Almost Love (43 page)

“Claudia’s family was wealthy. She could have attended university to gain the right academic credentials or apprenticed herself to one of the younger archaeologists of the time. However, she was temperamentally unsuited to sustained study and very proud of the fame that she had already acquired as a young woman who had broken through the magic male monopoly.”

“Very mellifluous!” said Ricky. “See if you can surprise us with a few more poetic turns.”

Juliet flushed and faltered.

“Can we try to get through this uninterrupted?” said Tim. “We appreciate your wit, but this is all quite complicated. We need to concentrate.”

Juliet gave him an uncertain smile.

“She wanted full recognition for her work and therefore began to write for archaeological publications, at least the ones that would accept her articles. Perhaps because she experienced some difficulty in getting the articles accepted, she wrote at least two full-length books about the digs that she had organised in the Middle East in the late 1930s. The first of these was published in 1937. Her theory, based on a limited amount of fact, was that in ancient societies women carried as much weight as men; that although the division of work between the sexes was already developing, women still fought and hunted alongside their menfolk. As well as this, she claimed that the traditional female tasks, such as child-rearing, were more valued than in later, historical times. As I’ve said, the theory was based on a very selective interpretation of some of the artefacts and wall paintings that she’d uncovered. Her writing was treated with scepticism by many of the male establishment, but Claudia struck a chord with women just as forerunners of what became the feminist movement began to gain momentum.

“Claudia was determined to overcome male prejudice. Her opportunity came in 1938. She’d been planning a dig in the Middle East and had obtained the funding for it – she was adept at touching her late father’s influential friends for money – when the Foreign Office stepped in and warned her that the situation in Europe was such that it would be too risky for her to carry on with the dig. I don’t think that Claudia would have taken a blind bit of notice of this, but, because of the fuss made about it, much of the funding was also withdrawn. She was asked by Lord McLachlan, who was also her publisher, to carry out some excavations in the Orkneys instead, as a kind of consolation prize. At first she was reluctant to take the job on, but she finally accepted the offer, if with a bad grace. By this time, war had been announced in Europe and she had few other options if she wanted to carry on as an archaeologist in the field.

“To give her due credit, she carried out the two Orkney excavations diligently, with little help except from local labourers who were paid to do some of the soil carting, etcetera. Her efforts were repaid with the most fantastic stroke of luck – a once-in-a-lifetime find.”

“The McRae Stone?” said Tim.

“Yes. That’s what it became known as. It’s also been called the ‘Rosetta of the North’. Like the Rosetta Stone, it was inscribed with the same text in three different ancient languages. Even though war had been declared, its discovery generated a huge amount of interest, both in this country and abroad.

“As we’ve seen, Claudia was already good at making her finds fit her theories. She had previously used her work to embrace the cause of feminism. She now set about claiming that her analysis of one of these three languages demonstrated that the people who had developed it were of superior intelligence to those who spoke the other two. I don’t know whether she thought of it first herself or whether someone suggested it to her, but what she was proposing was that the sophistication of this language indicated the existence of an early master-race.”

“And the language was an early form of Norwegian?”

“Yes. And of course the master race concept was as topical then as feminism had been earlier. Claudia wrote one article in support of her theory that reads just like her earlier stuff. She sets out her ideas enthusiastically, almost with bombast. She’d done some nifty work on the semantics, but she offers little other evidence to support it.

“The next article was published a year or so later. It is remarkable how much her style had changed in the interim . . .”

“This was after the war had started properly?”

“Yes. The article was published early in 1941. The second article and all the subsequent ones about the MacRae Stone that Katrin and I have found and read are less floridly written and much more closely argued. They are almost self-consciously erudite, with footnotes citing other work that show an impressive knowledge of semantics and early Norse history. And they are phenomenally well-versed in post-First-World-War politics. I suspect that Claudia herself introduced the master race idea to make a bit of a splash, but whoever wrote those articles was in deadly earnest. They were fascinated by her theory and they definitely wanted to make it stick.”

