Orders from Berlin

by Unknown

  ‘You say he found out after the war?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So that must mean your first husband didn’t know that Alistair was executed.’

  ‘No, he didn’t. Jack had an exemption because he was a skilled farmworker, but then when the news came that Alistair had died, killed in action, he was so angry that he volunteered. I tried to talk him out of it, but he wouldn’t listen to me. He wanted blood, German blood, on the end of his bayonet. You know what I mean – an eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth. But he didn’t get his wish, silly fool. He got trench fever instead within a few days of getting out there, lingered for a week or two in a base hospital, and then died on the boat home. Trench fever’s caused by lice, apparently. Did you know that, Mr Trave? Lice!’ She spat out the word as if it perfectly summarized the waste, the awful pointlessness, of her husband’s death.

  ‘Did Charles know that his father joined up to get revenge for Alistair?’ asked Trave, shaking his head with disbelief at what the woman across from him had had to go through. The lie about the execution that had led directly to her husband’s death seemed a diabolical act, unworthy of a civilized country.

  ‘Yes, of course he knew. Charlie was mad to go himself, except he was too young. The two boys were as close as twins when they were growing up, even though they were more than three years apart. And Charlie idolized Alistair – you can see that in the picture,’ she said, pointing over at the mantelpiece.

  ‘And so how did he feel afterwards, when he found out that Alistair was executed, that the Germans had nothing to do with it …?’

  ‘That we’d been lied to? That my husband had died for no reason?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Trave. ‘That too. What was Charles’s reaction?’

  ‘What do you think it was? He was angry – angrier than I’ve ever seen anyone before or since.’

  ‘With the War Office?’

  ‘With everyone. With the officers who’d presided at the court-martial; with Field Marshal Haig; with the poor soldiers who’d been on the firing squad, except that he couldn’t find out their names. Not that he didn’t try, but there’s a law against that kind of disclosure, apparently – a sensible one, if you ask me. And then he was angry with me too. Me more than anyone, I came to think later.’

  ‘You?’ asked Trave, surprised. ‘Why would he be upset with you?’

  ‘Because there came a time when I didn’t want to grieve any more,’ she said wearily. ‘I started to feel like I’d survived for a reason and it wasn’t just to be angry and unhappy for the rest of my life. I wanted a second chance, and John, my second husband, offered me that. He’s a good man and he was prepared to take Charlie on as well, but Charlie wouldn’t hear of it. He said I was betraying his father and Alistair by remarrying, that I was no better than a common prostitute selling myself to the highest bidder. Yes, he said that,’ said Mrs Seaforth, seeing the appalled look on Trave’s face. ‘And, looking back, I sometimes think that the only thing that would have satisfied him is if I’d committed suicide like one of those Hindu women, who throw themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres when they’re widowed and burn themselves to death. Maybe he might have loved me then,’ she said bitterly, ‘but, as it was, I became the great Satan. He got his scholarship to London University and turned his back on me. Oh, he came home a few times in the first couple of years, but it was just to abuse me. And eventually he stopped coming at all. Like I said, we haven’t spoken in fifteen years, which makes me sad, makes me cry at night sometimes, remembering him when he was a little boy holding my hand on the way to school. But I have to tell myself that he’s not that child any more, and hasn’t been for a long, long time. And really I think it’s for the best that we don’t see each other. Better for him and better for me.’

  She finished speaking and her head dropped, as if she were empty; as if she’d said all she could and had nothing left.

  And Trave knew that he had achieved the purpose of his journey. He’d found out that Charles Seaforth had more reason to hate his country than any man in Britain. It all made sense except for one thing, one piece of the jigsaw that didn’t fit.

  ‘Your husband’s John Seaforth?’ he asked. ‘You changed your name when you were married.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘And your marriage made Charles angry, so angry that he stopped seeing you.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said impatiently. ‘I already told you that.’

  ‘So why did Charles change his name to Seaforth too?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said, clearly taken aback. ‘He’d never do that.’

