The Age of Treachery (15 page)

“You’re sure about that?”

“Yes, because that’s what proves Lyall must have fallen from Gordon Clark’s window: there was no other way for him to get there. And he was surrounded by broken glass.”

Harrison leant out, twisting himself so he could peer upwards at the roof. “You know I think you could get up onto the roof from here,” he said.

“Don’t be a bloody fool,” said Forrester. “There’s ice everywhere.” But Harrison was grasping the gutter and hauling himself up.

“Harrison!” said Forrester. But Harrison was already disappearing onto the roof. Moments later Forrester heard his voice.

“There are possibilities up here,” he said. “Come and look.”

Grimacing, Forrester swung himself out of the window, turned around so his feet were firmly on the sill and swung himself up over the gutter; it was surprisingly easy. As he reached the roof Harrison was already across the sloping tiles of the Lodge and scrambling over the parapet which ran around the edge of the Lady Tower.

Forrester caught up with him on the tower, amid the debris left by the builders. Norton had complained bitterly about the idleness and unreliability of the British worker, views he would have condemned as reactionary in others but which, in his desire to get the tower repaired before the winter, had become more and more fervent. But in spite of many furious rows with foremen and bricklayers, the work had not been completed before it became too cold to mix mortar, and so now the Tower stood in a tangle of scaffolding, ropes and frozen tarpaulins.

But the view over the snowbound, moonlit city was heart-stoppingly beautiful. The spires and domes of the colleges, libraries and churches rose from the pure whiteness of the rooftops into a night sky packed with ice-white stars. Beyond the city the woods of the Thames Valley seemed to be filled with a darkness stretching back into the Ice Ages.

“Marvellous place, Oxford, isn’t it?” said Harrison. “Like being in someone’s dream.”

“Literally true, in one sense,” said Forrester. “Every college, every library, every chapel was a dream before it was a reality.”

“And I suppose will be a dream again long after it’s gone,” said Harrison.

Both of them knew that this discussion was what behaviour experts would call “displacement activity”, because without saying anything they both knew that their wild idea that the rooftop route might have allowed a murderer to get from the Lodge to Clark’s rooms was clearly a bust.

It was true that as they looked across the quadrangle at Clark’s rooms, they were no more than thirty feet away in a direct line, but two or three hundred feet if one went around the quadrangle along the rooftops. There was no need to undertake the experiment of making their way around the rectangle for it to be clear that if this had been their route, nobody could have committed a murder and made their way back before the body was discovered; the roofs were simply at too many different levels – climbing from one to another would have been immensely time consuming.

“Well,” said Harrison, “it was worth a try.”

They stood there for a moment longer, looking down into the quadrangle, and then Forrester said, “Let’s have a look from the other side of the tower, to see what would have happened if somebody had gone out of the front door.”

“Let’s try it at ground level,” said Harrison. “In principle someone could have slipped out of the Lodge, turned left and gone around the outside of the college buildings to get to Clark’s set. Then he could have come back the same way. Let’s see how long it takes.”

Instead of returning to the Lodge by the way they’d come they opened the trap door that led into the Tower and found themselves on the spiral stone staircase that wound down to the outer door. The steps were worn concave, and slippery with frost, and with no source of light once the trap door was closed behind them, Forrester found himself treading with unnatural care.

The door opened easily from the inside, though it locked behind them when they went out and Harrison used the second hand on his watch to time them as they set off around the outside of the college. The ground was thick with frozen and re-frozen snow on which their shoes threatened to slip at any moment, obliging them to go slowly and carefully.

At last they reached the door in the outer wall giving onto the stairs that led to the hallway for Clark’s room. They stopped at the door, which was sealed with a notice from the Oxfordshire Constabulary. The journey from the Lodge had taken eight minutes.

“Add say three minutes for the encounter with Lyall,” said Harrison, “and with the return journey that makes nearly twenty minutes.”

Forrester thought about it.

“What if he’d run, at least on the way back? In fact he’d have had to if he wanted to come back into the Master’s Lodge as the rest of us were going out to the body.”

