She smeared up the last of the sauce with the last of the chips, hitched up her bag and he followed her back to the car.
He drove.
‘He was in East Berlin — I went over once a month with cameras, equipment, whatever the agent needed for what he was tasked at. I brought back the films, the reports, in my knickers, in my bra. The risks were worse each time because Sunray pushed him harder each time. Each job was jammier than the last, and that was the way Sunray kept getting his head patted. They’d set me up with a cover as a student and got me permission to use the Library at the university over there, the Humboldt. . . Seemed to go like clockwork . . . I just did the easy bit. I went over and dumped the stuff and picked up the stuff and came back through the checkpoint. He was the one that took the risks, and he just used to laugh about it, more worried about me than himself. He was super, he was really brilliant. .
Mantle drove steadily. There were times when she stopped, when she stared ahead and held her arms tight around her chest, and when she stopped he did not prompt her. It had been a bit of his history, a long time back, seeing the grey concrete of the prefabricated Wall, and the watch-towers and the dogs and the guards who carried the automatic rifles. He had been to West Berlin but never across to the old East. He had stood on the viewing platforms and looked over the Wall and across the death strip. Talking quietly, she summoned up for him that part of his history.
‘Hans Becker . . . twenty-one years old, I was a year older. He didn’t do it for money, or out of politics. He did it because it was a buzz, and he used to laugh about it. . . Christ, and he used to make me laugh. He was just wonderful to be with. . . We would be over there in that dump country, full of bloody police and bloody Soviets — I’m not good with words — and we used to laugh. He knew what would happen to him if he was caught, and each time Sunray stacked the odds a bit higher against him and he never backed off. I used to see the sort of guys that the other girls in Brigade went with, fat guts and ignorant and boozy, and I thought I was so bloody lucky to be with Hansie. . . I loved him.’
They were off the motorway. He had caught the first sign for Slough. She had not had to tell him that she had loved Hansie Becker. When she had used the word, she had looked into his face and grinned, as if she reckoned he was too old to know about love. Love was the part of Josh’s history that hurt the worst.
‘It was a rubbish little thing they sent him on the last time . . You know what? Twenty months later, when the Wall had come down, they’d have had it for bloody free. But, they didn’t know, did they? Didn’t know the Wall was coming down. . . All those brains at work, all the clever little bastards, didn’t know. There was a Soviet missile base at Wustrow, west of Rostock. Hansie had always been given jobs before that were close to Berlin, where he knew. He hadn’t been to Rostock, didn’t even know where this place was. It was the first time he was anxious and he tried to hide it, but I could see that it worried him. The MiG-29s used to fly from Ribnitz-Damgarten at night for exercises with the missile, radar, crews at Wustrow. Sunray said that if Hansie could get close into the base he could monitor the telemetry of their radar systems. I took him the gear to do it with. It was rubbish and Hansie was caught for nothing. He was killed for nothing...’
She waved and he took a left. He saw the Asian shops and businesses that lined the streets and the small homes of old brick. He remembered the photographs he had pored over, with the magnifying glass, of Soviet bases, missiles, aircraft, radar dishes. Because of his history, because he understood, he could imagine the pressure exercised on the agent, the youngster, driving him towards hazard.
‘The Wustrow base was almost an island — a sort of causeway linked it with the mainland. North was the Baltic, south was a big bit of sea separating it from the land. For the equipment to register the detail he had to be on the peninsula where the base was. I don’t know, I suppose a sentry saw him. There was all hell, flares, shooting. He’d got this dinghy, sort of thing kids use on our beaches, but he was cut off from it. He must have crossed the peninsula, right through the base. He tried to swim for it, to the mainland. He was shot in the water, wounded. He was brought to this village on the mainland, Rerik, where they killed him.’
He wondered if she had told anyone before. They turned again, and she pointed up the street.
‘The man who killed my Hansie was the counter-espionage officer from the Stasi in Rostock, Dieter Krause.’
