Orders from Berlin (31 page)

Ava wasn’t really frightened of the bombs, at least not before they had started to fall. She was more concerned about what kind of signal she would be sending Seaforth by going back to his house or flat or wherever it was that he lived. She didn’t want him to think of her as some woman of easy virtue who could be seduced over a couple of bottles of wine in an Italian restaurant, but she’d come out determined to find out what made him tick, and to do that she needed to see where he lived. It was an opportunity that she couldn’t afford to pass up.

He took her arm and led her behind the Peter Jones department store into a district of tall, turn-of-the-century red-brick houses. Ava knew that it took money, a lot of money, to live here on the borders of Knightsbridge, and she wondered how Seaforth could afford it. But perhaps spying paid well. She remembered how affluent her miserly father had turned out to be.

They turned the corner and came out into Cadogan Square. It was the jewel of the neighbourhood, visually impressive even without the wrought-iron railings that had been removed the previous year to be melted down for the war effort. The tall, stately houses surrounding the gardens on all four sides seemed unchanged by time, far removed from the bustle of Sloane Square two blocks away and the war-torn world beyond. There was no one in sight as they walked across the grass and then up the wide steps of a well-maintained house under a brick portico supported by elaborately decorated Corinthian columns. The door was unlocked and they went inside and took a narrow, wood-panelled elevator to the top floor.

When Seaforth opened the door of his apartment, she let out a cry of surprise. Even in the failing light, the panoramic view was extraordinary. There were landmarks she recognized in all directions – the tower of Westminster Cathedral, Big Ben beside the river, and to the south the white chimneys of Battersea Power Station. She would have liked to spend longer staring out of the windows, but Seaforth was already going round lowering the blackout blinds.

He turned on the lights and went to hang up her coat, leaving her to look round at the furnishings of the apartment. She could see straight away that they were expensive, but she was now prepared for that. She was surprised rather by the look of the place. It was not at all what she would have expected. Everything was modern, characterized by hard, severe lines. The sofa and the armchairs had tubular steel frames, and the desk in the corner was made of some form of metal too. A pair of rectangular jet-black vases on a table in front of the centre window held no flowers. There were a multitude of books, and she recognized some of the titles from her father’s collection, but their arrangement
was entirely differ
ent from the organized chaos in Gloucester Mansions. Here the spines were lined up in precisely descending heights on built-in bookcases. Nothing was out of place.

She looked around in vain for something personal, something to connect the room with its owner, but there was nothing. It was as if no one lived in the apartment. She felt she was standing on a theatre set, waiting for a play to begin.

There was only one picture, but it dominated the room. It hung in pride of place above the mantelpiece and depicted the distorted head of a human being. The skull was half caved in and the eyes had almost disappeared up into the bulging grey forehead, pushed back by the open howling mouth. All this set against a burning orange background. Ava was horrified by the painting. It was like nothing she’d ever seen. She could not deny its hard, visceral power, but she realized that the vision behind it was of life as pain – an endless, searing brutality that only death would end.

‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ said Seaforth, watching Ava with interest as she took in the picture.

‘It’s terrifying. Who painted it?’

‘An artist called Francis Bacon, who believes that men are meat,’ said Seaforth with a wry smile. ‘He’s a penniless alcoholic gambler who paints over his own pictures because he can’t afford to buy canvas, but I’m quite sure that one day people will say he’s the century’s greatest painter – if he doesn’t kill himself with booze before his time, which is more than likely,’ he added.

‘Why do you like his pictures?’

‘Because he tells the truth.’

‘That men are meat?’

‘That they are cruel, certainly. How could you think otherwise after what has happened in the world in the last thirty years? But let’s not talk about that any more,’ he said with a smile. ‘We keep coming back to the war and that’s the subject we agreed to avoid, wasn’t it?’

He went into the kitchen to make coffee, leaving her sitting on the sofa. She felt frustrated. The apartment was beautiful but impersonal. It told her nothing about Seaforth. She needed to make something happen.

