The Age of Treachery (12 page)

“He did indeed,” said Forrester. “Though that was perfectly consistent with helping me clear Gordon Clark.”

“I suppose so. What about this Dorfmann chap? Even if he was a bit of a Nazi I can’t quite see why that would have led him to want to do away with David Lyall. I mean, he wasn’t in Norway when Lyall was on the run there, was he?”

“I’ve no reason to suppose so. As far as I know he never left Berlin. He was at the university there.”

“And why would Calthrop have had anything against Lyall?” asked Harrison. “Low though my opinion of the Foreign Office might be, and lower still of the intelligence community, I wouldn’t have said that stabbing Oxford dons and chucking them out of windows was their normal M.O., would you?”

“No,” said Forrester. “But remember I did see Calthrop and Dorfmann in deep conversation in Whitehall while I was in London.”

“Well that’s not so surprising if Dorfmann is being groomed for political power in the new Germany. He’s exactly the sort of person Calthrop would want to cultivate.”

“It may be something to do with this spy network Norton claims Calthrop’s setting up.”

“Do you mean the conversation with Dorfmann might have had something to do with that, or that Lyall’s death might have?”

“Either. Both. I’m not sure, it just came into my head.”

“Well, one never knows with these cloak and dagger operations,” said Harrison. “It’s such a murky business. But it could be a profitable angle for us, couldn’t it? All the police seem interested in is an academic rivalry, which points the finger firmly at Dr. Clark. If we want to widen the range of suspects we’ve got to widen the range of possible motives.”

“I can’t see the police being very impressed at being told one of the guests at High Table that night had something to do with the intelligence service. After all, that’s probably a given in Oxford.”

“True enough,” said Harrison. “We’d need more than that. Something that links Lyall to either Calthrop or Dorfmann. Do you know anybody in the intelligence racket?”

“’Fraid not,” said Forrester, and then realised this wasn’t quite true. “Well, possibly,” he said. “Ex-intelligence, anyway. And nobody, I think, is really ex-intelligence, are they?”

* * *

When the pub closed they walked back towards the college together, and Forrester decided he had an obligation to tell Harrison what had happened by Folly Bridge that afternoon.

“I hesitate because it’s probably my imagination,” he said. “But if somebody is thinking of putting a spoke in our investigation, you might be a target too.”

“I’ll watch my back,” said Harrison. He grinned, but suddenly the silent, darkened streets and alleys felt different to Forrester. A man known to both of them had died, violently, less than seventy-two hours before. If Forrester was right, whoever had done it was still at large – and he and Harrison were their chief danger.

Both of them knew, after the last five years, that someone who has killed once finds it much easier to kill again.

Suddenly, it seemed their footsteps on the frosty pavements echoed more loudly than before; the shadows in the entranceways were deeper. Forrester glanced up at the scaffolding on the buildings under repair – and there were plenty of buildings under repair this winter – and wondered what was concealed behind the ice-crusted tarpaulins. And when he bade Harrison good night and climbed the stairs to his rooms, he asked himself if there was someone waiting for him around the next turn of the staircase.

Or in the hallway outside his door.

Once inside he shut the door and locked it after him. Then he went to pour himself a sherry and remembered, too late, that he had given the last of it to Gordon Clark on the night David Lyall had died.

He laughed, softly, pulled the curtains and went to bed.

Forrester made the call early the next morning. The secretary to the Foreign Manager of
The Sunday Times
had asked no questions after Forrester had explained his wartime connection, and set up an appointment for that day. He knew it was a tenuous lead, but it was also the best route he could think of into the world of intelligence.

When the London train finally got him into Paddington, he took the Circle Line to King’s Cross and headed south down the bleak wasteland of Gray’s Inn Road to the offices of
The Sunday Times
. After a few minutes’ wait he was ushered up to the vast newsroom on the second floor, echoing with clacking typewriters and teeming with journalists, sub editors and copy boys, before being conducted to an office grandly labelled “Foreign Manager, Kemsley Newspapers”. When he went inside he understood why Fleming had not proposed they meet in the pub across the road.

