Orders from Berlin (34 page)

As the day wore on, the air got thick with cigarette smoke and oppressively hot, and Trave stood up and opened the window. Immediately a cloud of soot blew back into his face from the coal-fed steam engine; he fell onto his seat, coughing and spluttering, and everyone in the compartment burst out laughing. But the humour was not ill-natured and Trave joined in, sheepishly at first but then with abandon.

‘You look like a regular coal miner,’ said the woman sitting opposite, and offered him one of her sandwiches, which Trave accepted gratefully. He hadn’t brought any food with him, forgetting that there were no restaurant cars on long-distance trains any more since the war started. And soon everyone in the compartment was talking. Trave felt buoyed by the friendly atmosphere. This was what England was about, he thought. The easy good nature of the people meant that a cruel philosophy like Nazism could never take hold. The English were too decent, too democratic, to ever let that happen.

But then suddenly the train entered a long tunnel and everything went black. And in the darkness Trave remembered the pale, implacable face of the SS general that Thorn had shown him in the book he had taken down from Albert Morrison’s shelves the previous evening. Except that this was more than a memory; it was almost an apparition, and Trave had an overwhelming sense of the man’s extraordinary power and his terrible, relentless cruelty. And he was coming, he and his cohorts. The invasion threat was real; the SS was waiting, and rolls of barbed wire and lines of anti-tank ditches wouldn’t stop the Nazi war machine once it had landed. He knew with absolute certainty that he had to find out what Heydrich’s plan was before it was too late.

In less than a minute, the train emerged back out into the Cumbrian countryside glowing in the late afternoon sunshine, and the vision passed. But Trave remained shaken. He was glad he’d brought his gun, and he passed the rest of the journey in a state of growing impatience to reach his destination.

He changed trains at Carlisle, almost missing his connection because of the overzealousness of a detachment of the local Home Guard who were checking the papers and identity cards of the new arrivals and seemed determined to assume that everyone was a German spy until proved otherwise. But at just after six o’clock, he crossed the Scottish border and shortly afterwards arrived at the small town of Langholm, which for the first nineteen years of his life had been the home of Charles Seaforth.

The thick-stoned, grey granite buildings lining the narrow streets that radiated out from the tall spire of the Church of Scotland kirk seemed forbidding to Trave, although he liked the way the river Esk flowed through the town between mossy green banks. This border country had been a popular destination for gentleman sportsmen enjoying
shooting and fishing holidays before the war put paid to such frivolities, and Trave had no doubt that the river was alive with salmon and the woods surrounding the town were full of grouse.

He booked into a travellers’ hotel in the market square and then walked down Caroline Street to Number 22, a well-kept terrace house with a walled garden in front that had been turned over to the growing of vegetables. Smoke was coming from a chimney, and the evening sun twinkled in the latticed windows. In the summer, sunset came later in the north than Trave was used to down in London.

A woman opened the door immediately, causing Trave to step back in surprise. It seemed almost as if she had been standing in her narrow hallway waiting for his knock.

‘Mrs Seaforth?’ he asked, although he was sure she was Seaforth’s mother. She had the same high, wide cheekbones and sensitive-looking, almost sculpted mouth. Trave thought she must be in her mid-sixties, but she was well preserved for her age, and he was sure that she must once have been very pretty indeed.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Can I help you?’

‘I’m sorry to trouble you,’ said Trave, taking out his warrant card. ‘My name’s Trave, William Trave. I’m a police officer from London, and I have some questions I need to ask you about your son.’

‘About Charles? Is he all right?’

‘Yes, he’s fine. It won’t take more than a few minutes of your time.’

‘Well, you needn’t worry about that. I’ve got all the time in the world. My husband’s down at the British Legion playing his darts tonight and I’ve only got the radio for company. You’d better come in.’ There was a slight Scots inflection to her voice, but she didn’t speak with any dialect.

Trave followed Mrs Seaforth into a cheerful room that was obviously the parlour. A fire was burning brightly in the grate, and through a wide window at the back Trave could see another garden with a magnificent white wisteria growing rampant all along the rear wall and, up above, a view of birch woods rising up a steep hillside towards the horizon. Not such a bad place to live, he thought, remembering his dark bed-sitting-room back in London, with the wail of the air-raid siren bruising his consciousness every night.

