, I met Sir Oswald Mosley in Berlin,” Miss Spiteful interrupted. “He wanted me to thrash him and bark orders at him German, but he expected sex afterwards. Goebbels sent me an invitation to the wedding but thankfully I was moving to Paris at the time. I’ve managed to avoid him here in London.”

“Yes, we’ve noticed,” Forbes snapped impatiently. “If anything, his wife is more fervent Nazi than him. Anyway, we watch them all and can round them up when it becomes necessary. What Bradshaw is doing, besides buying land on the East Coast of England to turn into airfields, which is perfectly legal, is secretly recruiting people throughout Britain who will help Germany run this country if it is ever taken over. He is using bribes and promises of power on politicians, civil servants, landowners, businessmen, lawyers, judges, senior police officers, newspaper owners and editors, anyone who will switch allegiance take posts in a Nazi administration of our occupied islands. They do not have do anything until then; no spying, no sabotage but they are traitors all the same. What did that Spanish General last year call the Falangists already inside Madrid? His Fifth Column; well these are the British Fifth Column and Bradshaw is setting it up!”

Miss Spiteful was appalled; she had guessed that Bradshaw and de Hoone were up to no good but this was far bigger than she had imagined. Back in Berlin, she had heard that Nazis in countries such as Holland and Norway were being groomed as future administrators but nothing about Britain. A chill ran up her back; if she became implicated in this then not only her freedom but her life was in peril. The Nazis dealt brutally with traitors and spies but the British would be not be lenient either, there would be a judicial process but, even in peacetime, prison awaited anyone who imperilled their country and, in time of war there would be the hangman’s noose or firing squad.

“But you are watching Bradshaw,” she protested. “You must know who he meets or contacts!”

Forbes shook his head. “Bradshaw is a successful business man and property dealer. He travels all over the country and he does not always make the proposition himself, sometimes he uses the network that he has built up. He identifies a likely prospect and someone he has already recruited makes the offer. Then they can just carry on with what they are doing and wait for the Nazis to arrive. We cannot watch everyone he has ever met; many of them could be completely innocent. That is why he is so dangerous.”

“He must keep lists somewhere,” Miss Spiteful said. “Arrest him and search him and his home.”  

Forbes shook his head. “First of all we need evidence to get a warrant but we are pretty sure that any thing incriminating that he writes down is destroyed soon after. Every couple of days he sends a long telex to his office in Amsterdam which we know goes straight on to Reinhard Heydrich, his paymaster in Berlin.”

Miss Spiteful shuddered as she recalled Heydrich’s warning that she would be watched after she left Germany. Was there someone outside reporting back that she was entertaining a British Security Officer?

“We believe that those telexes are Bradshaw’s reports,” Forbes continued. “They look like business communications and we have copies of them all going back for more than a year but we cannot read the information that is hidden in the text.”

“I thought that you British were good at decoding,” Miss Spiteful sniffed.

“It’s a cypher not a code,” Forbes shook his head again. “Our experts can identify and extract the suspect passages but there’s a book or a poem which both Bradshaw and Heydrich use that the message is enciphered from. Without that, all we have is gibberish.”

He fixed his slitted eyes again on Miss Spiteful and leaned towards her.

“We pulled the plug on his telephone when we knew he was just about to go away so we could get a couple of our men posing as Post Office telephone engineers into his house to investigate the fault without him looking over their shoulders. They managed to search his study and some of the rooms and even cracked his safe when the servants were not around but could not find any thing that looked like it could be the cypher book. That’s how we know that he does not keep any thing written down.”

Miss Spiteful’s brain had been racing as Forbes spoke and the pieces began to fall into place.

“And what is it that you want me to do?” she asked quietly.

Forbes eyebrows shot up as he realised that she had already reasoned where he was heading.

“You’ve been in his home quite a few times and seem to have the run of the place,” Forbes said almost accusingly.

Since Bradshaw preferred Miss Spiteful to perform her regular domination sessions in his house in Cadogan Place rather than in her Bayswater dungeon, she had indeed been there quite often. Ostentatiously decorated and furnished, it also doubled as the centre of Bradshaw’s business empire since he preferred to run it from his study rather than the head office in Holborn. There was never any danger of Miss Spiteful meeting his wife and their children as Lady Bradshaw refused to leave their country house in Sussex for London except for the most important social occasions or pre-announced shopping trips. Bradshaw lived alone, apart from his servants, and Miss Spiteful found the place very gloomy. Even Bradshaw’s lovers, such as Lady Pandora, refused to move in with him. She flicked her head in acknowledgement to Forbes’s statement.

“What we want is for you to have a good look around his study and his library and even his bedroom to see if there is a book or a passage of text that could be the key to the cypher. We understand that you are completely unsupervised when you are there.”

“Which means that you’ve had no luck questioning his servants,” Miss Spiteful observed with a smile and Forbes pulled a face in agreement.

“I am not a Nazi but I am a loyal German and, although I do not bear any ill will against Britain, I will not do anything that will harm my own country. I refused to spy for them and I will not be a spy for you.” Miss Spiteful stated emphatically.

“I do not want you to be a spy, I want you help catch a British traitor!” Forbes snapped back.

There was a few moments silence as they stared defiantly at each other.

“And if I do not help you?” Miss Spiteful asked her voice quiet again.

Forbes broke the lock between their eyes and partly turned his face away.

“Despite the official policy of their government and the indifference of the majority of the people of the United States, J Edgar Hoover, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is well aware of the threat that the Nazis pose to America. As well as the growing membership of the American Bund, he is concerned that amongst the increasing numbers of refugees entering America from Europe there will be Nazi spies and saboteurs. As many pass through Britain he has asked us to notify him of any that we are suspect are infiltrators. All we have to do is put your name on that list and you will never be able to enter the United States.” He turned back to face Miss Spiteful with a triumphant smile.

“But after last night, I doubt if I will be invited back to Sir Douglas’s home,” Miss Spiteful said with an even voice that concealed her rising anger.

Forbes shook his head. “Bradshaw’s no fool. de Hoone’s reputation is well known here and back in Holland. Don’t forget, I was watching you all last night and I saw Bradshaw frowning at de Hoone’s attempts to grope you. I think that you will find that he prefers to keep your company and that you are forgiven.”

“Alright I’ll do it,” Miss Spiteful replied her voice calm despite her glittering eyes and pursed lips. “But there will be a number of conditions



To continue this story, click The Spy Who Bedded Me



Back to the top