The Mask of Troy

PART 3
13

R ebecca Howard stood on the gloomy landing of the flat in front of the chipped white door and straightened her fleece, then eased off her backpack and waited hesitantly, glancing back at Dillen. He reached the top of the creaky wooden stairs and smiled at her. They had arrived in Bristol half an hour before, on the train from Paddington in London, having landed at Heathrow airport from Istanbul soon after dawn that morning. In the taxi from the station Dillen had called Jack on Seaquest II to confirm their arrival and his plan to escort Rebecca back to the hotel in London, where she would meet her school party that evening for her trip to Paris. He shivered slightly, pushing his hands into his coat pockets. The old house was one of a row of villas off Royal York Crescent, a magnificent location overlooking the city and the Avon Gorge but exposed to the westerly winds coming off the Atlantic. For once, at least, it had not been raining, and it promised to be a beautiful June day.

He felt the cold because he was tired, and he looked forward to the warmth he always found here, sitting back on the dilapidated sofa and cradling a cup of hot chocolate in front of the gas fire, relishing the familiar smells of old books and coffee and drying clothes. It felt as if he were returning home. His parents had been killed by German bombing in London when he was only five years old, and Hugh had taken him under his wing at boarding school and offered this place as a home. There had been other young people like Dillen, and they had grown up together as an extended family. Every time Dillen mounted these stairs he felt as if he were on vacation from university, bursting to tell Hugh what he had seen and done, to introduce him to new friends. He glanced at Rebecca, and remembered with a jolt that more than fifty years separated them. He had made this same pilgrimage with her father when Jack was her age, almost thirty years before.

Rebecca gestured back down the stairs. ‘Does he always leave the front door unlocked?’ she whispered.

‘He usually has young people staying here,’ Dillen said. ‘Always has done, since I was a boy. They used to be pupils like me from Clifton College and Bath School for Girls, orphans from the war with no other family to stay with out of termtime. We had the other rooms off this landing, the doors behind you. Nowadays the net’s wider, I think. Street kids. Come on, knock on the door. He’ll be waiting for us.’

Rebecca raised her hand and rapped on the door. A muffled voice shouted, ‘Come in!’ She turned the knob, pushed the door and stepped inside. Dillen slipped in behind her and shut the door. Hugh was crouched with his back to them over the electric ring in front of the gas fire. The warmth was lovely, just as Dillen remembered it. The room was large, the bedroom of a spacious Victorian townhouse, with a shuttered window that overlooked an untidy garden with large trees, the rear windows of the adjacent row of houses just visible beyond. In the centre of the room was the old sofa-bed, folded back with the bedding stowed beneath, and beside it the battered oak table that was the only gift Hugh had wanted from the school on his retirement, scarred with the graffiti of generations of boys he had taught Greek and Latin. The walls were buried under books, thousands of them, in cases and tottering piles, the spaces in between filled with old prints and drawings.

Everything was as Dillen remembered it. On the mantelpiece was Edward Dodwell’s 1821 print The Gate of the Lions at Mycenae, the image that had so fired his imagination when he had first sat here as a boy. Beside it was the black-and-white photo from the Second World War. It showed a tanned, good-looking young man leaning languidly against the bonnet of a jeep, desert sand in the background, goggles hanging around his neck and a holster slung low over his shorts, cracking a smile at the camera. He was wearing the ersatz uniform of an irregular soldier, a tattered old jumper that made him look like a schoolboy, yet he exuded the confidence of a seasoned veteran. It was the picture of a man who had been forced to grow up fast, been toughened before his time. At the bottom was a faded signature, the words Peter, Egypt 1941 clearly visible, in the same handwriting as the dedication to Hugh in the volume of Pope’s Homer that Dillen had given Rebecca at Troy the day before.

Hugh took the pot off the electric ring and poured the contents into three mugs, then picked up a spoon and stirred them. He watched the steaming liquid for a moment, then picked up two of the mugs and turned towards them. ‘Perfect timing,’ he said, looking intensely at Rebecca, a twinkle in his eye. ‘It’s a fine art, you know. If you’d arrived a moment later, this would have been ruined.’ He had an educated accent of the 1930s, with clipped vowels but a softness that came from his West Country childhood. He was wearing corduroy trousers, threadbare in places, an oatmeal-coloured jumper with holes in the elbows and a frayed silk scarf tucked in around his neck. He had thick white hair, swept back and neatly cut, and he was clean-shaven. Dillen thought he was a strikingly handsome man, and he had seemingly lost none of his vigour, despite having passed his ninety-second birthday a few months before. Rebecca nodded politely. ‘My dad told me about your hot chocolate. He said it was the best ever.’

