The Age of Treachery (27 page)

“A Major MacLean, sir,” said Piggot, and Forrester got up.

“I’ll come down,” he said.

There was a small fire burning in Piggot’s grate, and a half-drunk cup of tea beside a late edition of the
Oxford Mail
, open at the sporting pages. The receiver lay beside the visitors’ book on the scarred wooden counter. Forrester picked it up.

“Forrester here,” he said.

“Got something for you,” said MacLean. “From that photograph.”

“Excellent,” said Forrester. “What is it?”

“Rather not say over the phone. Can you come up to town tomorrow?” Forrester tried to bring his academic calendar to the forefront of his mind.

“I think so,” he said. “Late morning?”

“Eleven-thirty a.m. would suit me perfectly,” said MacLean. “Come to the War Office and ask for me at the front desk,” and hung up.

* * *

Harrison, needless to say, was fascinated to hear the details of MacLean’s telephone call, and Forrester knew he would have gone to London with him at the slightest excuse; but he also knew MacLean would be much less forthcoming if an outsider was present. “I’ll tell you what I’ve found out as soon as I get back,” he said. “And perhaps in the meantime you can check on Margaret Clark’s movements yesterday.”

He was relieved to find the Master was not at High Table that night, and though in other circumstances he would have found it tedious to sit beside Alan Norton and hear him wax lyrical about the shortcomings of the British builder and the problems of getting the Lady Tower back to its pre-war condition when no-one seemed to feel any sense of urgency about it but himself, tonight it was vaguely soothing: the clatter of a mountain stream over rocks, monotonous and meaningless.

“You know how often the Master has bothered to come and inspect the works?” asked Norton, rhetorically. “Once. Just
once
have I been able to get him up that tower to look at the state of it, and since then I have had no help from him whatever.”

“I daresay he has other things on his mind,” said Forrester.

“If this was Russia,” said Norton darkly, “those repairs would have been finished in a week.”

“If this was Russia,” said Forrester, “those builders would have been shot.”

“Yes,” said Norton, “and they would have bloody well deserved it.”

And as he said these words Forrester suddenly looked at the man as if for the first time, and saw him not as a victim, not as a figure of fun, but as a coiled spring of resentment and anger. A coiled spring that could be released at any time.

And might, perhaps, despite his carefully constructed alibi, have been unleashed on the night David Lyall had met his death.

In fact, thought Forrester, if David Lyall had been killed on Alan Norton’s beloved Lady Tower and not in Gordon Clark’s rooms, he would have been certain the murderer was this man sitting beside him, spitting venom at the inefficiency of the British working class whose interests he so assiduously championed.

The fog had returned to London as Forrester arrived at Paddington, and the bus that took him to Whitehall moved so slowly and uncertainly through the murk, its fog lights casting a sickly yellow sheen into the grey vapour, that all it seemed to want to do was curl up and go to sleep. Even the vast bulk of the War Ministry was almost invisible beneath the shroud of filthy air, and the sergeant at the front desk was coughing painfully as he wrote Forrester’s name in a ledger so large it might have been used by St. Peter to list the souls entering the Kingdom of Heaven. He did not have Forrester escorted to MacLean’s office, as he had expected, but asked him to wait, and when MacLean came down the stairs, moving with his usual brisk efficiency, he beckoned Forrester to follow him down a further set of steps, leading into the bowels of the building.

“They’ve got everything set up down here,” said MacLean, as he guided his guest along concrete corridors devoid even of the War Ministry’s beloved brown paint. Forrester remembered his sergeant’s advice when he had first joined up. “The rule for surviving in this army, sonny boy, is if it moves, salute it. If it doesn’t, paint it.”

The corridor turned and turned again and the ceiling became lower and lower until finally MacLean opened an unmarked door and Forrester found himself in a long room with very little overhead illumination and small, concentrated pools of light over every desk, at which sat analysts peering into curious pieces of wooden apparatus incorporating thick chunks of magnifying glass. With Forrester in his wake MacLean strode past desk after desk until he stopped beside a prematurely balding young man whose spectacles were almost as thick as the magnifier through which he was peering. “Bannister, this is Dr. Forrester, from Barnard College. I’d like you to show him the Bjornsfjord material.”

