Orders from Berlin

by Unknown

  ‘I hear what you say,’ Thorn said, forcing out the words as he stood up to leave. ‘But can we keep this in confidence between us? It wouldn’t help anyone for it to get out.’

  ‘Don’t tell Seaforth, you mean? Very well,’ said C, inclining his head. ‘But let this be the end of it.’

  Thorn nodded his acquiescence as he backed away towards the door, leaving C standing in front of the fire beneath the portrait of his ancestor, looking as if he owned the place – which, of course, he did.

  Back past the twins; back through the green baize door; back into the world of peeling paint and grey lino floors and inadequate heat and light behind fraying blackout curtains. Back distracted down the creaking stairs and almost straight into the arms of his arch-enemy. Thorn stood still with shock for a moment, adjusting to the experience of having the man who was so vivid in his mind appearing suddenly in front of him in the flesh. He hated these apparently chance encounters with Seaforth in the corridors of HQ in inverse proportion to how much Seaforth seemed to enjoy them, standing aside with sarcastic ceremony and waiting for Thorn to go past while he observed his superior’s impotent rage with silent amusement.

  But today Seaforth seemed unable to resist going further. ‘How was C?’ he asked with a mean smile. ‘Gave you a pleasant reception, I hope?’

  ‘None of your damned business,’ snapped Thorn. How the hell did Seaforth know where he’d been, he wanted to know. Except that he wasn’t going to give his enemy the satisfaction of asking. He understood exactly what Seaforth was trying to do: the bastard knew he had nothing to fear from C, so he was using Thorn’s impotence as an instrument to needle him with.

  Thorn swallowed his anger and turned away, but Seaforth hadn’t finished with him yet.

  ‘Ava sends her regards,’ he called after Thorn in a mock-friendly voice.

  It was too much. Thorn’s self-control snapped and he clenched his fists, mad with rage. He wanted to pummel Seaforth, to pound him into bloody submission. It was his worst nightmare – the thought of Ava giving in to this charlatan’s advances. He’d thought of little else since he’d found them together on the day of Bertram’s arrest. ‘It isn’t what you think,’ she’d said. And he still didn’t know whether to believe her or not. But even if she was telling the truth, he sensed that she wouldn’t hold out for long. Seaforth clearly had a hold over her, and with Bertram out of the way, there was nothing to stop him from making her his next conquest.

  Thorn found it hard to acknowledge, but losing Ava was probably the greatest regret of his long, melancholy life, although it was hard to say he had lost what he had never really tried to win. The intensity of his feelings for Ava had rendered him tongue-tied, utterly unable to tell her how he felt.

  It didn’t help, of course, that he was older than her and that he was certain that any declaration would earn him the lasting contempt of Ava’s father as well as rejection by the daughter. But her sudden, unexpected marriage to the awful Bertram changed everything. It convinced Thorn that he might have succeeded at the same time that it made the woman he loved forever unobtainable.

  To him, but not to Seaforth. It turned out that a handsome face and an easy way with words were all that was apparently required to win the heart of the woman he had set up on an unreachable pedestal. And now Seaforth wanted to rub his face in it. Thorn was consumed with hatred. He turned to face his adversary, determined to have a final reckoning. It didn’t matter that he was no match for Seaforth; he needed an outlet for his rage. But then at the very last moment, just as he swung his arm back to strike, he caught the look of malicious triumph in Seaforth’s eyes and realized that he was playing into his hands. An assault would give C just the excuse he needed to suspend Thorn and replace him with Seaforth. At a stroke, everything would be lost.

  Thorn dropped his hands to his sides and smiled. It was the opposite of what Seaforth expected, and for a moment his mask slipped and Thorn could see the hatred burning in his enemy’s pale blue eyes. But only for a moment. Seaforth recovered his self-possession almost instantly and inclined his head, as if acknowledging a good move in a game of chess, and then went on up the stairs, disappearing from view at the top without once looking back.

  Thorn enjoyed his brief moment of elation, but it had passed by the time he returned to his office on the floor below, replaced by a renewal of the angry frustration he’d felt after the interview with C. Encounters on the stairs meant nothing. Seaforth held all the cards. Thorn might hate his enemy, but he had no idea what Seaforth was planning or thinking. Wearily, he lit a cigarette and reached across his desk for the file he’d been studying before he went up to see C.

