by David Laws
She pursed her lips. “Then he’ll have to miss a few days until we can…”
“Get this thing sorted?”
“Yes, get it sorted,” she said.
There was a silence, and when no more was said Harry went off to Scobie’s garage to start up the old car and check it was fit for the road.
His mind still on Erika, he began undoing the ties on the Sunbeam’s cover, struggling with the knots, thinking about her reactions and his friend’s wealth. She’d exclaimed excitedly at all the dark wood varnish, the Beth Wangman kitchen, the brushed-steel taps, the patio and the swimming pool. Upstairs, he knew, there were wardrobes full of Hugo Boss, Armani and Calvin Klein. “Not for me,” he said under his breath, an instinctive reaction against what he saw as excessive displays of opulence. Some stark contrasts sprang to mind: a family ancestor out in the woods scrabbling for firewood; an aged neighbour scraping ice from the inside of her bathroom window because she couldn’t pay the heating bill. What Harry’s father would have described as an unhealthy schism in society.
A sudden shout broke into these thoughts. There was an eruption of alarm from the house.
“Harry! Harry!”
He ran back into the kitchen and found Erika clutching his mobile, her mouth describing the perfect zero and her left hand shaking. “Disaster,” she said.
He shrugged, pointing at the phone. “What… how?”
“Mary just phoned me.”
“On my phone? How did she know the number?”
“I gave it her.”
“I see.” His hands were on his hips.
“It’s terrible, Harry, it’s kicking off again.”
“What is kicking off again?”
“They are. She just phoned. Those men, they’re outside my house in Barton and they’re looking at my car. All over it and under it. They’ve found my address, Harry, and you know what? They pinned a note to the door.”
“A note? Do we know what it says? Has your friend read it?”
In a small voice she recited, “We know who you are, where you live and what you stole.”
Harry blew out his cheeks. “So they know you’ve got the file.”
“They want it back.” She was taking deep breaths now, swallowing hard, head in hands. “The last bit was a threat. Like, ‘It will be the worst for you and your child.’”
Before Harry could fashion a response, she said, “You know what this means. Next thing they’ll be right outside this door. It’s not safe here any more.”
Chapter 6
27 days to go
Harry calmed her down and talked it through. The men would never get the address of Blackthorpe Grange. No one in Bury knew it. In any case, the best tactic for her pursuers would be to stake out her cottage in the hope that sooner or later she would return.
Erika wasn’t mollified. “We need to get right away from here,” she said, “right away from this town altogether. It’s just not safe. They’re too close, I can feel it.”
He gave in then. He usually did when she insisted, and to convince himself he was doing the right thing he talked about a plan, a programme of action. They would set off first thing in the morning and stay with friends or at cheap hotels, he said, but first he needed to make preparations.
He sat at the dining table, blotted out her nervous entreaties and made himself calm while he re-examined the blue file. No cursory look this time; more care. It was held together with solicitor’s tags looped through punch-holes, rather like some old Air Ministry pilot notes he’d seen, affording those long-ago Stasi file clerks an easy method of inserting the latest updates. Then he examined each name on the list with care. EICHE, KIEFER, LARCHEN… oak, pine and larch. Their code names hadn’t protected them, and what struck him was the gulf in importance between those listed, from a Government minister all the way down to a provincial lecturer. For instance, MANDELBAUM, an almond tree, an academic. What did they want with him?
Then he stopped, drew in a breath. Gobsmacked. His finger hovering over a name near the bottom of the sheet.
“I know this man.”
She looked up.
“He’s a friend. At least, I thought he was.”
She looked over his shoulder at where his finger pointed.
Toby McIntosh, code-named Larchen.
“Larch,” she said.
“What’s he doing on this list?” He swallowed. “Can’t be true! Not Toby!”
“They got to all sorts of people.”
“Don’t be ridiculous! That was back in the ’80s, but we were there in 2007.” He looked again at the list. How could Toby be a Stasi spy? The Stasi were dead by the time Harry and Toby were students at Leipzig. The hated secret police had disappeared when the Wall came down in ’89, disbanded in disgrace, some in jail, most consigned to a bitter retirement in the bars around Lichtenfeld. History, weren’t they?
“Perhaps not?” she suggested.
“I heard the rumours,” he said. Talk of a group of senior officials of the old regime operating in secret to keep ‘the faith’ alive. “Just daft talk, surely?”
“The Kameraden,” Erika suggested. “Maybe they’re the men at my door?”
Harry considered: were they really being pursued by some ghastly remnant of the old regime? “We’ll see about that,” he said. “Toby had better have a good story to tell.”
He flicked the pages of the list open and shut, but his mind was elsewhere. His plan: he’d start with Toby, then turn the tables on the men at Erika’s door. Switch from hunted to hunter. He visualised breaking the big story, the inch-deep splash headlines to come, and began to put his mind to the nuts and bolts of how to accomplish the task. What was the best approach? Simply write the story on the basis of what was in the file?