‘So sit down and make yourself comfortable,’ said his hostess, pointing to a chintz-upholstered armchair, one of a pair positioned on either side of the fireplace. ‘The kettle’s just boiled and I’ll make us some tea. I’m afraid that we don’t drink wine and spirits like you’re used to down in London. Temperance is next to godliness, as they say round here.’

‘Tea will be just fine,’ said Trave with a smile, and Mrs Seaforth bustled away out of sight, leaving her guest alone. He looked cursorily around the room, taking in at a glance a barometer by the door, a bevelled oak mirror above the fireplace, and a large framed sampler on the wall behind where he was sitting that asked the Lord to ‘bless this house’. Then he concentrated his attention on two silver-framed photographs on the mantelpiece. One was a wedding picture showing Mrs Seaforth and her second husband – it had to be her second marriage, because they were both middle-aged – standing arm in arm in front of the local church that Tr
ave recognized from having jus
t gone past it on his walk to the hotel from the railway station. They looked happy, Trave thought, and had probably continued happy together, judging from Mrs Seaforth’s friendly, easy-going demeanour.

The other photograph was of two boys, obviously brothers, standing side by side against a white background. At a guess, Trave would have said they were three years apart – fifteen and eighteen, perhaps. It looked older, more faded, than the wedding picture, but it had a strange unstudied quality, which surprised Trave given it was a studio portrait, which must have required the sitters to keep their positions for a long time during the exposure. The older, taller youth was dressed in a military uniform and looked out at the camera with a half-defiant, half-amused smile that was curiously attractive. He had his arm around the shoulder of the younger one, who looked up towards his brother with a devoted, happy expression – happy, Trave guessed, because he was posing for a picture with the brother he idolized.

Trave leant forward, staring hard at the picture. One of the brothers had to be Seaforth, and he guessed it was the younger one, remembering what Ava had told him about the photograph she’d seen in Seaforth’s bedroom of a young man in uniform who wasn’t Seaforth but looked like him. Trave sighed, thinking of how little he knew about the man he was trying to investigate. He wished that he had Thorn with him. Thorn would have known what questions to ask, whereas he was groping in the dark. Still, there was no help for it. He was on his own and he would just have to do his best.

‘Alistair’s the older one. He was so full of life, always laughing, devil-may-care about the world even when he was a little boy,’ said Mrs Seaforth, coming up behind Trave with the tea tray and confirming his guess about the brothers as if she had read his mind. ‘He got into endless scrapes at school, but people always forgave him because he meant well; he wore his heart on his sleeve. The girls loved him – he could have had his pick of them if he’d wanted. And Charlie worshipped him more than anyone. You can see that in the picture. They were inseparable, which was funny because they were so different,’ she went on as she poured out the tea. ‘Alistair so open-handed you could read him like a book, whereas Charlie was always looking deep into things, searching for grievances.’

‘What kind of grievances?’ asked Trave, taking his cup from Mrs Seaforth’s outstretched hand. Perhaps he could just let her talk, he thought, and wait until she said something that seemed important.

‘Oh, I don’t know. Against the English. Flodden Field, where they massacred the Scots in the sixteenth century, isn’t so far away from here. And then he hated the old squire whom my husband, Jack, worked for. He was English too. Charlie said he was exploiting us, charging us too much rent, not making repairs, not paying Jack enough money. Made him sound like he was some kind of Nazi – not that we had Nazis back then.’ Mrs Seaforth smiled, shaking her head at the memory. ‘And Charlie was right in some ways, I suppose, although it was the squire who got him an exemption from joining up in the last year of the war, which probably saved his life. But that just seemed to make him hate the old man even more. Charlie never liked being in debt to anyone. He never has and he never will.’ Mrs Seaforth paused, stirring her tea with a faraway look in her eye. ‘It all seems so long ago now,’ she said half-wistfully. ‘And the war changed everything. It’s like there was a before-the-war time and an after-the-war time, and there might have been a hundred years between the two. You’re too young to know what I mean.’ It could have sounded condescending, but it wasn’t for some reason, just a statement of fact. She looked up, catching Trave’s eye, and abruptly returned to the present. ‘Is Charlie in trouble of some kind?’ she asked. ‘I think you ought to tell me if he is.’