  Personnel file for Charles James Seaforth. Opened – September 1933. Last updated – January 1940. Date of birth – 18th November 1900. Place of birth – Carlisle Hospital. Thorn knew the entries by heart.

  Seaforth had gone as a scholar from his local grammar school to London University, with two years in the Army in between, missing the horrors of the trenches by a few months at most. Thorn thought that maybe the fact that Seaforth had never fought the Germans explained how he could bring himself to spy for them.

  He’d graduated with a first-class degree in modern languages, French and German, following it up with a stint at Heidelberg University teaching English before he came back to London and placed second in his year in the annual Civil Service exams. Which was pretty damned impressive, Thorn had to admit. No doubt as a reward, he was given a plum posting with the Foreign Office, serving as an under-secretary at the embassy in Berlin, where his in-depth reports on the political upheavals in the Weimar Republic in the early thirties earned him positive notice in Whitehall. And then a few months after the Nazis came to power in 1933, Seaforth was recommended for transfer to the Secret Service and began recruiting his network of German spies, which included the staff officer whose recent blow-by-blow reports of Hitler’s military conferences had fuelled Seaforth’s meteoric rise through the ranks of MI6.

  Each step along Seaforth’s path of advancement was accompanied by glowing letters of reference. One by one, Thorn turned them over with disgust, thinking what he would like to write if his opinion were asked. It was an exceptional career, containing nothing that anyone checking back could take exception to. And it was just the same with Seaforth’s background – father deceased, killed at Passchendaele in 1917; one sibling also deceased; mother remarried and living in the same small northern town where her son had grown up. No political affiliations, and interests listed as hill walking and stamp collecting. Unmarried – he was a confirmed bachelor just like Thorn, living alone in an apartment in Cadogan Square. This last was the only surprising entry in the file. It wasn’t apparent whether Seaforth owned or rented his flat, but either way it seemed much too expensive an address for someone at his salary level, unless he was receiving money from elsewhere, of course. But Thorn knew that living in an upmarket flat wasn’t enough to warrant an investigation. There was nothing in the file that gave him any kind of opening.

  Thorn was under no illusions. He knew that he had neither the backing nor the evidence to defeat Seaforth with a full-frontal attack. His appeal to C had been something he’d had to try on the principle of leaving no stone unturned, but C’s rebuff had come as no surprise. Thorn knew that henceforward he was on his own, and would have to keep his own counsel, because any premature move against Seaforth ran the risk that the traitor would act straight away. Whatever that action might be. Ten days on and Thorn was no nearer to finding out.

  ‘Provide detailed written report. What are the chances of success? C.’ Time had to be running out. The written report would have been sent a long time ago. Orders would be on the way from Berlin if they had not already arrived. From C – this unknown other C whom Thorn couldn’t identify, although not for want of trying. When he’d first read the radio message, the letter name had echoed faintly in his mind, but the more he’d pursued it through his memory, the more elusive the echo had become, until n
ow he wasn’t even sure that he hadn’t imagined a connection to something he’d once heard. All he was left with was his recollection of the imperative need he’d felt, on the day he first saw the message, to take it to Albert and seek his opinion. Perhaps Albert had said something once that had stuck in Thorn’s mind, or perhaps it had just been his awareness that Albert knew more about the gangsters that ran Nazi Germany than anyone else. Whatever the case, Thorn had rushed over to Battersea and left the note with the downstairs neighbour, setting in train the series of events that led inexorably to his old friend’s death a few hours later.

  Every day Thorn was tormented with guilt for what he’d done, thinking of all the ways that the day could have turned out differently – if he’d waited for Albert to return; if he hadn’t left the note; if he’d left work a little later. All the wrong turnings, yet he’d been right about one thing. Albert had known who C was. That’s why he’d rushed over to HQ as soon as he got the note. Thorn knew he’d been right to go to Albert, even if he’d been wrong about everything else before and since.

