Orders from Berlin (37 page)

‘Mum’s the word,’ said Jarvis with a knowing nod. Something told him that his Boer War Veterans Fund collection box would be receiving a significant contribution before the end of the day, and he had no objections to that.

Trave’s visit had alarmed Seaforth, even though he didn’t like to admit it. The connection between his arch-enemy and the dogged young detective spelt trouble. Seaforth guessed that Trave must have found out something or he wouldn’t be looking for Thorn. He cursed the terrier-like persistence of the detective and wished that he’d renewed his complaints to Quaid about Trave’s attentions instead of staying quiet after Bertram’s arrest in the hope that Trave would just go away. Now he felt he needed to act before Trave and Thorn dug any deeper, but he consoled himself with the thought that if all went according to plan, he would have nothing more to worry about by the end of the day.

Seaforth thought it was a good sign that Trave and Thorn had missed each other. He recalled how he’d had the same slice of luck when Albert Morrison had arrived at HQ
after Thorn had
gone home. His priority now must be to keep Thorn quiet and on the premises while he sent the intelligence briefing to Churchill and awaited the Prime Minister’s summons. As Seaforth was well aware, the
possibility
that Thorn would leave HQ for some reason before the summons arrived had always been an essential weakness in his assassination plan, and in the last few days he had given considerable thought to how he could keep Thorn in position without arousing his suspicions. Telling Thorn the truth – that he’d sent an intelligence briefing to the Prime Minister and that they had to wait around in case Churchill wanted to see them – was not an option. Thorn would smell a rat. He’d made no secret for a while of his belief that Seaforth was supplying Whitehall with false
intelligence
. No, Seaforth knew that his best chance of success was for Thorn to know nothing about the reason for the summons until he actually got to Downing Street. And it was with this in mind that Seaforth had come up with the stratagem he was about to put into effect.

He paused for a moment in front of Thorn’s door, composing his features into a friendly smile, and then knocked.

‘Come,’ said a familiar irritable voice, and Seaforth went in.

Jarvis had been right – Thorn did look a mess. The right side of his head was swollen and he had heavy bandaging around his eye.

‘Sorry to hear about what happened,’ said Seaforth, feigning sympathy.

‘No, you’re not,’ said Thorn, looking up angrily as he rapidly put away the file he had been reading, although not quickly enough to stop Seaforth from seeing that it was his own personnel file. ‘What do you want?’ he asked suspiciously. He could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times Seaforth had sought him out in his office, and he suspected an ulterior motive for this visit.

‘Just to let you know that C called,’ said Seaforth. ‘He’s on his way back to London and he wants to see us when he comes in.’

‘What about?’ Thorn asked, fixing his eyes on Seaforth as if trying to see behind the younger man’s smooth, opaque exterior.

‘I don’t know, but he was very insistent, so I thought I ought to tell you,’ said Seaforth mildly, refusing to rise to Thorn’s challenge.

Thorn continued to stare at his subordinate for several moments and then looked away with a grimace. ‘Is there anything else?’ he asked, making no effort to conceal his hostility.

‘No,’ Seaforth said genially. ‘That’s it.’ He went out with a smile, closing the door behind him. It was a lie about C, who was actually away overnight, but there was no one in the building except perhaps the twins who could gainsay Seaforth’s account of C having telephoned, and there was no reason for Thorn to cross-examine the twins when he had Seaforth’s file to keep him busy through the afternoon.

Now it was time to put the plan into action. Seaforth went quickly back upstairs to his office and called the Prime Minister’s office using the number Churchill’s secretary had given him when he visited the bunker. It was the same secretary who answered the phone. He knew who Seaforth was straight away and agreed to make sure that the briefing documents would go straight in front of the Prime Minister as soon as they arrived at 10 Downing Street. After that, of course, it would be up to the PM, but the secretary did say that Mr Churchill wasn’t expected anywhere until the evening so there would be time for a meeting if the PM wanted one, which would be at Number 10 unless a daylight bombing raid forced him into the bunker. Seaforth thought that unlikely. Recently, the Luftwaffe seemed to have largely given up on day raids, preferring to come in under the cloak of darkness.