No, of course not. If he named a single person he’d be in trouble, and he’d already been burned in the libel courts. A clever lawyer would make mincemeat of the list. He could already hear the cries of forgery. A set-up. A worthless piece of paper. Who could authenticate such a document? It was a minefield. And even if the list could be shown to be genuine, it would still be dismissed in court as the mere wish list of a criminal gang of Communist conspirators, the fantasy of a detested and defunct regime, names they had simply pulled out of a hat. The damage to the reputation of anyone Harry named in print would be huge. And so would be the damages.
He pursed his lips and knew he’d have to play a much cleverer game. Independent proof was needed: confessions, witnesses, facts, names and places. Even payments. He thought again. Especially payments.
“We’ll leave here,” he promised Erika, “but I want to follow up the people on the list and write about it.”
“Too dangerous, Harry!”
“Not at all. We’ll find them, interview them, and when it gets in the papers your nasty men will just have to disappear. Their list exposed, their secret out! No point in pursuing you then.”
She swallowed, and when she didn’t object further he said, “We’ll start with the small fry – with my supposed friend Toby McIntosh – and work our way up the list, picking up all sorts of useful information on the way. By the time we get to the top, we’ll know everything.”
Surprisingly, she didn’t argue as he had expected, and didn’t put up a fight. He nodded to himself. His plan was set. The stakes were high, in more ways than one.
Erika toured the property, upstairs and down, examining carefully all the windows and apertures. Would those men outside her house in Barton discover her new location? Surely, they wouldn’t sit idly by, just hoping she would turn up? They would make inquiries. They would put out the net. And the taxi driver who’d made the journey from the town to the Grange – he knew where they were. Cabbies talked, she knew that. Inveterate gossips.
These mystery men – who were they? Was it really the Kameraden chasing the Blue List?
Then her thoughts turned, as they usually did, to a certain person from her past who had inflicted a deep wound, searing her soul. She felt scorned and rejected. That had quickly turned to hate. And Erika knew how to hate in the most effective and devastating manner. She recalled her Leipzig trip, aimed at tracing a certain Karl Anton Fischer – but to no avail. She was aware of a strange irony in the situation: the men at Barton were looking for her while she was looking for him. She snorted in disgust. What would she do if she met Fischer again? She was conscious of a deep longing in her life, but the longing had now turned sour and the desire for vengeance was even greater.
Erika continued her tour, paying close attention to the bathroom window, screwing it down tight, then peering at the garage roof to see if it afforded a climber an easy way up to a first-floor window. Erika knew all the tricks. She asked herself: if she were the stalker, how would she do the job?
Then she went looking for a handy weapon, found a claw hammer, and left it by the foot of the stairs. Fear rose in her throat like an impulse to sickness, but she made a vow to herself: she would be no pushover. She had a son to protect. She’d fight, like she’d never fought before. All her technique, plus a mother’s protective ferocity.
One thing was certain: these men wouldn’t just come knocking at the front door.
Chapter 7
Sunday 3rd March 2019; 26 days to go
Next day, somewhere close to midday, Harry gave way to Erika’s rising tide of panic and, surrounded by suitcases and stuff on the back seat, drove the old Sunbeam Talbot – all shiny chrome and gleaming bodywork – out of Scobie Johnson’s garage and on to the A14 to embark on the first part of their double quest: to escape her tormentors and run down the names on Erika’s Blue List.
An hour later they approached the outskirts of Cambridge. Harry had fixed the rendezvous by telephone. His quarry had expressed surprise, then confusion at being looked up after such a long time. Toby McIntosh had once been one of Harry’s closest student friends. Riding pillion on the Triumph, carousing tours of the most questionable of city bars in Leipzig, a sounding board for Harry’s latest ideas. Who’d have thought he would appear as a name – and with the code name Larchen – on Erika’s Blue List of traitors?
“You’re glowering,” she told Harry as he peered at the road ahead. “You’ll put this man on his guard with a face like that.”
Harry continued to glower all the way into Cambridge. Citizens of the East co-operated with the secret state for all sorts of understandable reasons, he knew; the names changed but the pressures didn’t – Gestapo, Stasi and whatever came after – but what excuses could Toby, a foreigner, offer for volunteering his services? Harry felt his anger boil at the prospect that the man might try some bogus justification, some pathetic denial, or attempt to play the fox. In the face of such a devious act of betrayal, he worried that he might not be able to hold himself in check; that he would make a scene. He’d never heard of anyone being thrown out of a bookshop for creating a verbal punch-up. Perhaps he would be the first. He briefly wondered if Toby might have an escort, some sort of protector, but thought it unlikely. Even if there was an active organisation behind all this, they could hardly throw a security ring around everyone on the list and they had no way of anticipating Harry’s every move.
The meeting had been arranged for the second-floor cafeteria in Waterstones. Erika had been persuaded to check out the city’s shops, sights and cafes while Harry climbed heavily up the wide, creaking wooden staircase of the bookshop, still annoyed that the pleasure of this place – a bibliophile’s paradise of endless shelving and thousands of former trees – would be blighted by what was to come. When he arrived he discovered McIntosh already in the queue for a mozzarella panini. They nodded unsmilingly and didn’t speak until making it to an alcove seat far from any potential listener.