“So the rest of you wouldn’t notice him coming back in.”

“Exactly,” said Forrester.

“You don’t remember Dorfmann or anybody else being particularly out of breath, do you?” asked Harrison hopefully. “When you were looking at the body?”

“’Fraid not,” said Forrester. “Lyall rather took our attention. And then we were all looking up at Clark’s window, assuming at that point that whoever had done it was still in there. But Dorfmann and indeed Calthrop were definitely there with me when we were under the window – I remember them talking.”

“Getting back from here in time to join you would have been the tricky part,” said Harrison. “The killer couldn’t afford not to be among those present when the body was discovered, and almost by definition it was going to be discovered straight away – the crash of breaking glass ensured that.”

Forrester looked at the re-frozen snow. “How could anyone run on that?” he said. “Look how careful we had to be. He’d have had to walk or risk breaking an ankle. And he didn’t have time to walk.” But even as he said these words his mind was processing something Harrison had said: “the crash of breaking glass”.

Harrison looked at the locked door and the police notice. “I wish we could have a look at the window from the inside,” he said. There was a pause. Forrester sighed.

“In for a penny, in for a pound,” he said, remembering the training course near Birmingham in picking locks and forcible entry given by a former burglar.

He knelt down and slid his fingernails under the police document, loosened the glue and pried it off without damaging it.

“I’d like to borrow a pipe cleaner off you,” he said to Harrison, “but then you might want to slip away. I’m committing an offence here and I wouldn’t like you to be charged as an accessory.”

“I wouldn’t miss this for the world,” said Harrison, handing him a pipe cleaner. “I’ve never watched an expert at work before.”

“I’ve only actually done it twice,” said Forrester, stripping off the cotton and inserting the wire into the lock. “Most of my wartime forced entries involved a number-twelve boot slamming into a doorframe.” There was a satisfying click. “But the skill doesn’t entirely seem to have deserted me.”

It was dark in Clark’s rooms, the moonlight prevented from coming through the broken window by a sheet of tar paper held in place with three or four wooden laths.

“I’d like to take this off,” said Forrester, “but try to avoid breaking the laths – I want to put them back where they were if I can.” They levered the window covering off, the nails squeaking in protest, their shoes crunching on the broken glass scattered around the floor.

“Forgive me for being dim,” said Harrison, “but what are we looking for?”

“I’m not entirely sure,” said Forrester as they lowered the frozen tar paper to the floor, “but when you mentioned the crash of breaking glass I was trying to visualise the scene. You know, X stabbing Lyall, Lyall staggering back and crashing through the window.”

He bent down to examine the smashed woodwork that had once held the broken panes.

“Lyall wasn’t a heavy man,” he said. “It would have taken quite a bit of force to break this window frame.”

“Perhaps whoever did it threw him across the room?” suggested Harrison.

“After stabbing him? Seems a bit unlikely. I mean – imagine I’m Lyall and you’re X. Mime stabbing me. We know the knife went in here.” He indicated his heart.

Harrison raised his hand with his pipe clenched in his fingers and brought it down on Forrester’s chest. Forrester staggered back and felt the broken frame of the window digging into his back.

“It’s possible,” he conceded.

“He might have been trying to avoid a second blow,” said Harrison.

Forrester examined the broken frame more closely. He tugged at one of the jagged ends and it came away in his hand, the unbroken end pulling out of the socket in the main frame. “Damn,” he said. “Tampering with evidence. Not what I’d intended.”

“If you drop it on the floor it could have just fallen out,” said Harrison.

“Yes,” said Forrester. “Alright, let’s get this tar paper back up before somebody sees us through the window.”

Harrison turned to him as they worked. “There’s a surprising amount of glass in here,” he said.

“Surprising in what way?”

“Well, if Lyall went backwards out of the window, wouldn’t most of the glass have gone down with him into the quad?”

“There
was
a lot of glass in the quad,” said Forrester.

With some difficulty they slid the laths into position and hammered the nails back into the holes so they held the tar paper in place once more. Before they left Harrison glanced around the room.