  ‘I can assure you he has. He’s Charles Seaforth to everyone down in London. But I agree it makes no sense, unless …’ Trave paused, and then suddenly he understood. ‘He did it to hide his connection with his past. And in a way that wouldn’t attract suspicion to anyone making background checks when he joined the Secret Service. If he has the same name as his mother, then who’s going to dig down deep enough to find out that your husband isn’t his real father? And, frankly, it wouldn’t matter even if they did, because changing his name to yours makes entire sense. That way you’re one big happy family.’

  ‘Except that we’re not.’

  ‘But no one’s to know that. And the connection between him and Alistair is buried along with his motivation for hating this country and the men he holds responsible for killing his brother. You said he couldn’t find out the names of the soldiers on the firing squad, but did he discover who was on the court-martial?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Seaforth, suddenly turning pale. ‘There were two staff officers. I don’t remember their names, but the third judge was the colonel of Alistair’s battalion – the Sixth Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. His name was Winston Churchill.’

  It was Trave’s turn to look incredulous. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

  ‘Believe me, I’m not making it up. He’s the hero of the hour now, isn’t he, but it wasn’t always like that. Twenty-five years ago he was in disgrace, seen as responsible for one of the biggest disasters of the last war – before the Somme, that is,’ she added wryly.

  ‘Gallipoli, you mean?’

  ‘Yes. So you know your history,’ she said with a faint smile. ‘The Gallipoli campaign was Churchill’s brainchild, and after it all ended in catastrophe, he wasn’t wanted around London any more, so he took himself off to the trenches for some soldiering, a bit of cheap redemption. Just for a few months until they wanted him back in government, but enough time to sentence my son to death for a crime he wasn’t responsible for. Oh, God, it doesn’t bear thinking of,’ she said, or rather cried out, as she finally lost her self-control and burst into tears.

  It was impossible to say what had taken her past her tipping point and released the torrent of emotion that had been building inside her ever since Trave began his questions. Perhaps it was anger that had been the catalyst, but if so, then how must her son feel? Trave wondered. The mother had worked hard to move on, overcoming her bitterness and anger with the support of a loving husband. But Charles had done the opposite, immuring himself in an isolated prison of rage and hatred towards the man who was now leading the country through its hour of greatest need.

  Whatever Seaforth’s plan entailed, Trave was sure it involved some sort of personal revenge on the Prime Minister. But what kind of revenge, he had no idea. Trave felt out of his depth. He needed to get back to London and talk to Thorn, assuming Thorn had recovered enough to talk. There was nothing else he was going to find out here, and even if he had more questions, Mrs Seaforth was in no state to answer them.

  ‘Can I get you something?’ he asked, getting to his feet.

  ‘No, I’ll be fine,’ she said, taking a spotless white handkerchief out of her pocket to dry her tears. ‘My husband will be home soon.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘sorry that I had to put you through all this. I had no choice.’

  ‘We rarely do,’
she said sadly, accompanying him into the hall. She opened the front door and shook his hand, then held on to it for a moment, looking him in the eye.

  ‘Make him stop, Mr Trave,’ she said. ‘There’s been enough blood spilt, enough lives ruined without any more death and destruction. Please. Make him stop.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ he said. ‘I promise you I’ll try.’ And he meant what he said, even if he had no idea as he walked back up the street towards his hotel how he was going to carry out his pledge.

  CHAPTER 10

  Trave left Langholm early the next morning. He’d have far preferred to leave the night before, but the last train had left Langholm long before he got back to his hotel and found the other guests gathered round a big EKCO radio cabinet in the lounge. They were getting ready to listen to Lord Haw-Haw’s nightly propaganda broadcast from Radio Hamburg. Trave had long ago come to hate the sound of Haw-Haw’s insistent nasal drawl announcing, ‘Germany calling, Germany calling,’ on the stroke of nine o’clock. But it seemed the rest of the population couldn’t get enough of the British renegade’s tales of the destruction that the invincible Luftwaffe was inflicting on southern England. And behind Haw-Haw’s hate-filled rant, Trave now sensed the waiting presence of Heydrich. The image of the Gestapo leader in the photographs that Thorn had shown him in Albert Morrison’s book was now never far from Trave’s thoughts, and he slept badly, tossing and turning as he tried to fight off nightmares in which the sound of SS jackboots echoed on the stairs, coming for him and Vanessa and their baby boy.

