Читать книгу Simon Tolkien Inspector Trave Trilogy: Orders From Berlin, The Inheritance, The King of Diamonds - Simon Tolkien - Страница 26

It was like another world here on the other side of the green baize door that connected 59 Broadway to the next-door building where C had his office. Or rather suite of offices. Persons wishing to see C had to pass first through a narrow, rectangular anteroom between his two sentries – a pair of elderly, white-haired ladies wearing identical pairs of horn-rimmed glasses who were ceaselessly busy on Remington typewriters, sending out an endless stream of memos dictated by their invisible master. Known interchangeably as Miss Taylor and Miss Jones, they sat straight-backed behind matching desks, facing each other across a thin strip of blue carpet that ended at a big oak door. Above the lintel, a green light and a red light had been installed so that visitors would know when it was permitted to enter C’s presence, but as far as Thorn was aware, the lights had never worked. The secretaries were much more effective gatekeepers. Known universally as the twins, they ran C’s diary and fielded his telephone calls. All communication with the head of MI6 passed through them.

Unlike their employer, the twins never smiled and they had no small talk whatsoever. They had come with C from the Admiralty when he succeeded Albert Morrison as director of MI6, and popular opinion in HQ was that they had been born as they were now, hatched in some secret government factory as fully fledged septuagenarian spinsters with steely eyes and bony, typing fingers. Their hard, unforgiving faces certainly indicated another side to C’s character that he usually kept under wraps, concealed behind his normal hail-fellow-well-met, debonair exterior. Thorn was a veteran of the corridors of power, and he knew full well that a man didn’t rise to C’s position without being ruthless where necessary along the way. He sometimes wondered whether it was the lack of a hard edge that had held his own career back and had earned C the nod over him when it came to choosing Albert’s replacement three years earlier, but he had always dismissed the thought. Drive and determination had never been his problem, and he knew himself well enough to realize that it was a fundamental lack of charm that had ruined his chances of promotion. Clubbable – that was the word for it. C was clubbable and he was not. It was as simple as that. All his life he had set people on edge rather than at their ease. And it was far too late to change now.

It wasn’t that he was disqualified from further advancement by any accident of birth. Quite the opposite, in fact. Thorn was the youngest son of a baronet, a fully paid-up member of the English aristocracy. He’d grown up in a damp, cold manor house on the Welsh borders with a choleric father and a pair of handsome, daredevil brothers who hunted foxes in tight red coats at the weekend and believed that history had reached its apogee with the founding of the British Empire. Thorn didn’t disagree with them. He shared their values, but he’d always felt separated from them in some profound way. As a child, he’d sometimes caught his father looking at him in an odd way. He knew why now: he was the runt of the litter. He read too many books, he didn’t know one end of a horse from another, and – worst of all – he was a natural pessimist.

The family didn’t fare well in the First World War. One brother was blown to bits at Neuve-Chapelle in 1915; another – the heir to the title – lost his right leg on the Somme. But Thorn missed it all. He was taken prisoner during a night patrol towards the end of his second week at the front and spent the remainder of the war eating cold potatoes in a POW camp north of Munich. The experience left him fluent in German but obscurely ashamed of himself, and his career since had been in large part an attempt to repay his country for a failure that wasn’t his fault.

And now, as the bombs fell on London and the Nazi net was drawn ever tighter around the kingdom, Thorn felt that his world and his class were disappearing, sinking like a holed ocean liner, swallowed up in a tidal wave of total war. The future, if there was one, belonged to unprincipled arrivistes like Seaforth, and he felt there was nothing he could do to stop its relentless advance. Except that he had to try. Because Seaforth was a traitor and a murderer and was pursuing a plan whose villainy Thorn could only guess at. Any doubts that Thorn had had on that score had been removed by what he’d seen in Ava’s flat three days earlier. But, as Thorn knew full well, believing in Seaforth’s guilt was one thing; getting C to accept it was quite another. Seaforth was C’s golden boy, the goose that was laying the golden eggs with the gilt-edged intelligence reports he was getting out of Germany with such clockwork regularity. Thorn felt a wave of despondency sweep over him as he went into C’s office, leaving the staccato noise of the twins’ typewriters behind him on the other side of the thick oak door.