“You don’t think that Claudia herself wrote the later articles, then?”

“I’m certain that she didn’t. Katrin doesn’t think so, either. I should have said that, by the time the second article was published, Claudia had left Scotland for Norway. She was invited to collaborate with an academic at the University of Oslo. The academic’s name was Dr Elida Berg.”

“How did she manage to leave the country in wartime?”

“I don’t know. She may have travelled on a warship. Through her father, she had plenty of friends in high places. She achieved instant acclaim when she discovered the McRae Stone, which probably made them more disposed to help her. In peacetime, she would have had a perfectly legitimate reason for taking up the Norwegian offer, because the language that she had identified was a variant of old Norse.”

“Do you think that Elida Berg wrote the articles?”

“I’m certain that they collaborated; in fact, I’ve found an article that they wrote jointly. Later I think that Dr Berg was mostly writing on her own, but publishing under Claudia’s name. The writings not only become progressively more erudite, but more strident in the political conclusions that they draw. I haven’t found absolute proof that Dr Berg belonged to The Ymir, but the stuff that she wrote under her own name strongly points to it, as does her behaviour. I think that she may have belonged to more than one extremist group.”

“But why would Claudia McRae go along with all this extremist stuff? Was this woman her lover?”

“It’s true that, by the 1950s, Claudia’s associates believed that she was a lesbian. According to Oliver Sparham, who first met her in the late ‘60s, her sexuality was a kind of ‘open secret’ among her student followers, something that they joked about in private. But I’ve found absolutely no evidence that she had lovers of either sex and I’m far from convinced that she was a lesbian. Everything that I’ve read and heard about her suggests to me that she was more or less ‘asexual’, for want of a better term. If Claudia was in love with anyone, it was herself. I think that she developed a kind of starry-eyed adulation of Dr Berg’s intellect, though. It was almost love, but not sexually inspired.”

“Do you think that she was coerced into lending her name to underpinning the theories of The Ymir?”

“Not coerced. I think that she recognised the huge cachet that the association with Dr Berg gave to her work; she would have agreed to support The Ymir, and maybe other political groups, without thinking too much about what she was doing. She probably didn’t worry about the deeper implications. This was her chance of obtaining academic endorsement and she wasn’t going to let it escape her.”

“What happened to Elida Berg?”

“That’s a good question. In 1947 a children’s home that had been founded near Oslo during the war to shelter child refugees was burnt down. Some of the children had been reunited with their parents in 1945 and 1946, but the vast majority were still at the home in 1947. They had either been orphaned or their families could not be traced. They mostly came from Eastern European countries: Poland, Yugoslavia, the Baltic states. Some were Jewish. Only a few escaped the fire. The Norwegian police established without doubt that the fire had been started deliberately. Although it had the hallmarks of an organised crime rather than one that had been committed by a crazed individual, no group came forward to claim responsibility. Eventually the police became certain that it was the work of The Ymir; I’m not sure exactly how. The upshot was that several academics were forced to leave the University of Oslo; they disappeared completely. Other members of The Ymir were rounded up and some were tried and shot for treason. The organisation had been working with the Nazis during the war.

“It was alleged that the motive for burning the children’s home had been ethnic cleansing. The Ymir had tolerated the presence of the children during the war, but, when it became clear that they would be remaining in the country, where one day they would be likely to intermarry and have children of their own, it decided to murder them.”

Giash Chakrabati, who had been dozing off while Juliet was talking about archaeology, sat up straight in his chair and whistled.

“You’re going to tell us that there is a link between this and the attempt to fire Herrick Old House!”

Juliet nodded. She was about to continue when Andy Carstairs interrupted.