  He missed his friend. Angry, acerbic, curmudgeonly – never easy to be with. Yet they had been united by a deep, unspoken patriotism that never had to be acknowledged. And now he was gone. Thorn looked across the corridor to where Albert’s office had once been. It was bigger than Thorn’s room, and with C installing himself in the next-door building, he’d had the opportunity to move offices when Albert left, but he hadn’t wanted to. There were too many memories he needed to put behind him, of late-night conversations and fruitless searches through the yellowing pages of old files, looking for maggots in the woodwork, while the indifferent moon watched them through the as yet unblacked-out windows.

  So Hargreaves had taken over the office instead, and Albert had become forgotten, swept away into oblivion by the new regime. Once the war started, Thorn had hardly seen his old friend. There was no time and Battersea was out of the way, and he hadn’t wanted to meet Ava and think of what might have been.

  Thorn was eaten up with regrets. He felt like a rudderless boat drifting on the open water, cut from its moorings. His childhood home had been taken over by the Ministry of Agriculture, requisitioned for the war effort. His crippled, titled brother spent his life soaking in brandy and soda and self-loathing at his London club. The agents Thorn had recruited on the continent were either dead or in labour camps. And the woman he loved had no interest in him.

  It was his determination to get the better of Seaforth that kept Thorn going. That and a stubborn, instinctive refusal to give in to his own self-pity. Sometimes he doubted himself. He knew he wanted Seaforth to be the traitor. Because of Ava; because Seaforth’s star was rising just as his was falling; because they would have hated each other even if there had been no reason for their antipathy. But always his certainty returned. Seaforth had killed Albert. He was sure of it; utterly sure.

  CHAPTER 2

  Quaid looked up from writing his report for the prosecuting lawyer on ‘the case of the falling professor’, as he’d decided to call it for filing purposes, and noticed the worried look on his assistant’s face.

  ‘What’s eating you?’ he asked.

  ‘The loose ends in the Morrison case. I understand Bertram’s guilty, but I can’t get them out of my mind,’ Trave replied. In normal circumstances, he would have given an evasive answer to his boss’s question, but the inspector had been in an extremely good mood ever since Bertram had signed his confession, and Trave felt he could risk a direct response.

  ‘What loose ends?’ Quaid asked.

  ‘The old man rushing over to St James’s Park in the taxi; the weird note we found in his pocket; his friend lying about the other note that he left with the neighbour downstairs; and all of that having nothing to do with the murder, like it was some unrelated sideshow.’ Trave spoke quickly but took care not to mention Seaforth. There was no need for Quaid to know that he had disobeyed a second direct order to stay away from the office building in Broadway if his elusive quarry had decided not to renew his complaint, although Seaforth’s unexpected silence was in fact one of the ‘loose ends’ that bothered Trave most about the case.

  ‘Sometimes cases are like that,’ Quaid said tolerantly. ‘People’s lives are complicated, particularly nowadays. They don’t fit together like jigsaw puzzles. You have to look at the bigger picture – you’ll learn that with time,’ he added with easy-going condescension.

  ‘But it just seems like we should have asked more questions. Just to be certain, you know,’ Trave said lamely.

  ‘We didn’t because we didn’t need to,’ said Quaid, beginning to sound irritated. ‘Some people in government can be very sensitive about us coppers stamping about in our hobnail boots, poking our noses in where we’re not wanted, shouting their secrets from the rooftops. And frankly I can understand that. The point is we’ve got the right man. Bertram Brive has confessed to the crime and he’s guilty as charged. And that’s an end to it. You hear me?’ he asked harshly.

  ‘I hear you,’ said Trave. He knew he needed to put the Morrison case behind him. He had other work to do, and it was up to the court now to decide whether Bertram was guilty. And so for most of the rest of the day, he tried his best to put all thoughts of the case out of his mind, but his efforts were in vain. Eventually he gave up and tried a different tack, listing on a piece of paper all the reasons Bertram had to be guilty: the blackmail that gave him the motive; the will that gave him the opportunity; the cuff link that proved his presence at the scene of the crime; and last but not least, the confession that sealed his guilt. But still Trave’s doubts persisted. Bertram might well have confessed because of Quaid’s clever promise to make the blackmailer go away, and the cuff link could have been planted just as Bertram had claimed. And nothing explained the sideshow of unexplained evidence whose significance Quaid was so determined not to acknowledge.

