by HRF Keating
But now another sound came from inside. Ponderous footsteps.
Then the blue door was drawn fully back.
Harriet saw a man, perhaps in his eighties, white hair fluffy round a ruddy, bald dome of a head, a generous white moustache failing to conceal a long row of china-white false teeth, a paunch well protected by a tobacco-coloured cardigan. But, however telling of the latter years all this was, the two blue eyes looking back at her were twinklingly alive.
She had prepared her opening words, bouncing them out before the old professor had any chance to speak himself.
‘Mr Wichmann? Police.’
But, if she had hoped the brutal announcement would go to the core of the man the Faceless Ones had suggested as being behind the theft at Heronsgate House, she was to be disappointed. He appeared, at once, to be a little disconcerted, but no more than that.
So, a tougher proposition than his mild appearance might suggest? Or someone altogether innocent?
‘The police?’ he said now.
He produced a plainly cheerful smile, the serried ranks of paint-white teeth briefly showing.
‘What is it I have done? Have I been driving the car I do not possess at a speed in excess of two hundred miles per hour? Or has Mr Chaudhuri down below denounced me for stealing from him one apple?’
Harriet, producing her warrant card, returned smile for smile.
Plainly, if the Faceless Ones were right about the old man, it was going to be a long and difficult business getting to the truth of him.
‘No, sir,’ she replied. ‘Detective Superintendent Martens isn’t here dangling a pair of handcuffs. But may I come in and tell you what is my reason for calling?’
‘Yes, yes. Come in, come in. My little home.’
He turned and, padding along in front of her, led her into his sitting room or study.
She took the quick survey she made, almost without thinking, on entering anywhere on inquiries. Yes, there was the armchair she had earlier envisaged Professor Wichmann as dozing in. It was tall-backed with draught-protecting wings and covered in some tan-coloured material, now glistening in patches with long years of use. There was an electric fire in the fireplace, both its two bars issuing heat on this unpleasantly chilly day. On the floor a patterned carpet, a little too big for the area it covered, showed patches almost worn down to the backing threads. There was a dark-stained desk, big — too big again for the little room — and heaped with books and papers. Down beside it, she saw an uncovered typewriter, of a make that might have been produced as long as fifty years ago. And on every available space round the walls there were bookshelves crammed higgledy-piggledy with academic-looking volumes.
Portrait of the Professor.
But, if the Faceless Ones had any hard evidence for pointing to him, might it be ‘Portrait of the Sleeper Spy’?
Take another unexpected swing at him? Why not? He may have parried that single word ‘Police’
I shot out, but a second such low blow may penetrate his defences. If there are defences for him to have.
‘Professor Wichmann,’ she said, ‘what do you know about Heronsgate House?’
A quietly perplexed frown the only reaction.
But then, suddenly, a sharp look in those blue eyes.
‘Ah, yes. Yes, that is where a young protégé of mine is now working.’
So my second shock as unproductive as the first.
Professor Wichmann, with a long breathy sigh, dropped into his battered armchair, vaguely indicating to Harriet a sturdy cushioned one by the desk.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that boy is now personal assistant to the Director at that place, Heronsgate House, and he should not be. He should be here, here at the university, working on his thesis on Jean Paul.’
Harriet was quick.
That was not been the name of the German writer Christopher Alexander had said he had decided not to study. A chink? A chink in a prepared story of some sort?
‘Jean Paul?’
Professor Wichmann gave her a smile, a roguish glint from the china teeth.
‘Ah, yes,’ he said, ‘I would not expect an English police lady, even of high rank, to know Jean Paul, though his is a name to be found in the works of the greatest of all writers of crime stories.’
‘Conan Doyle? Sherlock Holmes?’
‘Good, good. But, nevertheless, you do not remember the name Jean Paul?’
Harriet grinned, a little sheepishly.
‘Well, I have to say that it’s my husband who’s the really keen reader of the Holmes stories.’