“This is all fascinating and I’m sure you’re right about a lot of it. You’ve done a great job on the research and the story so far hangs together, as far as I’m concerned. But all of this happened before any of us was born. Claudia McRae must have come back to the UK long ago and carried on being a famous archaeologist. So why has it taken more than half a century for a copycat crime to be committed? And what happened to Elida Berg?”

“Elida Berg’s disappearance continued to be of significance in Claudia’s life. We don’t know where Berg went to ground; given her extreme nationalism, I’d put my money on her having been concealed in a remote part of Norway; I don’t think that she would have consented to exile herself elsewhere. The Ymir would have helped. They may have supported her financially, or she may have been given a new identity and worked in some unobtrusive and appropriate profession – as a schoolteacher or a librarian, for example. Whatever the circumstances, she still had access to a good academic library. I know this, because I’m pretty certain that all of the so-called ‘semantic archaeology’ papers that Claudia McRae published in the fifties and sixties were actually entirely or partly authored by Elida Berg. They were never completely accepted by the archaeological establishment, but this was no longer because Claudia didn’t use the right style and provide appropriate references; each one was a superbly-argued piece of academic virtuoso. But other academics were wary of the writings, because even those well to the right of the political mainstream felt uncomfortable about the extremist views upon which they were founded.”

“I read some of those papers myself when I was a student,” said Tim. “I didn’t notice the ‘extremist views’.”

The whole team howled with laughter.

“OK,” he said, raising his hands palms up. “I let myself in for that. I was more naïve in those days.”

“Probably not all that naïve,” said Juliet. “You’d have had to know what you were looking for, and to have read a considerable number of the articles before you would have understood what was going on. You’d probably need to have dug deeper than the average undergraduate would have been likely to. For example, Katrin found recurring instances of some of the arcane symbols and totemic words used by The Ymir and, although the extremist stuff is present in all of them, it’s skilfully argued. What I’m saying is that, over time, it would have made an expert uneasy; and that’s probably why, although Claudia achieved tremendous popularity with the British public as well as with her own coterie of students, she never received the academic accolades that she felt that she deserved.”

“What happened to The Ymir?”

“I’m coming to that. After the executions, the group went to ground. It didn’t disband; from 1950 to about 1990 there were isolated instances of attacks on immigrant communities in Norway and other acts of extreme nationalism that police attributed to The Ymir. In one or two very high-profile cases – the murder in 1982 of a government minister whose parents had been immigrants, for example – it actually claimed responsibility.

“At some point in the early 1990s, it ceased to be an entirely underground movement. It tried to make itself respectable by developing a political wing that acted within the law.”

“A bit like the IRA?” said Andy, who was now hanging on Juliet’s every word, fascinated by the turn her account had taken.

“Exactly. Though with the difference that, as far as we can ascertain, The Ymir’s cause did not have – it still does not have – a large popular following in Norway. It has always been an extremist group, supported by and for extreme nationalists. That’s not to say that all the members of its political wing have been nutcases living on the fringes of society. They have included at least one government minister and others with high profiles: a banker, a journalist and, most worrying of all, a high-ranking soldier.”

“Did the terrorist element fade away, also become ‘respectable’, or just carry on as it had always done?” asked Tim.

“I can’t answer that for sure. Probably it either carried on as it had before, or the extremist element broke away into splinter groups in order to perpetuate the violence because they despised the political agenda as being too insipid. One way or another, the violent acts continued, although they became more sporadic – possibly because at intervals the extremist groups recruited new members who embarked upon bursts of evangelism before becoming receding again into anonymity. Most of the violent acts had to be planned and paid for, as well. The best of The Ymir’s brains had joined the political wing. It was able to canvass for funds like any other political group, but what it did with them was monitored quite closely by the authorities. However, in addition to legalising the movement in Norway, the political arm was able to offer The Ymir the advantage of legitimately raising its profile in other countries. So-called overseas ‘chapters’ were set up. Some of these provided money, but until now it seems there has never been enough money to carry out a large-scale act of terrorism.”