The Age of Treachery (23 page)

What had he found out in Berlin? Essentially, that although Dorfmann had indeed been a relatively obscure academic during the Nazi years, he had enjoyed good relations with senior members of the party, including its intelligence apparatus. That he had been in possession of some kind of Old Norse manuscript, and that such a manuscript had been used by German intelligence, involving two figures codenamed Erik and Saint, the latter having been in a position to give information on the intentions of the Soviet High Command and the Murmansk convoys.

Which reinforced the idea that Dorfmann might be behind Lyall’s death, because there was no doubt Lyall had been talking up his possession of an ancient Norse manuscript when he was killed. Both Haraldson and his conversation with the Scandinavian students confirmed that.

On the other hand, there was the fact that Dorfmann had been in the room with Forrester when Lyall was killed – and Forrester now knew that, contrary to what he had supposed, Lyall had not taken a manuscript from the Arnfeldt-Laurvig estate when he had been there during the war.

But he might have taken the knowledge of the manuscript’s existence. Knowledge gained in that depleted library with its sinister history.

And suddenly Forrester was certain that Lyall had used both the manuscript and the occult associations of the house from which it came to draw Haraldson to Oxford.

But why? Why had he wanted the Norwegian in England in the first place? What had he got to gain by it?

Forrester walked out of the cloisters into a shadowy quarter full of half-timbered medieval merchants’ houses and emerged into the Axeltorv, where a farmer’s market was going on under the watchful eye of Erik of Pomerania. Erik, after being dethroned as King of Denmark, had set up as a pirate and piled up vast quantities of treasure, now reputedly hidden in a castle in Pomerania. But treasure or no treasure, the eyes of Erik’s statue seemed to be fixed wistfully on a large ball of Gouda on the stall below him. Perhaps even pirate kings longed, in the afterlife, for a bit of cheese.

Even as he contemplated Erik’s statue, Forrester thought of Lyall eyeing the photographs in Sophie’s albums – and slipping into his pocket the photograph revealing the identity of the visitors who had come to Bjornsfjord in 1937.

But if he
had
taken the photograph Lyall had never spoken about it to anyone in Oxford; he had just talked about a manuscript. And he had taken no manuscript from Sophie’s house. Forrester’s thoughts were beginning to march in a circle, and he had to stop. He began to walk towards Hamlet’s Castle.

It wasn’t really Hamlet’s medieval Elsinore, of course, but a handsome renaissance building complete with pitched roofs and elaborate towers around a central courtyard. The story that had inspired Shakespeare had originated long before his time in a document known as
The Saga of Hrolf Kraki
. In that version the murdered king had two sons, who instead of pretending to be mad, while trying to solve the mystery, went about in disguise. There was also a tantalisingly elusive Icelandic hero called Amlóði, who accidentally killed the king’s advisor in his mother’s bedroom before dispatching the usurper himself. Whether any of those events had taken place here at Elsinore was another matter, but Forrester was prepared to believe they might have, and enjoy the sensation of being, for a while, in the heart of a legend.

He approached the castle across the star-shaped expanse of grassy fortifications, crossed the bridge over the moat and gazed up at the green copper spheres of the Trumpeter’s Tower. Beneath the tower was the statue of Ogier the Dane, the Viking chieftain who was supposed to wake and save his country if it was ever in peril, but who never had.

Inside the castle, he walked under huge seventeenth-century chandeliers along the length of the Great Hall and through the Royal Chambers. In the Royal Library a gnome-like librarian, looking like a character in a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, was perched on a tall wheeled ladder, pulling out one leather-bound book after another, examining it and writing in a large notebook before putting it back. As Forrester watched, the librarian leaned out too far and the ladder began to tilt dangerously. Forrester darted in and steadied it until the man could climb down. “
Tag
,” he said, and when Forrester replied in English, immediately switched languages.

“Thank you,” he said. “Very quick you were.”

“Very high were you,” said Forrester, and then realised there was a reason why the man had been leaning out instead of wheeling the ladder along: the castors on which it ran were jammed. He took out his penknife and bent down to free them. “Wonderful library,” said Forrester, as much as anything to make polite conversation while the man calmed down. “Any early editions of
Hamlet
?”