‘Yes, yes. They are often preferred by what I must not nowadays speak of as the stronger sex. So, let me tell you. In the course of his investigation of the case of The Sign of Four, Sherlock Holmes, reflecting, as I remember, on the beauty of the day’s dawn, mentions Jean Paul, as Jean Paul Richter was commonly called in those days.’
Another tenuous threat falling away to nothing. Harriet felt almost inclined to laugh.
‘Ah, yes,’ she said, ‘this morning when I was making some inquiries at Heronsgate House your protege, as you called him, Christopher Alexander, told me he had once contemplated doing a DLitt on, yes, Richter. But, he said, he had decided to take a job instead.’
‘Yes, yes,’ the old man opposite her sighed. ‘The silly unsure-of-himself boy. I had hoped … I thought once that he would even become my successor here at the university, that my work, such as it was, would still be kept alive. But, no. It was not to be. A loss to scholarship, even a considerable loss.’
But is Christopher, Harriet asked herself now, a young man who bitterly regrets that decision of his, with perhaps its promise of eventual academic fame? And has he — can it be? — taken a sort of revenge on his present occupation by betraying the Director’s secret? But to whom? To someone, or some group, who wanted to get their hands on a weapon as threatening as CA 534? And who had swiftly acted on the information they had acquired?
On the other hand, it could be that the Faceless Ones have got their beady eyes to some purpose on — on this pleasant old professor of German, sitting there in that dilapidated but comfortable chair. So, yes, let’s try another shock-tactics blow.
‘Professor, does it surprise you to be told that I am here because I have been given your name by the British secret services?’
It did surprise the old man. That was clearly evident. But it was as evident that it had not actually shocked him.
‘Well,’ he said at last. ‘Well, I am, I must confess, not entirely surprised by that. You know, I spent the early years of my life prepared at every moment to hear some such news as you have given me. Not that the British secret service was interested in a seventeen-year-old German boy, but that the Gestapo had me, and more credibly my father, in their sights.’
The Gestapo. Into Harriet’s head there came thoughts and memories culled from dozens of films and television thrillers she had seen, even from television comedies. In all of them, seriously or comically, the Gestapo meant an ever-lurking threat of sudden arrest, of the concentration camp, of torture possibly, of soon-to-come death. And, no doubt, this old man, that once seventeen-year-old youth, had been under such a threat.
‘So,’ she said, ‘you were living in Germany in the days shortly before the Second World War?’
‘Yes, yes. In those terrible times. My father, who was a distinguished historian, had married a Jewish lady, and, although she died when I was no more than five years old, the taint was seen always to be there. We, father and son, were conscious every day that the knock might come at the door. So, you can see how still, at the back of my mind, I have a fear. No, it is less than that. I have a dislike of feeling that I’m being watched.’
‘Yes. Yes, I can understand that.’
‘Ah,’ Professor Wichmann said, with that momentary teasingness Harriet was beginning to expect from him, the gentle rib-poking perhaps of a professor with students he liked, ‘but do you understand this? It is something I learnt in those days in
Germany. There are people also who do like to think they are being watched, who like feeling threatened?’
Harriet thought.
‘No,’ she admitted at last. ‘I’ve always known there are areas of the human psyche that I cannot get any grasp on, neither sympathy nor revulsion. But if you tell me there are people of that sort, I will believe you.’
Then, abruptly, she thought of Christopher Alexander again. Was he one such? Perhaps this was why Professor Wichmann had taken such an interest in him. And perhaps, too, that was the hidden reason why he might have told someone — but who? — where Dr Lennox had hidden the potentially devastating CA 534.
But Professor Wichmann was going on.
‘For a long while my father had attempted to leave Germany. Something by no means as easy to do then as your happy holiday-maker of today would believe. But at last he succeeded, and of course he brought me with him. Here to England. And for him to imprisonment, or internment as they politely called it.’