Hugh smiled back at her. ‘I do apologize. I’ve been rude. But I couldn’t take my eye off the pot.’ He held out the two mugs. ‘Hello, Rebecca. Your dad has told me all about you. And hello, James. I can’t believe what you told me on the phone. Marvellous discoveries. Marvellous. That cup from the shipwreck, with the word for king. You really think it could be Agamemnon? And the painting of the lyre-player with that word Homeros. Quite astonishing. It really puts the fire under our translation project.’

Rebecca took the mug and shook Hugh’s hand, and Dillen did the same. ‘Hello to you too, Hugh,’ he replied warmly. He nodded at the papers and manuscripts piled on the table. ‘How goes the war?’ Hugh followed his gaze, then exhaled forcefully, stooped down and picked up the third mug. He stood with his back to the fire, legs apart, his free hand behind his back, and took a sip from his mug. ‘The war,’ he replied, ‘goes slowly. Too damned slowly for my liking. It’s those wretched fragments of the Cypria in the Trojan epic cycle. I just can’t make up my mind whether they’re genuine Homer or not. There’s Homer in them, no doubt about it. But I just can’t say whether it’s the poet himself, or some later pastiche of bits and pieces that survived down to the Hellenistic period, thrown together to look plausible. I’m completely stumped. I can say that to you, but not to my editor at the university press. My siege, James, is in need of a Trojan Horse.’

‘Then I can be your Odysseus.’ Dillen took a large envelope out of the laptop case he had been carrying, stepped over to the table and dropped it on the pile of manuscripts. ‘As I promised.’

‘You’re certain you want me to do this?’

‘Never more so.’ Dillen turned to Rebecca. ‘I’ve asked Hugh to help me translate the Ilioupersis. After spending time with your dad and Maurice over the past week, it became clear to me that the translation is about more than a clue to an ancient shipwreck. The fall of Troy, this text, is the backdrop to everything we’re doing out there. What with my work on the excavation, it was going to take me a month or more to get the text done. Jeremy’s too busy, and he doesn’t have the expertise in early Greek. With Hugh’s help, it might get done in a week, maybe ten days.’

‘That’s about how long Dad sees the fieldwork running,’ Rebecca said.

‘As tight as that?’ Hugh murmured.

Dillen nodded. ‘Very tight, I think, with the shipwreck as well as Hiebermeyer’s excavation. The Turks are planning a major naval exercise in the region and everything has to shut down by the beginning of August. The IMU operation is going to have to run with military precision. They need you there really, Hugh, an old soldier, but HQ have assigned you to intelligence, I’m afraid.’

‘ Plus ca change. They were always doing that. I was too damned cocky for my own good. Always being treated like a boffin, but I preferred being at the sharp end. Still, I’m sure Jack can handle it. Wars need young men, not old ones.’ He rocked on his feet in front of the fire. ‘And the Ilioupersis. It’ll be marvellous to get my teeth into some real Homer. Some Homer I can truly believe in.’

‘You’re convinced I’m right?’

‘Those lines you sent me? Absolutely.’

‘Excellent. Excellent.’ Dillen put down his mug and rubbed his hands. ‘After I’ve taken Rebecca back to London and got her settled in her hotel, I’ll come straight back and we can get cracking.’

‘You really don’t have to take me,’ Rebecca said. ‘I can manage.’ She looked at Hugh, and sighed. ‘Sometimes they treat me like I’m some kind of innocent little girl from a finishing school. I’m not.’

‘I promised Jack,’ Dillen said. ‘And there’ll be an IMU security man waiting for us at the hotel. That’s a done deal.’

Rebecca rolled her eyes. ‘IMU security? Please.’

‘Problems?’ Hugh said to Dillen.