Everything was fitting into place. Seaforth replaced the telephone receiver and picked it up again immediately to order a motorcycle courier, then went down with his package of documents to the front door, waiting to put it into the hands of the messenger himself.

‘Quick as you can,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot riding on it.’

The man nodded and roared away towards the park. Seaforth looked at his watch – it was just coming on to two o’clock. There was plenty of time left for everything to play out. It helped enormously that Churchill had given instructions for Seaforth’s intelligence reports to be sent to him direct, bypassing the Joint Intelligence Committee. This way, there was every chance that the summons to Downing Street would come before the end of the afternoon, and Seaforth was reasonably confident that Thorn would stay put until then.

And after that Seaforth would hold his destiny in his own hands, and he didn’t intend to make any more mistakes.

Trave met Ava at the end of her street. She’d been out walking in the park and was on her way back, and when he told her what he knew, she wanted to come too. He tried to dissuade her, but she refused to tell him Seaforth’s address unless they went together, and in the end he had to give in.

‘This is about me as well as you,’ she said. ‘It’s about my father and Bertram and being used. You can understand that, can’t you?’ Trave could see that Ava’s opinion that Seaforth was responsible for her father’s murder and for framing Bertram appeared to have hardened into a conviction in the twenty-four hours he had been away.

‘Yes, I understand, but we need to get to Cadogan Square quickly,’ he said anxiously, looking at his watch. ‘Seaforth could go home any time. He’s got enough clout to set his own timetable.’

‘We can take Bertram’s car if you like,’ Ava volunteered. ‘He’s got it in a garage up on the High Street. It’s not exactly a Jaguar, but it should get us there quicker than the train. I’ll go and get the key.’

Trave waited impatiently while she ran upstairs to her flat, but she was back a moment later, and he had to walk fast to keep up with her. She seemed transformed from when he had seen her at the magistrates court the day before, almost as if she were a different person.

‘Do you drive?’ Trave asked as they turned the corner.

‘I wish,’ Ava said wistfully. ‘But my father and Bertram would never have stood for that. “A woman’s place is in the home” was like an article of faith for them. Oh, I know I shouldn’t talk about Bertram like he’s dead too,’ catching Trave’s surprised look at her use of the past tense. ‘But somehow I don’t feel like I’m married any more even if I am. I feel like’ – she stopped, groping for the right word – ‘like all that has happened in the last two weeks has changed me forever; that I can’t go back to who I was before, even if I wanted to, which I don’t. I want to drive and have a job and be my own person. The war’s terrible. I know that. But it’s giving women like me a chance to live their own lives for the first time, and I feel like I have to be part of that. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, I think so,’ said Trave. There was something about Ava’s innocent, breathless enthusiasm that moved him. Liberated from the bonds that had kept her tethered to the ground, her spirit seemed to soar and she had a zest for life that reminded him of his wife, Vanessa. He wanted her to have her chance.

‘I feel like you do understand,’ she said, turning to look at Trave as they hurried down the road. ‘I think I’ve always felt that, ever since that night after my father died when I was so upset and you helped me to calm down so I could say what happened. Maybe it’s because you’re the only person who doesn’t want anything from me except to help.’

‘Maybe,’ said Trave, feeling complimented but also a little embarrassed.

‘Even with Alec I feel that he’s always hoping for something,’ she said, continuing her train of thought. ‘I went to see him yesterday at the hospital after I saw you, and I know it sounds awful but I was glad he was asleep. I wanted to see that he was all right, but I didn’t want to talk to
him, to have to
answer all his questions, and so I left be
fore he
woke up.’

Ava stopped, out of breath from the talking and the hurrying. They’d reached the garage, and several minutes later she and Trave were heading back towards the river in Bertram’s two-seater Austin 7, the motor car’s first outing since she and Bertram had driven to Scotland Yard on the day after her father’s funeral.

Trave drove fast, or as fast as the car’s small engine would allow, ignoring the speed limit and braking violently several times to avoid angry pedestrians who shook their fists at him as he went past. Ava laughed and Trave forgot the seriousness of their situation for a moment as they accelerated past the Chelsea Barracks and across Sloane Square.