A teasing smile.
‘But for me, seen as too young, there was, yes, freedom. If, as it now seems from what you have just told me, freedom under licence, so to speak, with my name for ever inscribed on some Secret Service list. But it was, nevertheless, freedom, freedom to study what I wished. Even, in wartime, to study the literature of the enemy country where I had been born. The literature that I loved.’
Had he blinked away a tear?
‘And you, unlike Christopher Alexander, did go on to higher studies? And to a lectureship, or whatever? And eventually to becoming Professor of German Studies at Birchester University?’
‘Yes, yes. Even to finding myself Emeritus Professor, something that makes me, however unworthily, proud. And to having, so far from always fearing that knock on the door, become one who, again in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s words, believes in the magnificent fair play of the British police. All that is the debt I owe to this country, this peaceful country, of which I have long been a citizen.’
Harriet, abruptly finding back in her consciousness the violence that had shattered her two sons, uttered an incredulous, ‘Peaceful?’
‘Ah, yes,’ Professor Wichmann replied. ‘Yes, I can see that you — But, stop. Stop. Yes, did you say your name was Martens? Are you — can it be that you are the lady — you have some different married name? — whose twin sons, young police officers, have been — I was reading just this morning in the Birchester Chronicle — victims of a terrible bomb outrage?’
‘Yes. Yes, I’m afraid that’s so.’
‘But — But how does it come about then that you are here, on duty, making some unimportant inquiries?’
Harriet managed some sort of a smile, or mirthless grin.
‘That’s because this country is at this time not any sort of a peaceful place,’ she said. ‘I see you have no television. But you must have read in the Chronicle about worse outrages than the attack on my sons.’
‘All those deaths just a few days ago, the EuroVin festival, yes. But Hasselburg is not in England.’
‘No, but at any moment some English city, Birchester perhaps, may become another Hasselburg.’
‘Yes. Yes, that is true. You do well to remind me. Yet I can still think of this country as peaceful. It has been so for me, for many years. I have been able to go walking in the beautiful countryside. The beautiful and peaceful countryside. Not perhaps, to my mind, quite as beautiful as the Schwartzwald, the Black Forest, where I used to go walking with my father long ago, but beautiful enough, the Lake District, the moors of Yorkshire, Exmoor, Dartmoor, the Scottish Highlands. Beautiful, beautiful and, yes, peaceful.’
The hymn of praise had given Harriet time to recover herself.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I know what you mean. Britain was beautiful and peaceful once.’
Professor Wichmann shook his head.
‘No, no, my dear. You should not make that mistake. You are dreaming, dreaming of something that has never really existed. Yes, I have had delightful holidays walking in all those places, and, yes, peace, a sort of peace, entered my soul then. But the reality was there all the time. Was there ever a period here, has there ever been a time in the world, when all was truly peaceful? No. No, there has not. Wars have been fought in the beautiful places of Britain, plagues have killed their thousands here and everywhere, and surely you have read of the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which gave philosophers all over the civilised world so much to think about and was seen as such a challenge to Voltaire’s saying that this is the best of all possible worlds.’
You’re far beyond me now, Professor, Harriet thought.
But he had one more word for her yet.
‘Yes, my dear, there is always threat hanging above us, truly hanging above us. Remember all those pictures you have seen of the mushroom clouds of nuclear bomb tests.’
Harriet thought for a moment.
‘All right,’ she said then. ‘Of course I still have that image somewhere in my mind. But, do you know, it doesn’t make me feel threatened. I suppose it did when I first saw it, when we all first saw it. But it’s extraordinary how quickly it ceased to have the effect it should have done. My husband has a quotation that explains it, I think. TS Eliot, “human kind cannot bear very much reality”.’
A quite unexpected smile appeared then on Professor Wichmann’s face, lined-up china-white teeth flashing.