  Trave couldn’t sit still. His mind kept wandering and he couldn’t concentrate on the mound of paperwork that Quaid had handed him when he left for a meeting midway through the afternoon. He stuck it out valiantly until the stroke of six and then bolted for home. But halfway to the underground he changed his mind and went back. The keys to Gloucester Mansions and Albert Morrison’s flat were still there among the case exhibits, and Trave pocketed them. He’d make one last visit to the scene of the crime, not because he expected to find anything, but to try to set his mind at rest, and afterwards he’d move on. He had no choice in the matter.

  He got out of the Underground at Sloane Square and began walking down Lower Sloane Street towards the river. He stopped for a moment on Chelsea Bridge, looking down at a coal barge passing underneath the parapet and then re-emerging a moment later out into the evening, chugging on downstream towards Vauxhall while the grey water lapped hungrily in its wake against the thick granite piers of the bridge. A horn blew somewhere in the distance, adding to the melancholy of the setting.

  It occurred to Trave that he was probably following the route of Albert’s last journey. Had the old man been followed? Was that what had happened? Trave looked back over his shoulder, half-expecting to see a figure standing behind him in the shadows, but there was no one in sight.

  It was colder now than when he had set out. A sharp breeze was blowing in off the river and Trave pushed his hands deep inside his pockets, turning his head away from the whirl of autumn leaves blowing down from the trees. He quickened his pace, anxious to get to his destination.

  It was still light, but the moon had risen in the cloudless sky, hanging balefully over the towers of the power station on his left, gazing across at the absurd spectacle of two enormous barrage balloons tossing in the wind above Battersea Park like a pair of drunken elephants. Trave remembered them from the night of the murder.

  At a turn in the road, he passed the site of a bombed-out house where brambles and weeds were already pushing up through cracks in the broken masonry. Pathetically, someone had planted a tiny Union Jack flag among the ruins. It
fluttered forlornly from side to side like an obscene joke, while up above, the whistling wind blew through the remains of the windows. But there was otherwise no sound. London seemed like a city of the dead; the nameless, uncounted dead. Trave thought of the rows of waxed cardboard coffins stacked up in requisitioned swimming pools and public baths all over the capital, and he remembered the mortuary he’d gone to on police business the week before – the corpses had been identified by luggage tags tied to their feet, but a bomb had taken the roof off the building and a night of rain had washed away the writing on the labels.

  Suddenly he was there. The building’s name, Gloucester Mansions, was emblazoned in jet-black curlicue letters above the door, standing out against the bright white-painted portico, while up above, the tall red-brick mansion block loomed against the skyline with myriad symmetrical square windows looking out over the park opposite. Trave hesitated at the top of the entrance steps, fidgeting to fit the key in the lock. This was Albert’s key; this was where the old man would have stood at just this time of the evening, thinking he was safe when in fact he was standing on the brink of extinction. Inside, the big hallway was deserted – full of shadows, with the only light coming in through the oval window above the door. There was nothing to suggest that this was where a man had met a horrible death less than two weeks before.

  Trave had got halfway up the stairs when the silence was shattered by the horrible stomach-churning wail of the air-raid siren going off outside. But he carried on climbing. Now that he’d come this far, he was determined to see the inside of Albert’s flat one last time.

  He paused on the second-floor landing in front of Albert’s door. There was the sound of people moving around down below. The front door of the building was open and a light had gone on in the hall. It helped him see to fit the key in the lock, and he went inside. But immediately he stopped in his tracks, flattening himself against the wall of the narrow corridor that ran the length of the flat down to the fire escape door at the far end. Someone was inside the living room. Even above the noise of the siren, he was sure he’d heard the sound of sharp movement and a door closing just as he came in, and he could see a line of artificial light glowing in the gap between the base of the closed door and the floor. Instinctively he reached inside his jacket, looking for his gun, but then realized that he wasn’t carrying it. He was off duty – he had no business in the flat, and if he got hurt, that was going to be his own bad luck.