The desk behind which the former naval officer sat in his wood-panelled office looked for all the world like the control centre for some vast spy network. Not only were there four British Post Office telephones in different colours, several sets of red, green and white General Electric light boards and two Marconi intercoms, but on the wall behind him was a huge map of the world, with tiny flashing lights embedded in cities from Anchorage to Addis Ababa.

“Just journalists,” said Fleming, waving a hand airily at the map, “but one has to keep tabs on them.” The air of self deprecation on his bony, handsome, slightly querulous-looking face didn’t deceive Forrester for a moment: he knew how much Fleming had enjoyed all the trappings and excitement of Naval Intelligence during the war, and it was clear that despite the loss of the Royal Navy uniform which had suited him so well, he was trying to recreate it here. There was always something of the overgrown schoolboy about Ian Fleming.

“It’s all for show,” said Fleming modestly. “Convinces Kemsley he’s getting his money’s worth from me.”

Lord Kemsley had hired Fleming to help bolster the image of a newspaper group which had not come out of the war with a high reputation. Just months before the invasion of Poland its somewhat impressionable owner had blotted his copybook with the British government by rushing off to Germany to interview Hitler, and then compounded the offence by publishing intelligence which turned out to come from the top-secret Ultra programme. Now he wanted to make the paper respectable again – and had hired the well-connected Fleming as part of that process.

Grandson of a financier, son of an MP, old Etonian, friend of Noël Coward, Fleming had failed to find any role beyond that of playboy until the war came along; once it had begun he came into his own, dreaming up grand schemes for British intelligence and even giving unsolicited advice to the Americans on how to create their own spy organisation. Forrester had met him several times at SOE training courses in various requisitioned country houses and then, memorably, in a wrecked chateau in France after the D-Day landings. Many people regarded the man as an arrogant snob, but Forrester had a somewhat perverse liking for him, sensing the insecurity behind the insouciant façade.

Beyond his slightly ambivalent job at
The Sunday Times
(what did a Foreign Manager
really
do?) Forrester had heard rumours that Fleming had another, even more unorthodox newspaper connection in the form of a risky affair with Ann Charteris, wife of Viscount Rothermere, the owner of the
Daily Mail
, and one of Fleming’s closest friends.

Their sexual congress was rumoured to be somewhat outré, and it was said that between bouts of activity they would exchange notes on how their respective papers could better compete, even as Fleming insisted on his continuing affection for Ann’s husband. It was, in short, a relationship replete with danger. But despite that, or perhaps because of it, Fleming delighted in gossip and was fascinated to hear an extra titbit about the Barnard murder.

“Calthrop was there that night?” he said, when Forrester told him. “He must hate that. He’s such a careful man, is Calthrop.”

“I’ve been told he’s setting up an anti-Soviet spy network.”

Fleming raised a highly bred eyebrow. “You’re not supposed to know that. Who told you?”

“It’s common gossip in Oxford,” said Forrester, avoiding a direct answer. “Might he have been there because of Lyall?”

“You mean, to recruit him?”

“Or to investigate him?”

“It’s possible, but he most likely came to talk to your Master.”

“Winters?”

Fleming checked to make sure the door was closed.

“You remember Mycroft Holmes?” he asked, unexpectedly.

“Well, I remember reading about him in Sherlock Holmes stories,” replied Forrester. “Big fat chap, wasn’t he, and even cleverer than his brother?”

“
Éminence grise
of British intelligence,” said Fleming. “Just like Michael Winters during the late hostilities. I’m sure Calthrop was there to ask Winters’ advice about setting up the new op against the Soviets.”

Forrester paused, surprised. Somehow, he’d never thought to ask what the Master had been doing, apart from being Master, during the war.

“He never mentioned it,” said Forrester. “Winters, I mean. I didn’t even know he’d been involved with intelligence.”

“Well, he’s not the sort of chap to go talking about these things, but he was very highly regarded. And of course he’s very sound on communism. Calthrop may have even been asking him whether he’d be prepared to be the head boy.”

“What, of the counter-intelligence operation?”

“Why not? A natural step up from being Master of an Oxford college.”

Forrester considered this. “I’ve always just thought of Winters as an academic,” he said. “This puts him in a new light.”