‘Yes, your husband is right. But there is something else also. Something we should not forget. There has always been, among all the threats, hope. The hope that things will be better one day. It has been, even, the everyday, every morning, hope that — you will laugh at me, I think — that the postman will bring a letter and in it there will be good news.’
And can this, Harriet found herself thinking, be the man behind the theft of the ultra-dangerous CA 534, rather than the easily-led, perhaps delighting in being under a threat, Christopher Alexander? Is this nice man holding a terrible threat over all the — yes, peaceful — countryside from Land’s End to John o’ Groats?
Chapter Six
Then despair struck. Harriet had left Professor Wichmann’s flat, with its faint scent of vegetables rising up from the greengrocer’s below, going over in her mind all that she had learnt there. The shadowy evidence for either the professor himself or his protege, Christopher Alexander, being behind the break-in at Heronsgate House. But hardly had she gone out of the shop’s cramped backyard when, for some reason or none, the thought of Malcolm came thunderbolting into her head, Malcolm lying there in St Mary’s suffering from appalling injuries. Of Malcolm, perhaps just beginning to realise that his twin, whose life had intertwined with his own for all the twenty years of their existence, was dead.
The thick misery that had invaded every part of her when, with that out-of-the-blue phone call, she had learnt what had happened to the twins, came swirling and eddying back. There, in the cobbled alleyway behind the neat houses of Bulstrode Road, she stood unable to advance by so much as another step.
Graham. Graham — dead. Blown to pieces in some deliberate act. And Malcolm, yes, alive and able to speak now, but terribly, horribly injured. My two sons, who had so pleased me, so much endorsed my life by choosing to go into the profession I myself chose long ago. And both out of it now. Graham dead and Malcolm unlikely ever to be able to work as a police officer again.
At length, Hologram Harriet, seemingly there once more, took over.
God, yes, what time is it? We were going to try to see Malcolm tonight.
The Hologram, glancing at her watch, was unable to read it until the tears which had been ready to pour down dried at her eyelids.
Five minutes to five. And I’ve gone all through this day scarcely having eaten anything, except that foul pub sandwich, which I hardly touched.
Right then, home. Go to the car, get in it and drive home, where I shall cook myself whatever I find in the fridge and eat it, nice or nasty.
*
And at home she at once heard John, equally having
quit his desk early, greet her.
‘Jesus, darling, you look all-in.’
She managed a sort of smile.
‘Well, I am pretty much bushed. I’ve had a busy day. Mr Brown allocated me a task. It involved interview after interview, so much so that I forgot to get myself any lunch.’
‘Well, well. Was this some sort of punishment for what you failed to say in your TV appearance?’
‘Oh, no. Far from it. Mr Brown actually congratulated me on what I came out with, though he swore I was to tell no one. No trouble there.’
‘But then, as you hinted, you were given some work? I’m surprised, I must say.’
‘So was I, to begin with. But Mr Brown pointed out to me that, the security situation being what it is, the whole of Greater Birchester Police, more or less, is on anti-terrorist duties. And then he told me that there had been a break-in at that place, Heronsgate House, and that — Of course, I’m not meant to be telling you any of this but, of course, I am. A specimen, the only remaining one, of that hyperactive herbicide they accidentally brought into existence has been stolen. A gang, if that’s what they should be called, broke in there last night and apparently went straight up to the Director’s office, where he had chosen to hide the one specimen he had kept, despite an instruction to destroy all the runaway stuff. Mr Brown suggested it would be good for me, although I was entitled to a period of leave, to work. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since, working. Working flat-out. And all in a sort of vacuum.’
‘Well, for God’s sake, sit down. Sit down, and I’ll fetch you a) a drink, and b) some hot soup or something.’
Harriet did as she was told. She felt, in any case, that she could hardly have stood on her feet a moment longer.
And John, she thought after minutes of blankness since he had left the room, John, on my mobile at that pub, The Leather Bottle, told me Malcolm was able to talk. We must find out if we can see him.