The room was in fact an office only in name. It was far more like the living room of an expensively furnished apartment, and HQ rumour had it that an equally capacious bedroom complete with a four-poster bed lay on the other side of the closed door behind C’s large mahogany desk. True or not, there was no doubt that there was a staircase or an elevator that allowed C to come and go undetected – an advantage that added considerably to his mystique and prestige.

This lateral extension of HQ into the neighbouring house in the terrace was all C’s doing. Albert Morrison in his days as chief had inhabited a dreary office in the main building with small unwashed windows and second-hand Ministry of Works furniture, from where he had issued his directives amidst an organized chaos of books and papers. But C had refused to follow suit. Instead he had somehow managed to persuade the penny-pinchers over at the Treasury to approve the cost of purchasing the new space and converting it to his specifications, and Thorn had to admit that the results were impressive.

C came out from behind his desk to shake his deputy’s hand and ushered him to one of two deep leather armchairs that were positioned on either side of a large marble fireplace in which a crackling fire was burning, made to Thorn’s astonishment of logs as well as coal. It was late in the day and the light was beginning to fade in the world outside, and the flames threw dancing shadows on the tall ceiling. A rectangular eighteenth-century portrait in an ornate frame above the mantelpiece showed one of C’s ancestors dressed in the uniform of the Household Cavalry, sitting astride an enormous warhorse with snorting nostrils.

C sat down opposite his visitor. He was in his shirtsleeves, and a half-smoked Havana cigar burned between the fingers of his left hand, sending a column of thick blue-grey smoke up towards the chandelier overhead. The smell reminded Thorn of his visit to Churchill’s bunker with Seaforth two weeks earlier. He bristled at the memory, feeling a surge of anger against his enemy, but then he took a deep breath, forcing himself to calm down.

‘I have a confession to make,’ he began, trying to sound contrite.

‘Well, maybe I’m the wrong person to bring it to,’ said C with a smile. ‘I’m not a priest, you know.’

‘It’s not that kind of confession,’ said Thorn. ‘It’s about the decoded message that Hargreaves showed us at the morning conference ten days ago.’

‘The one sent by someone in Germany pretending to me?’

‘Yes. I took it to Albert Morrison.’

‘You did what?’ C looked shocked, as if he couldn’t believe what Thorn had just said.

‘I thought he might know who the sender was. I know I was wrong—’

‘You’re damned right you were,’ said C, interrupting angrily. ‘That message was a top-secret document and Albert had no security clearance. I’m surprised at you, Alec. A man of your experience should have known better than to do something so stupid.’

‘I agree,’ said Thorn, bowing his head. ‘And I’m sorry. Believe me, I’ll regret what I did to my dying day. But I need you to know what happened afterwards. Albert wasn’t home, so I left him a note, and then, as soon as he got it, he came over here in a taxi.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because the police told me. I’d already gone home, but I think somebody intercepted him in the street out there,’ he said, pointing through the cigar smoke over towards the window, ‘and guessed why he was here. And then that somebody followed him home and murdered him because he knew too much. I’ve thought about it over and over again and that has to be what happened. It’s too much of a coincidence otherwise – that Albert rushes over here and then two hours later he’s dead.’

‘Coincidences happen,’ said C, sounding unconvinced. ‘I read in the newspaper that Albert’s son-in-law has been charged with the murder. I don’t think the police would have done that if they had no evidence, now, would they?’

‘Well, that’s just it,’ Thorn said eagerly. ‘I was at Ava’s, Albert’s daughter’s, flat when they came to arrest him. He’s a doctor called Bertram Brive. But when I first got there, Bertram was out, and Ava was with someone we both know. She was with Charles Seaforth.’

‘Ah, was she now?’ said C archly. ‘I was wondering when the conversation was going to come round to him.’