  The journey back to London seemed to take even longer than it had on the way up. Trave’s carriage was entirely occupied with exhausted soldiers catching up on sleep after their last nights of leave, so he had only his thoughts for company. Gazing out of the window, he recognized some of the towns and landscapes that he had passed going in the opposite direction the day before. They were the same, but he had changed. He had gone north still uncertain of whether Thorn was right about Seaforth’s guilt, but he had left his doubts behind in Langholm. His conversation with Seaforth’s mother had convinced him that Seaforth had to be the recipient of Heydrich’s enigmatic message. In one way this made no sense, given that she had been able to tell him only about events that were now twenty or more years old; but Trave had been unable to resist the conclusion that an experience as bitter as Seaforth’s had to have made him not a servant, but an enemy of his country.

  Trave felt sure that Seaforth was guilty, but that didn’t mean he had the evidence to have him arrested. Far from it. All he had was a series of coincidences, and he knew without a doubt that an immediate transfer to the military police awaited him if he took his suspicions back to Quaid. No, it was Thorn he needed to see. From what the hospital had told him the day before, he felt confident that Thorn would have sufficiently recovered by now to be able to talk, and he hoped that the information he’d gleaned about Seaforth’s background, and in particular the connection to Churchill, would enable Thorn to fill in the blanks and work out what Seaforth was planning under the direction of the Gestapo leader with the pitiless eyes.

  Trave drummed his fingers on his knees, frustrated by the time he was losing as the train meandered through the London suburbs. But as it rolled slowly on through small stations decorated with flowers in baskets hanging incongruously above piled-up sandbags, and chugged leisurely past gasworks and smoking factories and streets upon streets of terrace houses, he started to sense the teeming vastness of the capital – too huge to be destroyed by terror bombing, however ferocious its scale. He got out at Euston station at just after twelve o’clock with a renewed feeling of hope, went straight to a police box, and telephoned St Stephen’s Hospital.

  It was obviously a bad time of day to call. Nobody Trave spoke to seemed to know where Alec Thorn was or what was happening to him. Eventually he gave up, banging the receiver against the wall several times to vent his irritation as he realized that his only option was to go to the hospital and find Thorn for himself. But when he finally got to Fulham Road almost an hour later, he learnt that Thorn had insisted on discharging himself. It didn’t help to be told that they’d missed each other by no more than a few minutes.

  Trave cursed his bad luck, wondering where to go next. Perhaps Thorn had gone home, but if so, Trave couldn’t follow him there. There was no listing in the hospital’s telephone directory for an Alec Thorn, and a call to the operator provided Trave with no further information. Frustrated, Trave followed the last lead left to him and took the Underground to St James’s Park, hoping against hope that he might find Thorn at 59 Broadway.

  The caretaker, Jarvis, opened the door, wearing the same grey overall as on Trave’s last visit and looking even more unhelpful than he had then.

  ‘You remember me,’ said Trave. ‘Detective Trave – I was here before.’

  Jarvis gave no indication about whether he remembered Trave or not. He just stood in the doorway, waiting to hear what was coming next.

  ‘I’m looking for Alec Thorn,’ said Trave, dispensing with further preliminaries. ‘Is he here?’

  ‘No,’ said Jarvis, pronouncing his favourite one-syllable word with relish.

  ‘I was at the hospital,’ said Trave, refusing to be put off. ‘They said he’s been discharged and so I wondered if he’d come here or if you’d heard from him?’

  ‘No,’ Jarvis said with finality this time, and was about to close the door when a voice forestalled him, coming from behind Jarvis’s shoulder.