‘No, it’s nothing like that,’ said Trave. ‘We just need to make some background checks. You know how it is.’ He spoke awkwardly, uncomfortable with having to lie to this woman who was being so hospitable. But he knew he had no choice in the matter.

‘So he’s getting promoted,’ she said, but Trave didn’t need to lie this time. She assumed she’d got the right answer. ‘Well, that’s exciting,’ she went on. ‘But he never tells me anything, you know. In fact …’ She paused, holding her spoon suspended in her cup, and Trave suddenly saw that she was fighting to keep her self-control. ‘In fact, I don’t even know what he does down there in London because he hasn’t spoken to me at all. Not for more than fifteen years. So you can see it was a bit of a shock when you asked me about him – brought back a lot of memories which I try not to dwell on too much.’

‘Why? Why hasn’t he spoken to you?’ asked Trave, surprised.

‘Because he blames me for what happened; blames me for having moved forward with my life.’

‘Forward from what? Please tell me what happened, Mrs Seaforth. I need to know.’

‘The war happened. I told you that. Alistair died; my husband died. It’s a common enough story. You can hear it from widows in any town or village in the country.’

She was withdrawing from him, Trave could feel it. He regretted being so direct with his questions. His curiosity had got the better of him and he’d pushed too hard. But he couldn’t give up now. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Seaforth,’ he said, looking contrite. ‘Really I am. I can see the past must be very painful to you.’

‘It is,’ she said, nodding. ‘I prefer not to think about it unless I absolutely have to. And from what you’ve told me, Mr Trave, it doesn’t sound to me like we need to go down that road,’ she said, giving Trave a sharp look that was at odds with her previous manner. ‘You say you’re here to do a background check on Charles, and I can tell you that I know nothing against him. Quite the opposite, in fact. As far as I’m aware, he’s honest, he’s not been convicted of any crime, and he’s extremely clever. But I expect you know all that already.’

Mrs Seaforth got up from her chair and held out her hand. It was obvious that she wanted her visitor gone. It was difficult to understand why when she had been so welcoming before. He had clearly offended her in some way, touched a raw nerve of some kind. Trave tried in vain to think of a way to keep the interview going and then gave up. He shook her offered hand and walked away.

He walked down the street and round the corner to a pub called The Fox and Hounds, with a dramatic picture of a hunting scene painted on the inn sign, which creaked gently in a breeze that had blown up as if from nowhere while he had been drinking tea with Seaforth’s mother. There were no other customers in the bar, and he sat in a corner inglenook, gazing disconsolately into the brown depths of a pint of the local beer while he waited for the shepherd’s pie dinner that he’d ordered when he came in. He wasn’t hungry, but he knew he had to eat.

‘New to town?’ asked the landlord when he brought Trave the food. He was a big man with a beard, and he seemed friendly enough.

‘Yes, I’m just passing through,’ said Trave, and then added, rousing himself from his lethargy: ‘I’m here to see Mrs Seaforth. Do you know her?’

‘Of course I do. She’s a lovely lady,’ the landlord said heartily. ‘John Seaforth’s a lucky man.’

‘Her husband?’ asked Trave.

‘That’s right. He used to be our postman, but he’s retired now.’

‘I’m here about some business concerning her son down in London.’

‘Never met him. He went south before Mary moved into Langholm. She used to live in a little village a few miles from here with her first husband, Jack O’Bryen. I never knew him. He died in the last war. Their oldest son too. You can see Jack’s name on the town war memorial up in Buccleuch Park.’

‘Just Jack’s?’ asked Trave. ‘Why not both their names?’

‘No reason,’ said the landlord hurriedly, and moved away back to the bar, putting a sudden end to the conversation.

Trave ate his food slowly, turning the landlord’s strange behaviour over in his mind. He’d been friendly like Mrs Seaforth, but then suddenly he’d backed away, just as she’d done. There was something in the past that they didn’t want to speak about. Alistair, the elder son, had been in military uniform in the photograph on Mrs Seaforth’s mantelpiece. He’d fought in the war and he’d been killed in it too, but his name wasn’t on the town’s war memorial. It couldn’t have been an accidental omission because his father’s name was recorded there among the fallen.