‘Precautions,’ he replied. ‘Rebecca was involved in the repatriation of that Durer from the Howard Gallery earlier this year, you remember? Art stolen by the Nazis. She overstepped the mark rather by going off on her own and doing a shady deal with some character in Amsterdam. Jack went ballistic when he heard.’

Rebecca stared defiantly into the air. ‘It was not a shady deal. His name was Marcus Brandeis. Not really a bad man, exactly. He said he’d had a change of heart about the antiquities black market, but I knew perfectly well he was turning informant because he needed protection. I was just the right person for him to talk to. And it helped make one of Europe’s most notorious black-market art dealers into a police asset.’

‘ And stirred up something of a hornets’ nest,’ Dillen said. ‘All of the bad guys who wanted his neck, and their armies of neo-Nazi and Russian thugs.’

Hugh grinned at Rebecca. ‘You’re a chip off the old block. That’s the real problem. Jack sees too much of himself in you.’

‘He also remembers what happened to my mother in Naples,’ Rebecca replied, more quietly.

Hugh reached out and touched her arm. ‘Of course.’ He steered her to the sofa. ‘Sit, please.’ She put down her mug, then shrugged off her fleece and sat down. Dillen took off his coat and sat beside her. Hugh turned back and adjusted the dial on the gas fire. ‘I hope you can bear the heat. It’s my one indulgence. From the war, you know. Winter of ’44, in the Ardennes. Too many nights in the open. Once you’ve known the true meaning of cold, heat becomes the most precious thing.’

‘It’s perfect,’ Rebecca said. ‘It feels very homely.’

‘That’s what James said the first night he spent here, in my old army sleeping bag in the room across the landing, with the other children I put up.’

Dillen sipped his drink, fingering the pipe in his pocket. He turned to Hugh. ‘About Rebecca’s security. Jack thinks the IMU operation at Troy is bound to set the underworld buzzing, antiquities smugglers and dealers like Rebecca’s friend in Amsterdam. Everyone knows Jack’s projects are rarely piecemeal, but go for the big questions, leave few stones unturned. The advantage of having virtually unlimited resources.’

‘Ephram hasn’t been hit by the recession, I take it?’

‘Ephram? Far from it. He keeps pumping more and more into the endowment for IMU. And he’s just agreed to fund the Herculaneum ancient library project.’

Hugh turned to Rebecca. ‘Ephram Jacobovich was one of my last pupils before I retired. I sent him on to James at Cambridge. I knew he was going to make a fortune. You can tell, with some boys. I was determined to stoke his fascination with ancient history and archaeology, to push him to study that at university, rather than computers. He knew all that anyway. And look what’s happened.’

‘That must be very satisfying,’ Rebecca said.

‘I was going to be a kind of archaeologist once,’ Hugh said quietly, glancing back at the mantelpiece. ‘With a friend of mine. Long time ago. That couldn’t happen, but all of this, everything with IMU and your dad, means I’m living a little bit of that dream.’ He turned to Dillen. ‘Speaking of Jack. You were saying. Carry on.’

Dillen nodded. ‘Jack’s never made any secret of his belief that part of Schliemann’s treasure is still hidden away, somewhere in Europe. It’s one occasion where he felt that going public was the best way to spirit up the clues. You remember the TV documentary he did last year? He thinks the gold that showed up in Moscow in 1993 was only part of it, that Schliemann secretly sent other finds back to Germany, and that some of those may have ended up in Nazi hands.’

‘So you’re saying that these underworld characters just have to watch and wait.’

‘Jack’s worried about kidnapping and extortion,’ Dillen said. ‘It’s becoming a bigger problem now in Europe. And of course Rebecca is vulnerable.’

Rebecca gave an impatient shrug. ‘I can look after myself, right? Every time I’ve been on Seaquest II, Ben’s given me self-defence training, and taken me through another weapon. He says I’m a natural with Dad’s Beretta nine-millimetre.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ Hugh said. ‘I don’t doubt it at all.’ He gave Rebecca a steely look, then turned back to Dillen. ‘Now, let’s get to the other reason you’re here. You said on the phone that you’d been researching Schliemann’s papers.’