  ‘Wait, Mr Jarvis. Let’s not be quite so hasty, shall we?’

  Trave didn’t recognize the voice, but he immediately recognized its owner when he appeared behind Jarvis in the doorway. It was Seaforth, wearing an expensive tailor-made suit that made him look like some kind of Hollywood film star.

  ‘’E was ’ere before; ’e talked to Thorn. Said ’e was a policeman,’ said Jarvis, taking a step backwards and addressing his remarks to Seaforth as if Trave weren’t there. ‘Now ’e says Thorn’s been discharged. I told you ’e would be.’

  ‘So you did, Mr Jarvis. So you did,’ said Seaforth, clapping the caretaker lightly on his bony shoulder. ‘And I’m sure we’re very glad to hear that Alec is back in the land of the living,’ he added, which seemed to Trave to be an entirely truthful statement at least as far as Seaforth was concerned, although Jarvis seemed less enthusiastic. Seaforth in fact looked delighted at the news, which puzzled Trave, knowing as he did from Thorn that they were sworn enemies.

  Seaforth smiled at Trave over Jarvis’s shoulder as he spoke to the caretaker, as if inviting the visitor to join in a conspiracy of shared amusement about Jarvis’s rudeness and dropped aitches. Yet Trave had also picked up on a warmth, almost a deference, in the way the surly old janitor spoke to Seaforth that had been entirely lacking in his interaction with Thorn when Trave had last been at 59 Broadway.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Jarvis. I can take this from here,’ said Seaforth. The caretaker gave a last baleful look at Trave and retreated back into the interior of the building.

  ‘I’m Charles Seaforth. Maybe I can help you?’ said Seaforth as soon as he and Trave were on their own. He held out his hand to Trave in a friendly way, as if meeting him for the first time, even though Trave was sure this was a charade. He would have been willing to bet his meagre savings that Seaforth remembered the face of everyone he’d followed or had been followed by since he’d begun his career as a secret agent – whenever that may have been.

  ‘No, I’m afraid not. It’s Alec Thorn I need to see,’ said Trave, shaking Seaforth’s hand but avoiding his eyes. He remembered the contemptuous ease with which Seaforth had given him the slip in the Underground station on the day of Bertram’s arrest and sensed instinctively that Seaforth would get the better of him again if he was forced into a conversation.

  ‘May I ask what about?’ asked Seaforth, refusing to take no for an answer.

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t tell you that. It’s a police matter,’ said Trave, turning to go.
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  ‘Relating to the murder of our late lamented colleague Albert Morrison?’ asked Seaforth.

  ‘Yes,’ said Trave, caught off guard.

  ‘I thought so,’ said Seaforth, smiling. ‘So you must be Detective Trave?’

  Trave nodded. He had no choice.

  ‘You may wonder how I know who you are. It was your superior, Inspector …’ Seaforth made a show of trying to remember the name, even though Trave was sure that he knew it already, and then came up with it: ‘Quaid – that’s it – who told me about you when he telephoned us to discuss the case following your visit to Mr Thorn. If you don’t mind me asking, are you here on Inspector Quaid’s instructions?’

  ‘Like I said, it’s a police matter,’ said Trave. ‘I can’t really discuss it.’

  ‘So you won’t mind if I call Inspector Quaid and tell him about your visit here?’ asked Seaforth with a smile.

  ‘You do whatever you have to do,’ Trave said defiantly, and then regretted his words. Seaforth was toying with him, testing his reactions, and he had reacted like an angry bull at the first provocation. Still, it was hardly surprising that his nerves were frayed, Trave reflected. Seaforth held all the cards. All he had to do was pick up the telephone and call Quaid and Trave would find himself on the next train north, and this time without a return ticket.

  But Seaforth had not finished with him yet. He reacted to Trave’s outburst with a return to his initial friendliness. ‘I expect that Alec has just gone home to wash up and get changed,’ he said. ‘It sounds like he’s been through quite an ordeal.’