He stopped the car. A panel of plyboard was nailed to the front door.
‘Two days ago they brought Dieter Krause to Templer, paraded him. Our lot were on their bloody knees to him, treated him like he was a friend. He was all swank and arrogant and laughing until I thumped him. I kicked him in the balls for Hansie.’
Josh said, ‘You should let it go, let time bury it.’
The scorn played across her face. ‘It was murder. Murder is murder. Or do you compromise?’
Josh dropped his head. ‘I try to be sensible. You were there, weren’t you? Of course you were there. Your boy was stressed up and you’d gone along for the ride to hold his hand. Not authorized, was it? Certainly a disciplinary offence, maybe court-martial, but you were there.’
She had reached into the back of his car and lifted the bag onto her lap.
‘Did you see actually see the killing?’
‘No.’
‘You saw a part of it, not the end of it?’
‘Yes.’
Josh said, ‘You didn’t see the killing. What you know is second hand, conjecture. Christ, I admire your guts. Without eyewitnesses, affidavits, evidence you can’t touch him. Forget it.’
She spat, ‘You’re pitiful.’
‘Understand power? Power runs like a big river. Go into that river and you drown. My best advice, let the dead sleep. If he was brought to Templer then he’s an asset. If he’s an asset then he’s protected. God, don’t you understand?’
The scorn on her face was like a blow. She was out of the car.
She unlocked the front door. He heard her call for her mother. He was drawn after her.
He stood in the doorway. She hugged her mother and the cat was against her legs. She had humiliated him. Compromise was another part of Josh Mantle’s history.
She went up the stairs and he saw where the carpet had been prised up and tacked back badly onto the steps. Adie Barnes shook his hand, grasping it in her small calloused fist. She let go to take a purse from her handbag.
‘There’s no charge,’ Josh said. ‘Let’s say I enjoyed a ride out in the country. She’s a lovely girl, Mrs Barnes.’
Adie Barnes busied herself in the kitchen.
He stood, awkward, and feeling like an intruder in the small front room. He thought she must have skipped work that day and laboured to remake her home. Someone must have been in to help her refit the units and shelves to the walls. The room was a shrine in photographs of her daughter.
‘It’s everything to her. They’ll take her back? It’ll be all right?’
He took the cup and saucer, and the plate with the cake. He wanted to be gentle. ‘She’ll need your patience and a long rest. Most of all she’s going to need love.’
He drank the tea and ate the cake. He heard the footsteps fast on the stairs, the opening and closing of the door and the clatter of the little front gate. The photographs were of Tracy Barnes as a recruit, sitting with the team at Brigade in Berlin, at Templer, in uniform, smiling, and crouched with a black dog. Josh hadn’t the courage for honesty.
He let himself out.
He drove away. He felt no achievement, no pleasure.
It was only a few minutes’ drive from the street to the car park close to the offices of Greatorex, Wilkins & Protheroe.
She was in a telephone box. There was a car down the road, two men in the car, one smoking and one talking into a mobile telephone. He saw the lustre of her hair, caught by a street lamp. He didn’t stop and shout at her, ‘Go home, stay there, he’s an asset and protected. Go home or you can b
e hurt. Forget it ever happened.’ He was used to marching into people’s lives and then walking away from them.
A bad taste of failure in his mouth, Julius Goldstein telephoned Raub. The file of Hauptman Dieter Krause showed no evidence of criminal activity in human rights. He reported, also, that pages of the file concerned with Hauptman Krause’s relationship with the Soviet officer, Major Pyotr Rykov, were not present, and a part of the separate file dealing with the military base at Wustrow. He told Raub that it was not possible from the files to find evidence of murder. He was authorized to return to Cologne on the late flight.