‘Only skimmed the surface. Schliemann was a prodigious correspondent. Do you remember Jeremy Haverstock, Maria’s American assistant in the Institute of Palaeography? I mentioned him a moment ago. He and I worked together through Schliemann’s papers from the time of his first dig at Troy in 1871 to his final visit there in 1890. It was fascinating, and Jack was right. He says treasure-hunters worth their salt always leave clues for future explorers, in case they don’t make it. To find the clues, you have to get into the mind of the treasure-hunter, something Jack was sure Schliemann knew too. But it’s what we didn’t find that was so revealing. Schliemann had a virtually uncontrollable urge to tell the world everything he discovered. At Troy he found the treasure of Priam; at Mycenae, the Mask of Agamemnon. He trumpeted them both to the world. His name was splashed over the newspapers, and he loved it. But then there’s something not quite right. He abruptly departed each place, Troy, Mycenae, at the moment of his greatest breakthrough, when he should have stayed and dug for more. After finding the mask at Mycenae he embarked on fifteen years of restless exploration, in Greece, in Italy, in Egypt, chasing dreams that seem half-baked, almost unhinged. It was as if he’d lost the plot, let his ego get the better of him.’

Hugh nodded. ‘I was at Mycenae the summer before the war, you remember, digging with the British School. I recall sitting on the hillside staring at that magnificent place, wondering how on earth an archaeologist like Schliemann could have left it unfinished. I always thought there was something else driving him, something that allowed him to turn his back on the gold and other treasures he knew must still lie there, as if he’d found what he needed and had to move on, some kind of obsessive quest that we can only guess at now.’

Dillen pursed his lips. ‘It’s there in his papers, only it isn’t. It’s like a void. It’s everything he should have said, but didn’t. All the odd reasons he gave for going to those other places. To Egypt, to search for Alexander the Great’s tomb? Not likely. Why does someone on the cusp of revealing the truth about the Trojan War, the greatest discovery ever in archaeology, suddenly veer off and search for something completely different? I believe he was on a trail of clues that only he and Sophia knew about, one that began and ended at Troy.’

Hugh moved from the fireplace and sat down in the battered leather armchair opposite them, putting his mug on the floor and leaning forward on his elbows. ‘So,’ he said quietly. ‘Why have you really come to see me, James? You could have e-mailed me those scans of the ancient text.’ He looked at Rebecca. ‘And a Howard doesn’t pay a social visit in the middle of an excavation campaign. Not one producing finds like you’ve had in the past few days.’

Dillen gestured at the table. ‘Your other project. The one I encouraged you to start. Those pages I can see with the National Archives symbol at the top. Scans of hand-written British army unit diaries from the war.’

‘So that is it.’ Hugh sat back. ‘I’d guessed it when you started talking about Schliemann. All those years ago, that story I told you boys in your first Latin lesson. That’s it, isn’t it? About something I found during the war, a clue to the greatest treasure ever concealed?’

‘And then you clammed up on us.’

‘I thought you might have forgotten, or thought it was just a story to get unruly boys interested in translating Latin. I should have known better. For a long time I wished I’d never told you. I wanted to forget the war, you know. I’ve tried to, for more than sixty years. But as you get older I suppose the defences drop, and it’s all there again as if it were yesterday.’

Rebecca undid her backpack and took out a bundle wrapped in a sweater. She carefully extracted the copy of Alexander Pope’s The Iliad of Homer that Dillen had given her the day before and handed it to Hugh, who took it and stared at it for a moment, then put one palm gently on the cover. ‘How nice to hold this again. When did I give this to you, James? Your graduation, wasn’t it?’

Dillen nodded. ‘And now I’ve passed it on to Rebecca. I thought you’d approve.’

Hugh smiled. ‘Of course.’

‘I’ve seen the dedication,’ Rebecca said cautiously.

‘Ah.’ Hugh swallowed hard. ‘And you want to know about Peter.’

‘He’s tied in with this story, isn’t he? James told me something on the plane, about a sketch he’d found. The girl with the harp.’

‘ The girl with the harp,’ Hugh whispered. ‘How do you know about that?’

‘My guesswork,’ Dillen said. ‘Once when I was a boy you let me use one of your old sketchbooks, and there was a page with those words written in pencil at the bottom. You’d tried to rub it out. The girl with the harp. You’d pencilled in some outlines above, a drawing, a sketch of her perhaps, but you’d abandoned it. I guessed it was something to do with the war. I’d seen your face whenever you heard harp music. I knew you were one of the first troops into Belsen, and I just guessed.’