It seemed that theirs was not the only business meeting taking place. The big coffee machine hissed busily as customers clinked cups amid an array of leather armchairs. Files were being opened, papers shuffled, diaries consulted. Harry thought he recognised the participants: literary agents, writers, lecturers, students, businessmen. Deals were being done, books commissioned, seminars fixed. No one was of a mind to listen in.
McIntosh spread his palms questioningly as they sat. He looked more or less the same, Harry thought; a few crinkly lines around the eyes, a little heavier perhaps.
“Lovely to see you again, Harry.”
“Not sure you’ll rate this as an unalloyed pleasure by the end of this conversation.”
McIntosh sighed. “I had a feeling not. Your tone on the telephone.”
“Your name has come up.”
A silence, then McIntosh asked, “In what connection?”
“Espionage. That’s the connection.”
Another silence, which Harry let hang.
“Do you want to explain?”
“Should I need to?”
McIntosh picked up his coffee and said, “Shall we stop this dance? What do you want, Harry?”
Harry stared grimly at his one-time friend. His threadbare jacket with its grey elbow patches, and the subdued timbre of his voice. Not the perky student he once knew. “Your confession, for a start, then an explanation,” he said. “You’re on the Stasi’s Blue List, Toby, named and codified as an agent of influence in Great Britain. As if you didn’t know…”
McIntosh waved a dismissive arm. “Don’t be ridiculous! Before my time – you should know that. The Stasi were dead long before you and I arrived. They went back in ’89, for God’s sake!”
“Still on their list. Still one of their spies.”
“Nonsense.”
“Want me to show you?”
Toby sighed, crestfallen. “You’ve got it there?”
“Of course. The master list. Toby McIntosh, code name Larchen, German for larch. So, how come, Toby? That’s what I want to know.”
Toby glanced over his shoulder before answering. Perhaps he was worried who might be listening. “Ancient history, old chum, history from my immature past. But now? All dead. The Stasi have gone to the great socialist graveyard in the sky.”
Harry’s expression said McIntosh wasn’t going to get off that easily. “Why, Toby? Why sign up with some creepy remnant of a disgusting, decrepit, fossilised regime? What were you thinking of?”
McIntosh spread his palms again. “Look, at the time I thought it was the right thing to do, but now?” He shrugged. “Now I regret it. I think I was wrong and I’m not proud of it. In fact, I rather wish it had never happened. I’m embarrassed about that period of my life… and I was rather hoping that no one would ever get to hear about it…”
At this, he looked questioningly at Harry.
“Who?” Harry demanded. “Who was your contact?”
Toby licked his lips, massaged his nose and looked to the ceiling.
“Who?”
A sigh. “The student boss Higgersdorf.”
“God, that creep! How could you have been so…?” Harry paused. “And what was his pitch? And for who?”
“The Kameraden.”
“So they exist?”
“They did.”
“And, it seems, they may still.”
McIntosh swallowed. “What now, Harry? Are you going to blow me wide open? Ruin me?”
Harry ignored the question and demanded, “And what did they want to do? Plant you in some sensitive position so you could search for secrets, spread their poison?”
McIntosh sighed. “Yes, they wanted me to find some high-tech post, but I’m not high-tech, Harry; the most I could manage was a firm of accountants. Pathetic, isn’t it? And you’ve no idea how damned boring it is. Profit and loss, stock depreciation, writing down assets – God, how did I get stuck with that? All those bright futures we dreamed of, back in Leipzig. All that excitement, all that looking forward to
what was going to happen later in our lives… So why did it turn out to be so humdrum, so disappointing? Tell me that!”
Harry could see more than Toby’s wrinkles now. He was looking at a beaten man. The betrayal still rankled, but his initial hostility was beginning to wane. He recalled the good times they’d experienced in Leipzig, a couple of indulgent and naive students… well, that had to count for something.
“So,” McIntosh said, “I’ll ask you again: where are you going with this, Harry?”
“I want your help.”
“Well, that’s a positive.”
“I want you to help me track down some of the others on the list.”
McIntosh considered, chewed his lip, sipped some more coffee, then nodded. “OK,” he said uncertainly, then sat up, suddenly decisive. “I think the whole thing was a terrible mistake, so I suppose turning traitor to the traitors will be my way of clawing back some shred of self-respect, even if only to convince myself. To repair a guilty conscience.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“So, Harry, do I get to see your explosive list?”
Harry played with his briefcase, unclipping the fastener, shuffling some papers, then produced the file from his inside pocket.
“You always were a joker, Harry, how could I forget that?”
“Never does to be predictable.”
McIntosh went into a meandering explanation for agreeing to their bookshop rendezvous. “Had a feeling this might turn out to be embarrassing, and Celia, well, what can I say, she doesn’t know anything about that side of my life, and anyway, she’s not too strong on me just at the mo.”
Harry ran his finger upwards from the bottom of the list. “Here’s you…”