Orders from Berlin

CHAPTER 11

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 before 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.

‘It’s his brother, isn’t it,’ she said, although she thought she already knew the answer.

‘Yes,’ said Trave. ‘He was called Alistair, and I think he’s the reason we’re all in this mess.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Seaforth’s mother told me that Charles found out after the war that his brother was executed for cowardice by the British Army in 1916 and that the discovery enraged him — with the kind of rage that doesn’t go away but grows inside a person year after year like a cancer, until he can think of nothing else. Or at least that’s what I think happened,’ said Trave, shaking his head.

But it wasn’t what Ava wanted to hear. ‘You make him sound like a victim,’ she said. ‘And he’s not. He’s evil, like the monster in that picture over there,’ she said, beckoning Trave over to join her in the doorway so that she could show him the Francis Bacon painting hanging above the mantelpiece in the living room. ‘Look — it’s his Dorian Gray picture, the man behind the mask.’

Trave was silent, gazing up at the picture. Ava watched him, trying to guess what he was thinking, but when he spoke, it wasn’t at all what she expected to hear.

‘We need to get it down,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘Just a hunch, that’s all.’ He put Alistair’s photograph on the desk, moved a hard-backed chair over in front of the fireplace, and then climbed on it. Carefully he lifted the picture and found it came easily away from the wall. Ava helped him set it on the carpet, and when she looked back up, she gave a gasp of astonishment. A compact stainless-steel safe was revealed behind where the screaming head had been. There was a small combination dial in the centre of the recessed door.

‘How did you know it was there?’ she asked.

‘I didn’t. It was the logical place for a safe, that’s all. Although I suppose it explains why none of the desk drawers or the cabinets is locked,’ Trave added with a sigh, looking round the room. ‘God knows how we’re going to open it.’

‘Can’t you use the gun?’

‘It won’t work.’

‘Why? It did on the door.’

‘Safes like this are bulletproof. There’s no way we’re getting inside it unless we know the combination.’

‘And that could be anything,’ said Ava, acknowledging defeat. She felt bitterly frustrated. To have come this far only to be thwarted by a locked steel door was a hard pill to swallow. ‘Come on. We need to get out of here,’ she said, turning away and moving towards the door. ‘Those gunshots of yours made a hell of a noise. Someone’s going to have called the police. They’ll be here soon.’

But Trave didn’t respond. Instead she saw he’d gone over to the desk while her back was turned and had picked up the photograph of Seaforth’s brother again. He was staring at it intently, as if it contained some kind of secret. And then he suddenly put it down, climbed back on the chair in front of the fireplace, and began twisting the dial on the safe this way and that. He stopped, waiting for a click, but nothing happened. And then he tried again, but still without success.

‘What numbers are you putting in?’ asked Ava. She’d crossed the room to stand behind him.

‘The date Alistair was shot — the eleventh of February, 1916. His mother told me it; she said it was the day before his birthday. It was a long shot, but I thought it was worth trying,’ said Trave, opening his hands in a gesture of resignation.

He started to get down from the chair, but Ava put out her hand to stop him. The movement caught him by surprise and he almost lost his balance. ‘His birthday!’ she repeated. ‘Why don’t you try that?’

Trave nodded, feeling stupid that he hadn’t thought of the idea himself. He turned back to the dial and entered the numbers, first with the nineteen and then without. And on the second attempt, the safe opened.

There were bundles of cash inside, which Trave didn’t disturb, an old book that looked like a diary of some kind — maybe the one that Ava had told him about — and at the back, several brown envelopes. Trave took them over to the desk and emptied their contents onto the blotter. Lists of names; letters in German; carbons of intelligence briefings marked ‘TOP SECRET’, and a four-page carbon document in English headed ‘PLAN’ in capital letters, which had been in an envelope on its own. On the first page it was marked for the attention of Gruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8, Berlin, and it was signed at the end with the single letter ‘D’ above the date, 19 September 1940.

Trave read quickly, handing each page to Ava as soon as he had finished. Within a few sentences it had become obvious to him that D was Seaforth and that he was indeed a high-level spy working for Nazi Germany.

Elegantly phrased and carefully written, the document described Seaforth and Thorn’s meeting with Churchill on 15 September and suggested that Heydrich should provide further intelligence of sufficient interest to engineer a summons to a second meeting with the Prime Minister, at which Seaforth would shoot Churchill and Thorn and blame the assassination on Thorn. In a separate section added at the end, Seaforth told Heydrich that his radio message sent on 17 September had been intercepted and decoded by British intelligence. He said that one man, the former chief of MI6, had understood the significance of the message but that Seaforth had eliminated him and believed that his cover was now once again secure, provided future communications were sent only by ‘the traditional route,’ whatever that might be.

There was no mention in the document of Seaforth’s personal grudge against the British Prime Minister, but Trave felt he could sense behind the dry, careful language Seaforth’s belief that he was an instrument of destiny. And it would be difficult for Seaforth to think otherwise, Trave thought, given the unexpected opportunity that had presented itself to exact a personal revenge on the man who had signed his brother’s death warrant.

‘Come on,’ said Trave, gathering the papers. ‘We need to find a way to warn Churchill. Seaforth’s going to carry out this plan as soon as Thorn gets back from the hospital. I know he is.’

‘Why? How can you be so sure?’ asked Ava. She was in a state of shock, finding it almost impossible to come to terms with what she’d just read. She wanted to sit down for a minute and try to absorb the full measure of Seaforth’s perfidy.

‘I can’t be sure,’ said Trave, answering her question. ‘But he’s seen me round at Broadway asking questions and he’s going to want to strike quickly before things start to unravel — assuming that he’s got the intelligence he needs from Berlin, which seems likely, given that this document was sent nearly two weeks ago. I’m sure Heydrich will have given him the go-ahead. The plan looks like a good one from what I can see. It’s simple and daring and it may well succeed if he gets the chance to put it to the test.’

‘Can’t you call someone?’ asked Ava, pointing at Seaforth’s telephone.

‘Who? I’m just a lowly detective, remember? I don’t know how to get in touch with 10 Downing Street any more than you do. No, we need Thorn. He’s the one with the access. I bet he’s back at 59 Broadway by now. And I don’t have the number for MI6, either, if that’s what you’re suggesting. I know I should have got it from Thorn, but he wasn’t in any state to tell me after he got hurt, and so I’m going to have to go over there and find him.’

‘Not without me, you’re not,’ said Ava. ‘Remember what you promised.’

Trave nodded reluctantly, looking as if he wished there were some way he could take back his words.

They didn’t meet anybody on their way down in the lift, but there was a group of frightened-looking residents in the front hall, congregated around the old man who had let them in. Trave walked quickly through the throng, holding on to Ava’s arm, and went down the steps to the car.

He gunned the engine to life and hurtled round the corner towards Sloane Street, passing a police car coming fast in the opposite direction with a clanging of bells. Trave glanced down at his watch — it was twenty past three. He pressed the accelerator pedal to the floor, wishing that he were behind the wheel of Quaid’s high-powered Wolseley police car instead of pushing an out-of-date Austin 7 beyond its limit.