“Yes, sir,” said Bannister and began shuffling myopically through the piles of photos on his desk.

“It was Bannister who spotted the 9th SS Panzer Division at Arnhem,” said MacLean conversationally. “Unfortunately no-one believed him. If they had, the war might have been shorter by six months.” Bannister’s ears went red, but he said nothing and finally came up with the photo album print Forrester had allowed MacLean to copy.

“Not much to be learnt from this as it stood, sir.” Bannister glanced up at him sideways, and Forrester felt vaguely offended, until he realised this was just the theatrical preamble. Stuck down here in this windowless cave, Bannister probably seized on any opportunity for theatre that came his way. “But this is what we got when we blew it up by a factor of five.” And Bannister brought out a foolscap-sized sheet of photographic paper and slid it under the magnifier.

As Forrester leaned into the lenses it was as if he was inside that day in 1937, on the cliff path leading down to the water, looking across the fjord at the two men rowing towards the shore. He could almost feel the heat of the summer sun, and the coolness of the water as the dinghy cut through it, almost hear the flap of the sails of the big yacht from which the men were rowing.

A shiver ran through him as he realised Sophie might have stood on that very spot, might indeed have taken the photograph, as she waited for her husband’s guests to arrive. Sophie. Suddenly he could feel the touch of her fingers on his cheek, the softness of her flesh under his. The expression in her eyes when they had parted. And then he was concentrating again, and realising that the face of the man in the prow was now perfectly identifiable.

“Peter Dorfmann to the life,” said Forrester. “Well done, Mr. Bannister.”

“Thank you,” said Bannister.

“He isn’t finished yet,” said MacLean, like a proud parent showing off the achievements of a talented toddler. Bannister slid an even greater enlargement of a small proportion of the original photo, in which the men in the dinghy filled the frame. “In this one you can make out the cut of their clothes too,” said Bannister, and Forrester looked again. It was true; the enlargement even revealed that Dorfmann was wearing a sort of canvas jacket of vaguely nautical cut. By contrast the man with his back to camera was wearing a striped blazer and a panama hat.

“Impressive,” said Forrester. “I just wish the chap in the striped blazer would turn around.”

“Never mind him,” said MacLean, “we’ve got Dorfmann there in 1937, and it gets better. Show him what you did with the yacht, Bannister.”

Bannister took yet another enlargement from the pile and slid it under the magnifier. This time the dinghy was out of shot, and the stern of the yacht filled the frame. It was clear that the name had been carved into a wooden plate curving around the stern – but only the first two letters, thrown into shadowed relief by the sun, were visible.

They were “G” and “I”.

“Interesting,” said Forrester. “Does that help much?”

“It certainly does,” said MacLean. “Tell him, Bannister.”

“We calculated the length of the yacht,” said Bannister, “and that made it possible to calculate the size of the stern-plate. When we factored in the size of the letters we can see, we were able to work out that the name had just five letters in it.”

“Very good,” said Forrester.

“You can see the yacht had a motor,” said MacLean, “so we got in touch with the Norwegian Ministry of Shipping and asked them for the list of motor yachts registered with them in 1937. There were three with five-letter names beginning with ‘G’.”

“Which presumably narrows down the candidates considerably,” said Forrester.

“They were only able to come up with pictures of one of them, which unfortunately wasn’t this one. Which left two remaining possibilities: one was a yacht called
Gitta
and another called
Gimli
.”

“
Gimli
,” said Forrester.

“
Gimli
,” repeated MacLean. “In Old Norse it means ‘golden roof’, and it referred to the place to which the gods retreated after the end of the world.”

“Ragnarök,” said Forrester automatically, remembering that night in the Master’s Lodge when everything had changed. “Interesting.”

“More than interesting,” said MacLean. “Because we know the name of the owner of the yacht
Gimli
.” He paused for a moment, clearly savouring the revelation to come. “
Gimli
,” he said, “was registered to a gentleman named Vidkun Quisling.”