“If we had them,” said the librarian, “they would have been stolen by the Germans.”

Forrester processed this. “Of course. I imagine they took a fair bit.”

“Anything they thought they could get away with.”

“Including sagas?”

“Probably. That is what I am trying to find out. Nordic they believed they were, though they really just as gangsters should be described in my opinion.”

Suddenly Forrester’s mind was racing. “Listen,” he said, “I wonder if I could ask a favour.” And he wrote down his name and address. “If you do find out that the Germans removed any Old Norse manuscripts during the occupation, would you let me know?”

“Certainly,” said the librarian. “May I be asking why?”

Forrester smiled. “It’s a long story,” he said.

Forrester landed at Northolt in the early hours of the morning and hitched a ride on an army lorry going to the Kensington Barracks. From there he called MacLean’s office at the War Ministry and was told he wasn’t in yet. He took the tube to Whitehall, had a cup of tea and a bun at a cabman’s stand and called again. This time MacLean’s secretary told him to go to the bridge in St. James’s Park and wait there. By the time MacLean finally arrived Forrester was feeling unwashed, unshaved and exhausted; all he really wanted to do was go to bed.

“So you dropped me in it again,” he said as MacLean appeared. “Why do I never learn?”

MacLean took out a cigarette, lit it judiciously, and offered one to Forrester, who declined.

“You seem to have survived very well,” he said. “Although your nose is looking a bit bent.”

“I would have had a better chance of surviving if I’d been told what I was up against.”

“My dear chap, if I’d known, I’d have told you,” said MacLean, “but I’m all ears now,” and he listened intently as Forrester gave a short précis of what had happened to him since landing in Berlin.

“You really seem to have put the wind up somebody, don’t you?” said MacLean, when Forrester had finished. “Good for you. So, let’s have a look at the snap you pinched.”

He examined the photograph Forrester had taken from the album in Sophie’s drawing room, and said he’d keep it to see if the boys in photo analysis could glean anything more. Forrester said he wanted to show it to the police first as part of the evidence about Lyall’s murder, and MacLean looked reluctant. “Tell you what,” he said, “let’s go back to the Ministry and see if we can get it copied.”

Forrester agreed, and they walked back through the park to Whitehall along paths covered in ice, which had melted and refrozen so often it was like a range of miniature mountains. The snow on the grass was grey now, and miserable-looking ducks watched them suspiciously from the bleak surface of the lake.

“But whatever we get out of the photograph, you did very well, you know,” said MacLean. “Your hand seems to have lost none of its cunning.” Forrester suppressed a wry smile at his old boss’s continued use of judicious flattery. He remembered all too vividly how MacLean had been able to deploy a little understated flattery to calm his agents after the most disastrous and ill-planned missions, as though the whole point had really been to allow them to demonstrate their remarkable abilities to stay alive. Before Forrester could point this out Maclean said: “And it was worth it, of course. What you’ve found out could prevent a very bad apple from rising to the top of the barrel. I think I’m mixing a couple of metaphors there, but you know what I mean.”

“It’ll only mean something if the Americans take it seriously,” said Forrester. “I haven’t exactly got definitive proof that Dorfmann is a bad apple.”

“Circumstantial evidence may well be good enough in a case like this,” said MacLean. “And if we can track down the rest of the files referring to ‘Erik’ and ‘Saint’ and identify them, we may have something actionable.”

“The problem is,” said Forrester, “I’m not sure any of this is going to help save Gordon Clark. Dorfmann may have been part of the Nazi intelligence apparatus, but that doesn’t prove he killed David Lyall.”

“Unless Lyall thought what he’d found out about Dorfmann in Norway gave him some sort of leverage. Something to do with Satanism?”

“You think he might have tried to blackmail Dorfmann?”

“What do you think?”

Forrester considered. “He was perfectly capable of it,” he said, and then added, “The problem is Dorfmann has an alibi: me.”

“Because you were with him when Lyall was killed?”

“Exactly.”

“Perhaps he had an accomplice. After all, he didn’t come after you himself, did he, in Berlin or Norway? He sent professionals. Perhaps one of them did it.”