‘She was in a camp, a small camp near there,’ Hugh said quietly. He paused, picked up his mug, then put it down again. Dillen saw that his hand was trembling. He wondered whether this was right, whether they should have asked him after all, but then Hugh continued. ‘The guards had gone. We’d seen to that. My chaps and I. We were in there before the liberating troops arrived, but there was already a Red Cross contingent. A nurse with the children, named Helen. Always remember her. She’d got a German living nearby to bring a harp. And there she was, the girl, sitting with the harp amidst all that death and squalor. I tried drawing it years later. It should have been Peter doing that. He was the artist, not me. I just couldn’t finish it. It was a mistake even trying. I thought it might help, but it didn’t.’

‘You mentioned the Ardennes,’ Rebecca said gently. ‘That was the Battle of the Bulge, wasn’t it? We did that at school. James told me you were in the SAS.’

Hugh stared at the fire, picked up and cradled his mug, then looked back at Rebecca, his eyes steely again. ‘There was no glamour in it then, you know. No mystique. Nobody knew about the SAS. That was the whole point of it. I always thought the acronym was a bit silly, actually. Special Air Service. The only time I ever jumped was from a practice tower in the desert. Our job was to go behind enemy lines and kill. In North Africa, we crept into airfields at night and bombed and shot up sleeping men. In France before D-Day, we knifed and strangled. In Germany, after the Rhine crossings, we ambushed remnant SS and Wehrmacht, and old men of the Volkssturm, and Hitler Youth, boys as young as twelve. We didn’t take prisoners, unless we were ordered to. We gave as good as we got.’

‘Hitler’s commando decree,’ Dillen murmured.

Hugh nodded. ‘All captured commandos were to be executed. I lost most of my stick – my patrol – that way, in France. They should never have surrendered. Didn’t drum that into them well enough. New chaps mostly, hadn’t been with us long. Always felt guilty about surviving. But sometimes they were handed over to the Gestapo first. That’s why we went to Belsen, to this other camp. We were looking for one of our chaps. We didn’t find him, but we did find some SS who tried to surrender to us. Those guards I mentioned. Gave them pretty short shrift. That was when I saw the girl with the harp. She’d made a drawing, and I saw it, saw something extraordinary in it, and asked Helen if I could take it. The girl had done others, but not that image. Intelligence at Corps HQ were pretty interested too. And that was the last day I ever saw Peter.’

‘Was he in the SAS too?’ Rebecca asked.

Hugh shook his head. ‘We’d served together early in the war in North Africa, in the Long Range Desert Group.’ He gestured at the photo on the mantelpiece. ‘That’s when I took that picture. After the LRDG wound down, he went back to his infantry battalion, and I volunteered for the SAS. But Peter went into another outfit after he was wounded in Italy. Another silly acronym for a tough unit, 30 AU.’

‘I know about that,’ Rebecca said. ‘It kept coming up when I was researching that painting, the art stolen by the Nazis. They operated behind enemy lines too, didn’t they? Not ambushing, but searching for intelligence. Sometimes they linked up with the Monuments and Fine Arts men, the MFAA, whenever they came across stolen art and antiquities.’

Hugh nodded. ‘That’s exactly what happened that day. I was the one who fed the intelligence back. The place where I was given the drawing was a kind of satellite of Belsen, a small labour camp in a forest clearing. We had our suspicions that there was something in the forest and I passed them on to VIII Corps HQ, who had arranged a ceasefire to clear out the camp. Peter’s unit happened to be the one operating in the area, and he was sent to the camp with his driver and an American officer, one of the Monuments Men. And of course these covert ops were never just about stolen art. Those places could conceal more sinister secrets. It was the possibility of chemical and biological weapons that was so terrifying. By then we knew what the Nazis were capable of doing. We’d heard about the death camps in the east, Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, about Zyklon B gas. A pesticide, for God’s sake. My biggest fear was disease, epidemic. What they might have bottled up, what they could unleash.’

‘And what might still be out there, still hidden away,’ Dillen said.