‘Hear me out,’ said Thorn, ignoring the gibe. ‘I need you to understand the sequence of events. Albert’s murdered and Seaforth, who hardly knew him, turns up at the funeral and starts paying attention to Ava, whom he’s never met before. And then three days later he’s in her flat when she finds a cuff link in her husband’s desk that matches one the killer left at the murder scene. And not only that – I got her to admit that Seaforth picked the locks on the desk drawers to enable her to look. There was no one else in the room, and he had the perfect opportunity to plant the evidence.’

‘Why would he do that?’ asked C, looking unimpressed.

‘Because he murdered Albert and he needs someone else to take the blame. Can’t you see what I’m saying?’ asked Thorn, allowing a note of special pleading to creep into his voice.

‘Yes, I do see. But I also wonder whether you’re allowing your emotions to get the better of you?’ asked C, leaning forward with an air of apparent concern. ‘Albert’s death must have been a great blow to you. I know how close the two of you were. And we both know you’ve had issues with young Seaforth for some time.’

‘Are you saying it’s affected my judgement?’ asked Thorn angrily.

‘Well, has it?’

‘No, absolutely not. You’re right I don’t like Seaforth, but that’s not the reason I’m here. There are other things he’s done …’

‘Like what?’

‘Well, look at the way everyone else’s German agents have gone west – put up against the wall or sent to labour camps. But his intelligence gets better each week. Doesn’t that tell you anything?’

‘We’ve been over all that,’ said C, shifting in his chair, beginning at last to show signs of impatience. ‘Have you got anything else, Alec, or is this really just another one of your hunches?’ he asked, his voice laced with sarcasm.

But Thorn had come too far now to back down. ‘Did you get Hargreaves’s memo the other day?’ he asked. ‘About the earlier radio message that they’ve matched to the one we discussed in the meeting, both using the same code?’

‘Yes. Sent four days earlier, giving a date for a drop, no doubt from an aeroplane, but no location. Signed C. Not exactly a breakthrough, is it?’ said C, who prided himself on his encyclopaedic memory for all the documents that passed across his desk.

‘The place had obviously been agreed in advance,’ said Thorn. ‘But that’s not what matters. The point is that this isn’t some run-of-the-mill mission like you thought it was before. The date of the drop was the same day as the radio message, which means that the agent receiving the message wasn’t likely to be the one picking up whatever equipment or documents were being flown in. There’s got to be a sleeper of some kind monitoring the location. And the people involved are using radios and a code that’s been hard to break, which points to a sophisticated operation, one that we should be taking seriously.’

‘And MI5 are taking it seriously,’ said C. ‘I can assure you of that. It’s just it’s their job to deal with it, not ours. We’re in the business of foreign intelligence, in case you’ve forgotten.’

‘Unless it’s one of our agents who’s involved,’ Thorn countered. ‘Did you know that Seaforth was away on the day after the message about the drop was sent? He never came into work at all.’

‘Gone to meet the sleeper agent instead, I suppose you’re saying. Did he give a reason for his absence?’

‘He phoned Jarvis in the morning to say he was sick. But he looked healthy enough when he came in the next day. I can tell you that.’

C took a pull on his cigar, looking silently at Thorn as if weighing all that he’d said. ‘It’s not enough, Alec, and I think you know that,’ he said finally. ‘What you’re telling me is all circumstantial. You say that your dislike for Seaforth has nothing to do with you accusing him, but I’m not so sure of that. I’m sorry to say it, but, unconsciously or not, I think you’re trying to get rid of him because he’s after your job. And yes, I do think it’s affecting your judgement. This vendetta is going to have to stop. I’ve warned you before and I’m not going to warn you again.’

Thorn thought of responding. But instead he bit his tongue. He wasn’t a fool, whatever C might think. There was clearly nothing to be gained by further argument unless he wanted to earn himself an early retirement. C had made up his mind about Seaforth and he wasn’t going to change it, whatever Thorn had to say.

‘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 now 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.