Forrester blinked. Vidkun Quisling, the former ruler of Norway, had been executed by firing squad just months before as a traitor to his country. Indeed, for years now his very name had been synonymous with the worst type of Nazi lickspittle. Son of a country pastor, he had become part of the General Staff of the Norwegian Army before the Great War and been sent on missions to Russia just after the revolution. There he had worked with the famous Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen to relieve famine in the Ukraine; it was also rumoured he had acted as a spy for the British, for which he had been made a Commander of the British Empire.

And then the Norwegian Army had dispensed with his services, and he found himself back home and unemployed. Inspired by the radical politics he had seen in Russia and funded by the sale of the many valuable antiques he’d been able to pick up there from fleeing aristocrats, he set up a national paramilitary organisation in Norway dedicated to anti-Bolshevism and racial purity. This led to him being invited to join the government, where he made himself popular with the right by attacking trade unions and the communists. He then founded a party of his own, the
Nasjonal Samling
, and though it had little electoral support in Norway he was soon meeting with Italian fascists and Nazi ideologues and spouting the anti-Semitic rhetoric he picked up from them.

Not long after
Kristallnacht
he sent Hitler a fiftieth birthday greeting, thanking him for “saving Europe from Bolshevism and Jewish domination”. As his party faltered in the polls he began taking secret donations from the Nazis to keep it going, and gave Nazi intelligence officials information of Norway’s defences. When Hitler invaded, Quisling became head of the puppet Norwegian government, and participated in the deportation of Jews as part of Hitler’s Final Solution.

The previous year, when Hitler was defeated and Norway was freed, Quisling had been arrested by his furious countrymen, and taken to the Akershus Fortress to be tried for treason. Not long after, he was executed.

“Well, if Dorfmann was travelling around Norway on Vidkun Quisling’s yacht in 1937 there’s a strong case for concluding he was a Nazi sympathiser from way back,” said Forrester.

“Absolutely,” said MacLean. “Bringing us this photograph was a considerable coup. It won’t be forgotten.”

“Thank you,” said Forrester, still staring at the photo. Then he said, “Could I have a look at the other one again? The one of the chaps in the dinghy?”

Bannister slid it back under the magnifier. Forrester glanced at the image of Dorfmann again, but his interest was in the man with his back to camera – the man in the striped blazer.

“Would you agree with me,” he said to MacLean, “that this is probably the Englishman the caption to the missing photograph referred to?”

“There’s certainly something very English about the blazer and the panama hat,” said MacLean. Forrester turned to Bannister.

“It’s quite a distinctive pattern of stripes,” he said. “Look, three thin, one thick, two thin. Is there any way you could identify the blazer?”

“Shame we can’t see the colours,” said MacLean.

“We could make some intelligent guesses, though, sir,” said Bannister, “depending on the degree of light and dark.”

“And possibly make some enquiries in Savile Row,” said Forrester. “There’s got to be someone in those elegant gents’ outfitters who’s an expert on striped blazers.”

“I’ll look into it,” said MacLean, “but the main thing is we’ve got something to show the Americans. They’re going to find it very hard to make Dorfmann their man now.”

“Why were they so keen on him in the first place?” asked Forrester.

“Oh, you know,” said MacLean. “He’s sound on communism. Hates the Bolsheviks, that sort of thing.”

“Yes,” said Forrester. “Hitler was pretty consistent about that too.”

* * *

Forrester got them to give him the copy of the photograph at its original size – they wouldn’t release any of the blow-ups – and made a phone call before he left the War Ministry, which resulted in an immediate invitation for pre-lunch drinks at the Café Royal. MacLean had proposed the War Ministry canteen, but with insincere regret, Forrester explained he had another offer, and MacLean grinned, shook hands and ushered him out, promising to let him know if there were any further developments.

Forrester was heading north through the fog towards Trafalgar Square when he realised an indistinct figure had fallen in step with him. So thick was the fog that it was a moment or two before he realised it was Charles Calthrop, the man from the Foreign Office.

“Dr. Forrester, I think,” said Calthrop. Forrester nodded. “To say we met under very unpleasant circumstances would be an understatement, would it not?” As always, he was the essence of urbanity. “Have matters progressed significantly since the police arrested Dr. Clark?”