“No sign of a struggle,” he said. Even in the semi-darkness it was clear that all Clark’s books and papers were in place.

“There may not have been one,” said Forrester. “If Lyall wasn’t expecting the attack.”

“I say,” said Harrison. “Something’s just occurred to me: if it wasn’t Dr. Clark who killed him, why would Lyall have come here at all? I mean – what was he doing in Clark’s rooms in the first place?”

Forrester considered this. “Somebody could have given him a message,” he said at last. “Asked him to meet them here. Presumably he thought he was coming to see Clark.”

“But hadn’t there been an almighty row between him and Clark less than an hour before?” objected Harrison. “Wouldn’t it have seemed odd to him to have Clark asking him to come and see him in his rooms?”

“Yes, it would,” said Forrester.

“Unless the note said that Clark wanted to apologise or something?”

“Even if the note had said that, Lyall wouldn’t have believed it. Clark would never have apologised to Lyall in a million years.”

“You seem very certain of that.”

Forrester met his eye, remembering that he had never told Harrison the real reason why Clark hated Lyall. He felt like a cheat, but he had promised Margaret, and if the police didn’t know that Lyall had been having an affair with Clark’s wife, Forrester certainly wasn’t going to tell anybody else. Instead he gave a short smile.

“I am very certain, knowing both men,” he said with finality, and they closed Clark’s door behind them, carefully replaced the police notice and went back to shut up the Lodge.

The next day, just before midnight, MacLean having been as good as his word, Forrester found himself at Northolt Aerodrome, boarding an RAF C5 loaded with engine parts destined for Berlin. He found himself sitting in a canvas seat between the crates beside a young army captain in a de-Nazification unit and a cheerful Irishman named Lynch who announced he was going to Germany to take charge of “the opera”. Forrester looked at him with some surprise. “Opera?” he asked. “I didn’t know that was part of army operations.”

The Irishman laughed. “Oh, culture’s a big deal over there these days,” he said. “The Russians and the Yanks and us are all competing to take Jerry’s mind off the fact that he hasn’t got anything to eat. Your Hun loves opera, you see. ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ and all that kind of thing.”

“Were you an opera administrator before the war?” asked Forrester.

“Not a bit of it,” answered Lynch cheerfully. “My entire experience consists of being in the chorus of the County Cork Amateur Operatic Society.”

“You’re kidding,” said the captain.

“Not at all,” said Lynch. “I put down opera as one of my interests on some form I had to fill out and I think from then on it was Chinese whispers. You know, somebody said, ‘Does he know anything about opera?’ And somebody else said, ‘There was something about it on his application,’ and a third chap remembered it as, ‘Oh, yes, he’s an expert.’”

Forrester couldn’t help smiling: the great British amateur tradition was about to descend on German opera lovers.

“I plan to introduce a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan,” said Lynch. “Do you think they’ll like
The Mikado
?”

“I think they’ll hate it,” said the de-Nazification captain, whose name was Clare, “and a bloody good thing too. I’d like to make Goering sing ‘I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General’ with a bayonet up his arse.”

Clare had not formed a favourable impression of the Germans coming to his office trying to prove they had no connection with the Nazis. “If you believe them it would be very hard to understand how Hitler was ever elected,” he said. “According to the people who come to see me everybody in Germany in 1933 was a Social Democrat, most of them had Jewish fiancées, and their favourite politician was Winston Churchill.”

Forrester laughed.

“What gets my goat is their self pity,” said Clare. “They blame Hitler for getting them into this mess; they never blame themselves for putting him in power.”

“And I suppose they’ve all torn up their party membership cards,” said Forrester. Clare smiled.

“Of course they have, but it doesn’t do them any good. The Nazis sent their membership records off to be pulped when they realised they were losing the war, but the owner of the pulping mill handed them to the Americans. We can check every lie that comes out of the bastards’ mouths.”

“So I could check if a particular person had been a party member or not?” asked Forrester.

“If you can get the right clearance to visit Wasserkäfersteig,” said Clare.