But Ava’s mood changed abruptly when Trave turned off the King’s Road and the tall, red-brick, Dutch-style houses of Cadogan Square came into view, surrounding the well-tended communal garden. The square looked very different from when she had last seen it two evenings before. Now it was three o’clock in the afternoon, the sun was shining, and the birds were singing in the plane trees. A woman was walking her dog across the newly mown lawn, and at
the far end two
men in whites were playing tennis. But the peacefulness of the setting had no effect on Ava. Her
experience
with Seaforth was seared into her memory, and she felt a surge of anxiety as she recalled her narrow escape from his apartment.

The houses in the square had mostly been built at the same time midway through the reign of Queen Victoria, and many of them were indistinguishable from one another, so Trave was worried that Ava might not recognize the one where Seaforth lived. But she knew it straight away, and Trave parked the car out in front. The closer the better, he thought, if Seaforth came back and they needed to make a quick getaway.

He turned off the engine and turned to look at his companion. ‘Maybe you should stay down here,’ he said, looking down at her shaking hands.

‘No, we agreed to do this together. You can’t go back on it now I’ve got you here,’ she said angrily.

‘I’m not trying to. I was thinking of you, not me.’

‘Well, don’t,’ she said, refusing to be placated. ‘We should go now, before he gets back.’

They went up the steps and Trave examined the bank of bells on the wall beside the glass-fronted door. Ava had already told him that Seaforth lived in the penthouse flat, so it was no surprise to find Seaforth’s neatly typed name next to the top bell. Trave pressed it and he and Ava waited for several minutes before breathing a simultaneous sigh of release when nothing happened. After moving his finger down the column, Trave pushed the bottom bell and almost immediately an old man wearing slippers and a cardigan appeared at the other end of the hallway, shuffled slowly across the carpet, and peered out at them apprehensively through the glass.

Trave held up his warrant card, trying to look commanding, and the old man reluctantly opened the door.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked nervously.

‘I’m afraid not. We’re here on police business,’ said Trave, repeating the meaningless but useful phrase he’d used on Seaforth earlier, and walked purposefully inside.

The old man started to protest, but Trave ignored him and headed straight for the lift, followed by Ava.

‘Do you think he’ll call the police?’ asked Ava as the lift ascended noisily towards the top floor.

‘He will in a minute,’ said Trave enigmatically.

Stepping out on the landing outside Seaforth’s flat, Ava understood what Trave meant when he took out his gun.

‘Go back in the lift,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how many bullets this’ll take, and they could rebound off the door. I don’t want you to get hit.’

‘Aren’t you going to at least try opening it some other
way?’ asked Ava, looking dismayed. She remembered Seaforth’s
dextrous picking of the lock on Bertram’s desk and
thought that he
would certainly have come up with a more sophisticated approach to breaking and entering than what Trave had in mind.

‘I’m not a locksmith,’ said Trave. ‘And we don’t have any time. Now please …’

Ava did as she was told, and a moment later there was a deafening explosion, succeeded immediately by two more. When she opened her eyes, Trave had already gone through the shattered door and was inside Seaforth’s flat. Nervously, she followed him in and came to a standstill in the middle of the living room, bathed in the sunlight that was pouring in through the wraparound windows and was glowing on the steel-and-glass surfaces of the modern furniture. She felt disoriented, as if the room were just an extension of the cityscape outside and she were floating among the towers and treetops. She felt there was no relation between this ethereal eyrie and the apartment she’d visited two evenings before.

‘God, I wish I knew what I was looking for,’ said Trave, rousing Ava from her reverie. He was systematically pulling open every cabinet and drawer in sight and rifling through any documents he found. He didn’t bother to put anything back, just threw the discarded documents on the ground and moved on to the next cache.

‘Haven’t you any idea?’ she asked.

‘Not really. I’m guessing something written down, something about whatever it is he’s planning. Something connecting him with his masters back in Berlin. If it’s here, of course,’ he added, speaking from the bedroom, where he’d gone to continue the search. ‘Because that’s the worst part – not knowing whether there is anything …’ Trave’s voice trailed away, and Ava went over to the bedroom doorway and found him holding the photograph of the smiling young man in uniform that she’d noticed when she was in the room before.