“Good point,” said Forrester. “Let’s hope we can persuade the police to consider that possibility.”

“Anyway,” said MacLean. “I very much appreciate what you’ve done. We need good Germans in power when we hand the place back to them, not people like Dorfmann.”

* * *

Forrester telephoned Inspector Barber from Oxford Station as soon as the train pulled in, and made an appointment at a time that allowed him to return to the college, bathe, shave and change before walking down to the police station. There was a message waiting for him from Margaret Clark, but he decided not to respond until he’d spoken to Barber – he might, after all, be able to bring her some good news.

He began to suspect he was wrong about this about two minutes into the meeting. Forrester could always sense when his words were having the effect he was looking for – and this time he was certain they weren’t. Barber listened attentively and politely. He even made notes, but he also drew pictures of sheep on his blotter, and when Forrester had finished he said, “This is all very interesting, but it doesn’t get us very far, does it, sir?”

He paused, and Forrester bit back the impulse to object, and waited.

“You’ve got no proof Mr. Dorfmann did work for German intelligence,” said Barber, “just a very obscure reference in some mis-filed dossier and a lot of academic tittle-tattle. And as he was a German national in a time of war, provided he didn’t commit war crimes he was perfectly entitled to lend his services to the German government. In fact he probably had little option. So if Lyall was trying to blackmail him by threatening to reveal his intelligence connections, that wasn’t much of a threat, was it? Certainly not enough, in my view, for Dorfmann to respond by taking the risk of murdering the man.”

“Unless Lyall also had evidence Dorfmann had been in Norway in the 1930s and taken part in Satanic rites.”

“What evidence? You’ve got no proof David Lyall had anything to blackmail Dorfmann with.”

“Except the photograph I’ve given you.”

“Of two blokes rowing a dinghy? That proves nothing at all. And you couldn’t blackmail anybody with that anyway, because you can’t identify anybody in it.”

“But I’m sure the missing photograph
did
have an identifiable face. And that’s the one Lyall took.”

“The one you
say
Lyall took. But anybody could have taken it. It could have just fallen out of the photograph album. You can’t tell me what was in the picture and you can’t show me any proof Lyall ever had it.”

“What about the fact that Dorfmann tried to have me killed in Berlin and Norway?”

“It’s not a ‘fact’ that Dorfmann tried to have you killed in either place,” said Barber. “It’s your supposition. You stirred up a hornets’ nest there, that’s obvious, with all this amateur detective work, and God knows who you annoyed. But the fact that you nearly got yourself killed doesn’t necessarily implicate Dorfmann and doesn’t do a ha’porth of good to Gordon Clark either, as far as I’m concerned.” He stood up.

“Look, I fully respect your determination to help your friend, and I see you’ve taken a lot of risks for him, which I can only admire. But nothing you’ve found out materially alters the case against him, does it?”

There was a pause. Forrester stood up too. “Not yet,” he said. “But it should give you pause, Inspector Barber. If nothing else, what I’ve found out in Germany and Norway shows this case is a lot more complicated than it seems. All I ask of you is this: don’t shut your eyes to the possibility that Gordon Clark is innocent. Because if you do you could be perpetrating a terrible injustice.”

And he left the room. If his words sounded confident, it was an illusion. Inside, he was certain he had achieved nothing at all.

* * *

He was glad he had spoken to Barber before he met Margaret Clark: he had no false hope to hold out. They met in the churchyard of St. Mary’s, where Forrester had last fought his demons before the night of Lyall’s murder. It seemed a lifetime ago, and when Margaret Clark came through the archway it seemed even longer. He stared at her in astonishment as she approached, suddenly aware of an enormous change within himself.

His secret infatuation with her had utterly vanished. After Sophie Arnfeldt-Laurvig, Margaret Clark looked as cheap and artificial as a ring on a Woolworths counter. Still beautiful, still intelligent, still exuding a powerful sensual appeal; but not, any longer, for him.

It was, in truth, a profound relief to be freed of his fascination with her. It felt as if a weight had been lifted from his heart. And the change in his feelings made him more determined than ever to save Gordon Clark – if only to stop his friend from being destroyed for the sake of this shallow woman.