Just as he was coming back into the room, the phone rang. He went over to the desk and picked it up, listened for a moment, and told the person at the other end of the line to wait.

‘I’m sorry. I have to take this,’ he said. ‘I won’t be long.’

‘Is there somewhere I can freshen up?’ she asked.

He pointed towards a half-open door across from the kitchen and returned to the telephone.

She went through the door and found herself in a bedroom – a thick carpet and expensive modern furniture – and beyond, through another door, the bathroom was a vision of white tile and chrome and glass. But it was a vision that Ava resisted. If she was careful, there was time to look around. She could hear Seaforth talking in the room behind her. There was nothing personal that caught her eye except for a single photograph of a young man in uniform on top of a chest of drawers opposite the bed. It looked like Seaforth, but it wasn’t him. She opened the drawers, but, as she suspected, they were full of clothes, so she went over to the night table by the bed and opened the drawer in that. There was a book inside – an old, battered book. She picked it up and began to turn the pages. It was a diary of some kind, written in September and October 1915.

She chose an entry at random and began to read:

All day it has rained. Just like yesterday and the day before that. There are corpses of our mates that we can’t get in from the German wire. It’s death to try – the Boche leave them hanging there like warnings. As the days pass, they swell until the wall of the stomach collapses either naturally or when punctured by a bullet, and then a disgusting sweet smell floats back to us across no-man’s-land. We thought it was gas at first until we realized. … And the colour of the dead faces changes from white to yellow to red to purple to green to black to slime. These are things that I thought I would never see. I do not know why I am writing them down. There can be no God that would permit this slaughter.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? Give that to me, damn you!’ Seaforth yelled. She’d never heard him shout or even raise his voice before, but now he was angry, transformed by rage into a person she didn’t recognize.

He was coming towards her now. She had no idea what he would do, but she could see that his eyes were focused not on her, but on the book in her hand. It didn’t matter that she didn’t know why he cared about it so much; it was enough to know that he did. It gave her an opportunity, and at the last moment she threw it at him. It bounced off his chest and fell to the floor, and instinctively he bent to pick it up. And in the same moment she ran past him into the living room and wrenched open the front door of the apartment.

Out on the landing she hesitated for a second, unable to decide between the elevator and the stairs; but the sound of movement behind her forced her to choose. She dashed down the stairs, taking them two at a time, somehow managing to stay on her feet, until she reached the hallway at the bottom.

She stopped. She had to. She was doubled over, hanging on to a pillar in the semi-darkness. It was the only way she could stay upright. Her heart was beating like a hammer in her chest and her legs felt like lead. There had been no sound of pursuit on the stairs, but now to her horror she could hear the elevator cage descending from above. He was coming. She knew he was. For a moment she was unable to move, caught like a rabbit in the headlights, staring at the elevator door. But then she forced herself to look away. There was still time. Clutching her aching side, she pulled open the heavy front door of the building and went stumbling onto the steps.

She put out a hand to steady herself but found no support, and losing her balance, she fell forward onto the pavement. She lay still, unable to get up. Someone was leaning over her, taking hold of her arm. She wanted to resist, but she had nothing left, only surrender.

‘Are you all right, miss?’ asked a voice. ‘That looked like a nasty fall.’

She opened her eyes and saw a kindly-looking old man staring down at her. She wondered who he was for a moment, until her eyes focused on the ARP letters on his tin hat and she realized that her rescuer was an air-raid warden doing his rounds.

He helped her to her feet. Leaning on his shoulder, she looked back through the door of the apartment building and saw nothing – an empty shadowy hallway; no sign of Seaforth at all. It was as if nothing had happened.

‘Here, put this on,’ said the warden, taking off his coat and wrapping it around her shoulders. ‘You’d better come with me. I’m on my way back to my control centre anyway. They can check you over there, see that you’re okay. And then you’ll need to take shelter. That last siren was a false alarm, but word is there’s a big raid coming our way tonight.’