The most senior of the researchers escorted him from the basements. ‘You should not take it personally. If you wanted to know which teacher in a school in Saxony-Anhalt informed on his colleagues, then I could find you the answer. Which environment activist was beaten up because his wife betrayed him, which student reported on his colleagues, which poet infiltrated an arts group. I can tell you, names and dates and contact officers. Here, there is only the chaff of human misery, and that does not reach to the level of murder. They were busy in those last days, sanitizing the files, sterilizing the past. That is why, today, they swagger on the streets, certain of their safety. From what you looked for, from what is missing, I can tell you that the link between Hauptman Krause and Major Pyotr Rykov was sensitive in this matter of murder. If there was not guilt then the files would not have been cleansed. Is it important to you, this question of guilt?’
He stepped into the chilly floodlit yard. Julius Goldstein said, ‘The possibility of guilt is important because it can obstruct an advantage that we seek. My thanks to you, goodnight. The advantage is in the man, Rykov.’
‘Is that him?’
‘That’s our boy.’
The Briton and the American stood against the wall, a little apart from the guests in the salon where the Americans always entertained.
‘In the shadow of his man.’
‘I get the impression that the big shot doesn’t go to the toilet without the say-so of Rykov.’ The eyes of the Briton watered from the foul-smelling cigarettes around them. His diplomatic accreditation was for a second secretary (consular).
‘Use the soft tissue, imported, or the local ass scratcher — need a man with a sharp clear mind for the big decisions.’ The American, on the list submitted to the foreign ministry, was a cultural attaché.
From where they stood, with soft drinks, they could see the line of guests filtering into the salon, past the handshakes of the ambassador and the deputy chief of mission. The minister, whose chest flashed ribbons, was in conversation with the deputy chief. The ambassador welcomed the short stocky Russian with the colonel’s insignia on his shoulders and the chest free of decoration colours. A heavy-built woman stepped forward hesitantly to meet the ambassador.
‘And brought his lovely wife with him.’
‘Our Irma — not what you’d call an ocean racer.’
‘More of a bulk carrier, Brad.’
‘Heh, look at that, David. Enjoy that.’
The minister had moved on to the centre of the salon, couldn’t have seen where he was headed. The Colonel had left his wife and was powering to him. The minister had blundered, stormy night and no navigation, into what Brad called the ‘recons’. They’d had eight different names in seven years, so Brad always won a laugh out of David with his name for the reconstructed KGB people. Eyes sparking, a stand-off, mutual hostility — military facing up to the ‘recons’. The Colonel had seen the opportunity of confrontation and come fast to his man.
‘You think they might actually fight, bare fist?’
‘I’m out of Montana, they used to have a betting game there. Put colours, for identification, on the back of a couple of rats which hadn’t been fed in several days, drop the rats in a sack and knot the top, tight. Bet on the winner.’
‘The loser’s dead?’
‘One rat lives. Where’d you put your money?’
Without finesse, Rykov had taken the arm of his minister and propelled him round like it was a parade-ground.
‘My paint’s going on Rykov’s back.’
‘Be a hard fight in the sack, he has to be clever and lucky. You rate him lucky enough — clever enough?’
‘I’m told he is. He wears a good face, a strong face.’
‘But you can’t see into the face. The way of this damn place, you never see behind the face of the man who matters...’
In the crowded room, the Briton and the American had eyes only for Colonel Pyotr Rykov. For the last four months, each, in his own way, through his own unshared channels, had sought to explain the man, unmask the character and analyse the influence. Both had failed. They were two veterans, middle-aged, heavy with experience; both had exploited the resources available to them to satisfy the hunger at Langley and Vauxhall Bridge Cross for hard information on the mind of Colonel Pyotr Rykov; both acknowledged that failure.
‘This guy the Germans are hawking...’
Droll. ‘Don’t, Brad, intrude on private grief.’
Chuckling. ‘Heh, is it right that a feisty little cat scratched his face? That’s pretty un-British manners.’
‘When’s he going across to your lot?’
‘A couple of weeks. The guest list’s the best and the brightest. They’re screaming for a profile on Rykov. He has undivided attention.’
