Orders from Berlin (36 page)

‘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.

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 hous
es, 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 to
ok the Underground to St James’s Par
k, 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 a
nd retreated back into the int
erior 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.

‘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.’

‘Yes. I expect you’re right,’ Trave said guardedly.

‘I’m sure he’ll be here before too long if you’d like to wait.’

‘No, I’ll come back later,’ said Trave, backing away. He knew what Seaforth had in mind – a call to Quaid while Trave sat in the poky waiting room where he’d talked to Thorn on the day after the murder, and the inspector would be round in an instant to remove his rogue assistant from 59 Broadway once and for all.

‘As you wish,’ said Seaforth, watching the retreating policeman with the same look of scornful amusement he’d bestowed on Trave from the departing Underground train five days before.

Trave walked aimlessly through the streets, trying to get his thoughts under control and work out what to do next. He cursed himself for having gone to 59 Broadway, yet he knew he’d had no choice. He didn’t know Thorn’s home address and he had no way of finding it out, so the spy headquarters had been the only place he could go to look for him.
He’d had to take a chance, and it was just bad luck that he’d
run into Seaforth instead. But there was a price to pay for bad luck. Trave felt sure that Seaforth had already put in his call to Quaid and that the inspector would soon have people out looking for him. The net was tightening around him, not Seaforth, and he needed to get out of the area.

But where to? He was on his own now, he had to face that. He had a warrant card and a revolver with six rounds of ammunition, but otherwise he was a policeman without resources. He’d burnt his boats with Scotland Yard by going to 59 Broadway, and the only way back was if he could find out what Seaforth was plotting and foil his plan before it was too late.

Seaforth – he was the key, Trave suddenly realized, not Thorn. Trave had no idea where Thorn was, he had no way of finding out, and he couldn’t wait around for him to show up. But perhaps none of that mattered. Because he did know where Seaforth was. If Seaforth was at 59 Broadway, then he couldn’t be at home in his apartment, and maybe there would be something there that would provide a breakthrough or at least a lead that might take the investigation forward.

And in the same instant that Trave thought of Seaforth’s apartment, he realized that he was wrong about being on his own. He’d forgotten about Ava. In a flash he remembered her parting words to him at Bow Street the day before: ‘You can count on me.’ Ava knew where Seaforth lived – she could tell him where to go.

Trave remembered Seaforth’s mocking smile from a few minutes before, the way he’d looked as though he had the game already won. Perhaps he was too arrogant to imagine a policeman turning to crime and breaking into his apartment without a warrant. Perhaps his confidence was his Achilles’ heel.

There was a sandbagged police box at the end of Victoria Street, and it didn’t take long for Trave to get Ava’s phone number. He rang it again and again, but there was no reply, and, as with Thorn, there was no available listing for Seaforth’s apartment. Trave wasn’t surprised. Privacy was apparently one of the perquisites of spying.

The mood of black despair that Trave had felt after seeing Seaforth seized him again and he fought to keep control of his emotions. Up and down like a yo-yo, his mood swings were getting more extreme as he crisscrossed London, getting nowhere fast. But he knew he couldn’t give up. Perhaps A
va was home but not picki
ng up the telephone, or perhaps she was out shopping or walking around aimlessly just like him. Whatever the case, sooner or later she would have to go home, and Trave intended to make sure she found him waiting for her. Ava was his last lead, and he could not let it go. Wearily, he made his way through the backstreets to Victoria station and caught an overland train to Battersea.

Thorn missed Trave by less than ten minutes. Jarvis reported the deputy chief’s arrival to Seaforth as soon as Thorn had gone upstairs and shut the door of his office.

‘’E looks like ’e’s been in the wars, I can tell you that,’ said the caretaker, looking pleased.

‘I’m sorry to hear that. Oh, and by the way, I don’t think there’s any need to tell Mr Thorn about that policeman’s visit. It sounds like he’s got quite enough on his plate already,’ said Seaforth, looking hard at Jarvis.