Ava sat on the top floor of the double-decker bus, looking at the war-torn city as it went slowly by outside the mesh-covered windows. It was just past nine on the morning following her ordeal. The shops were beginning to open and the sun was shining down out of a clear blue sky. It was hard to believe that this same sky had been filled with hundreds of bomb-laden enemy planes only a few hours before. It had been one of the worst nights of the Blitz so far, and there was bomb damage everywhere, making for slow progress. But Ava didn’t mind; she was too busy taking in the sights. Grimy, excited children were out in force, playing in the ruins, looking for incendiary bomb tails and nose caps and other interesting pieces of shrapnel. Shopkeepers swept away broken glass and rubble from outside their shop fronts or were posting defiant signs in their windows:
business as usual
and
more open than usual.
Milk and coal carts drawn by hard-working shire horses picked their way through the debris; rag-and-bone men cried out their wares; women in headscarves talked to each other over their garden walls … Everywhere Londoners were going to work and getting on with their lives, contributing to the war effort in thousands of different ways. ‘We can take it,’ was their message. ‘That Hitler won’t stop us doing our jobs.’ It was inspiring.

Ava had felt their defiance even more the night before in the public shelter on the King’s Road to which the kindly ARP warden had taken her after rescuing her outside Seaforth’s apartment. She’d sat on an upturned packing crate in the candlelight, wrapped in the ill-fitting but warm greatcoat that he’d given her, as she drank tea from a plastic cup and joined in with renditions of innumerable hymns and patriotic songs. A large, determined lady from the WVS, the Women’s Voluntary Service, had stood on a dais and conducted the singing with a walking stick, ensuring that the shelterers kept up a spirited response to the noise of the explosions going on outside. Ava had never been more alone in the world and yet she’d never felt closer to her fellow human beings.

She was still shaken and shocked by her experience with Seaforth. The change in him that she’d witnessed when he had found her reading the diary had been so violent that she felt sure the charming, sensitive person she’d encountered at previous meetings had been an act put on for her benefit. The real Seaforth was closer to the howling creature in the terrifying picture above the mantelpiece in his apartment. Perhaps he had it up there as a reminder of who he really was.

She thought again of the accusations Alec Thorn had made against Seaforth in her flat on the day of Bertram’s arrest. Had Quaid been right to dismiss them so lightly? Could Seaforth have killed her father? Could Bertram be innocent of the crime? She didn’t have answers, but she knew that she needed to keep looking for the truth, and the inspiration she’d taken from her escape and the night in the shelter had made her more determined than ever not to give up the search. This bus journey to Bow Street Magistrates Court was another step along that road. Today was the first proper hearing in Bertram’s case, and she had no intention of missing the occasion. She needed to reassess her opinion of whether the police had got the right man, and she thought that seeing him would help, even across a crowded courtroom.

She got off the bus at Covent Garden and walked up Floral Street to the sandbagged courthouse, past the Royal Opera House, which had been converted to use as a Mecca Dance Hall since the start of the war. She was dog-tired after her sleepless night in the shelter, and there had been no chance to rest when she went back to her flat in Battersea to wash and change her clothes. Pure adrenaline was keeping her on her feet.

Inside, a huge crowd of people from all walks of life were milling about in the lobby outside the courtroom: down-at-heel crooks looking wistfully towards the exit doors; impoverished young journalists hoping for a hot story to please their editors; journeymen lawyers in threadbare suits conferring with their clients or waiting for their cases to be called on; stolid-looking police officers in blue serge uniforms waiting to give evidence. And coming towards her where she stood just inside the entrance was another policeman, but one wearing plain clothes instead of a uniform. It was Detective Trave, whom she had last seen watching her across the crowded restaurant in Coventry Street.

‘How have you been?’ he asked, shaking her hand.

‘All right,’ she lied. The truth was too complicated, and she didn’t want to talk about her troubles. Even the thought of such a discussion made her feel exhausted.