Fleming glanced at his Rolex. “Look, can we continue this in my car? I’ve promised Ann I’d drop by for drinks at Warwick House. You can join me, if you like. She usually has an interesting crowd.”

Minutes later Fleming was pulling his modest Morris Oxford out of its parking spot beside Kemsley’s blue Rolls Royce and he and Forrester were gliding through the almost car-free city towards Green Park. Forrester said, “There was a German there that night named Peter Dorfmann, did you ever hear anything about him?”

“Professor of German Literature at Berlin University,” replied Fleming, shifting gears smoothly.

“How did he manage to hold a job like that and avoid getting involved with the Nazis?”

“Low cunning, I imagine.”

“It can’t have been easy, keeping them at arm’s length in a prominent position like that.”

They were turning into Bond Street now, and Forrester noted that Sotheby’s was in business again, as was Cartier’s. No posters were asking people to save Fabergé eggs for the children.

“Was a German literature professor a prominent position during the war?” asked Fleming. “I mean, I can easily imagine this fellow pontificating away in the literature department without
der Führer
’s beady eye ever fastening on him.”

“Don’t forget
der Führer
was an author,” said Forrester.

Fleming laughed. “What a dreadful thought: having to deliver solemn lectures on
Mein Kampf
.”

“And Goebbels was a book lover.”

“He was indeed,” said Fleming. “He used to burn one before bedtime every night.” He pulled the Morris neatly into a parking space opposite Warwick House. One positive outcome of the Luftwaffe’s depredations: there were plenty of parking spaces in London these days.

Newly refurbished, Warwick House rose magnificently out of the surrounding ruins, and from the upper drawing room there were magnificent views over the snowy expanse of Green Park, with Buckingham Palace visible through the winter trees.

As he looked around the room it seemed to Forrester that Fleming’s mistress was using her husband’s money and her own formidable energies to recreate the salons of the 1930s. The place was thick with writers, artists, Tory politicians and the kind of aristocrats once described as being distinguished by “their intricate family relationships and curious nicknames”.

But the centre of attention was Lady Rothermere herself, with flashing eyes and thick, dark hair, and managing, despite the opulence of her surroundings, to give an impression of bohemian recklessness. She embraced Fleming and waved her champagne glass welcomingly towards Forrester.

“Have you heard what
Time
magazine says about me?” she asked. “Peter, show them the article.” Peter Quennell, recently foisted on the editor of the
Daily Mail
by Ann as a book critic with a salary a thousand pounds more than that of the previous incumbent, obediently brought out the cutting.

“‘In a beautiful new red straw hat,’” he read. “‘Brought from Paris by her friend the Duchess of Westminster, the vituperative Ann, Lady Rothermere—’”

“What nonsense,” interrupted Ann.

“Perfectly true,” said Fleming.

“‘The vituperative Ann, Lady Rothermere, 32,’” continued Quennell, “‘is forcing her gloomy new husband, Lord Rothermere, 47, to pay more attention to his newspaper interests. As for him, his daily trips to the office are becoming more and more irksome, and he longs to get away from the job to travel, study, read. But his wife’s enthusiasm for the paper is preventing him.’”

“All nonsense,” said Ann, “but it’s nice to know the people of the New World are kept informed about what sort of hat I wear.”

“What else should we tell them?” asked Fleming mischievously. “I’m sure there are details that would fascinate them even more than your taste in headgear…” and as Fleming and Ann drifted away together Forrester accepted a champagne glass from a waiter and let his eye roam around the room, which seemed to him a kind of bubble floating above the surface of austerity Britain.

“Hello, you,” said a voice behind him, and when he turned his fingers felt numb around the glass as he found himself looking into the eyes of Barbara Lytton.

But he knew perfectly well that Barbara was three years dead, and with him now only in his dreams. So what was she doing here, smiling up at him, looking like a schoolgirl again? “You don’t recognise me, do you?” said the girl. He did not. “It’s me, Gillian.”

“Good God,” said Forrester.

“No braces,” said the girl. “Not so many spots. Well, not any, actually, I hope. And no pigtails.”