They watched the Colonel. He was always a pace behind his minister, and they saw his lips move as if murmuring guidance. He was there for thirty-five minutes, the barest decency, before he was gone, slipping away with his minister and his wife, back into the frozen darkness of Moscow’s night.
Chapter Four
It had been a late rail connection to the last ferry boat of the evening.
A squall had whipped off the harbour waters. The wind, even behind the high sea walls of packed rocks, had the strength to shake the pleasure boats, the tugs and the few fishing boats on their moorings, and to roll the ferry before the hawser ropes had been cast off.
Under scudding cloud, it ploughed through the waves, made a direct course across the Channel and towards the coast of Europe. It was the territory of the long-haul lorry drivers and the few passengers prepared to sacrifice comfort and time in the interest of economy.
She stood alone at the forward rail of the ferry boat, as far forward as passengers were permitted to be.
She did not seek the company of the lorry drivers in their lounge or other passengers, who clustered round the gaming table, the fruit machines and the cafeteria’s counter. She was unnoticed and unwatched. The night ferry was, for her, the most suitable way to travel from Britain to the Continent, the passport check would be the briefest. The spray, as the prow of the ferry ducked into the waves, spattered her hair and her face, her shoulders and her body. The tang smell of it was on her. She shouted her anthem to the night wind. It was a song of parting, waiting and death.
And she did not think of them, the men who had intruded into that aloneness and privacy in the last hours, days and weeks. If she had . . . Major Perry Johnson sat solitary in a corner of the mess, isolated, near to that place on the carpet where the drink stain had dried out. He was the man whose corporal had soured an excellent occasion. He was shunned. He was not called to the bar by Captain Dawson, or by Major Donoghue, and in the morning he would try again to attempt the impossible and discover the pattern of Tracy Barnes’s filing system. That afternoon, aggressive spite, he had told Ben Christie to keep the bloody dog out of G/9, and Christie had called him a ‘vindictive old bastard’ and applied for a transfer, immediate. He nursed his drink, he reflected that his world had fallen. . . but she had not thought of him.
The salt of the sea spray was on her lips and in her mouth .
Albert Perkins fought his tiredness. He sat at a plain table in the archive of Defence Intelligence. The material, too old to have been transferred to computer disk, was paper, bulging from a cardboard box, old sheets of typed and handwritten notes that were the bo
nes, not the flesh, of an incident in the past that had a resonance of the present and might affect the future. He was brought coffee, a fresh mug every fifteen minutes. Without it, he would have slumped over the table.
The wind and the spray slicked the hair on her scalp. She did not feel the cold, did not shiver. . . Josh Mantle was by himself in the open area on the first floor. There had been a sharp note waiting for him from the partner, Mr Wilkins. Where had he been? Who was his client? Why had he not cleared his absence with Mr Greatorex? He worked on the cases that Mr Protheroe would be handling before the magistrates the next morning. He had returned to the grind of his daily life. He would be late away from his desk — it would be the small hours before he returned to his high flat near to the London road.
She did not try to wipe the water from her face or to keep the gale wind from her hair. The lights were ahead of her, winking and rolling with the motion of the ferry.
She came off the boat. She bought, from the one shop open in the middle of the night at the harbour terminal, a big gift box of Belgian chocolates and asked for them to be wrapped in fancy paper. She had her rucksack on her back and carried her gift to the waiting train. She huddled in the corner of an empty carriage and before the train pulled out she was asleep, at peace.
‘Another hundred and ten pounds in the kitty, but earned with blood and sweat, eh, Josh?’
‘I was surprised, Mr Protheroe, that he was given bail.’
‘Sick mother. I expect I laid it on rather heavily, as if the ambulance siren had already started up and she was on her way to intensive care. I tell you, Josh, if my Miriam ever makes the bench then a yob like that will need more than a sick mother to keep him out of the cells. Well, I look upon that revolting little creature as an investment for the future, lorryloads of legal aid at fifty-five pounds an hour where that one’s going.’
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