‘Unquestionably,’ Hugh replied. ‘That’s the horror of it. Europe in 1945 was like a huge Aladdin’s cave. How could we possibly have found it all? Buried bunkers, lake beds, disused mines. And it ties in with missing works of art. What you were saying about Schliemann’s diaries, James. It’s the same thing. It’s as if there’s a void. With the art, we know what’s missing. We know the names of the canvases.’ He pointed to a faded print above the fireplace. ‘Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man, from Krakow. That’s a pre-war print I had on my wall at Oxford. Peter gave it to me, actually. It’s one of dozens known by name, vanished. And if that’s known to be missing, what else is there we don’t know about? I’m not talking about art and antiquities. It could be the biggest legacy of the Second World War, and the most terrifying. Where it might be, and who might get hold of it. For some of us, for me, that war still rumbles on, not just because I can’t get it out of my head, but because it’s unfinished, as if there’s a gigantic concealed bomb under Europe with the clock still ticking.’

‘Tell us what happened to Peter,’ Dillen said. ‘That final day.’

Hugh paused. ‘I wasn’t terribly well that morning. A recurrence of malaria, something we’d both picked up in Egypt. Only a few hours of shivers and hot flushes, but enough to make me a liability in the field. I knew that the nurse in the camp, Helen, saw there was something wrong, but I didn’t want to ask her, not in that place with all those poor children dying, needing her every second. But when I returned to Corps HQ after leaving the camp, the MO checked me over and I was temporarily grounded, reassigned to Corps Intelligence. Bloody nuisance, you know. There’s nothing worse than being pulled from your chaps. But there was nothing else for it. At least they kept me in touch with our ops by putting me in charge of recovering effects from anyone killed behind enemy lines. It was pretty important, in case there was anything the Germans might use, or any intelligence being brought back. A few hours after Peter had left to go to the camp, an army spotter plane reported an overturned jeep beside the road leading back from the camp. An accident, a pothole in the road. It was Peter’s jeep, but it only held the body of his driver, a Corporal Lewes. I was puzzled to find that he had that drawing made by the girl in his pocket. I knew the colonel in charge of 30 AU had given it to Peter when I’d handed it in to Corps Intelligence earlier that morning, before he and Lewes set off for the camp. I’d already shown it to Peter.’

‘Was that the last time you saw him?’ Rebecca said.

‘We only had a few moments, in the middle of a busy HQ tent, with a howitzer battery blatting away behind us. Not much time to say anything, let alone hear what we were saying. Not that it mattered, perhaps. There was a flash of exhilaration in his face, and that’s what I remember. He was in a pretty bad way, too. But enough of that. You want to hear about the drawing. Peter would have been very careful with it, I’m sure. But then Lewes was his batman, so he would have trusted him with it. That was often the closest relationship, you know, officer and batman. Unspoken bond, all that.’

‘Were you ever close to anyone? Like that?’ Rebecca asked.

‘Me?’ Hugh paused, taken aback. ‘Good Lord. No. Not by then. Not like before the war. We… were romantic then. Naive. We even looked forward to war, to that bond amongst men we’d heard so much about. It was extraordinary, so soon after the Great War, yet it only seems to take a generation for men to forget. It’s as if war has become part of our nature, as if our biology has found a way to make us forget, to allow us to do it over and over again. It was General Lee, in the American Civil War, who said, thank God war is so awful, otherwise it’d be addictive. The difference was, the civilians in the Civil War saw the horror around them. We all knew terrible loss, our fathers, our uncles, killed in the Great War, but few of us in 1939 had seen carnage close up, seen death and dying. That might have done it.’

‘When you say we, you mean you and Peter,’ Rebecca said.

Hugh paused, looking down. ‘We were a small group. Close friends, at university. But yes. Peter was the closest.’

Dillen leaned forward. ‘Corporal Lewes. Why was he driving back to Corps Headquarters?’

Hugh took a deep breath. ‘I assumed they’d found something in the camp, perhaps in the forest. Peter had probably sent Lewes back for the usual follow-up team: extra riflemen, an interrogator, sappers for breaking into buildings, a bomb disposal expert, that kind of thing. The unit were a pretty impressive outfit and knew their stuff.’

‘Did anyone try to send word back to Peter? Did you? About what had happened to Lewes?’

‘I wanted to,’ Hugh replied. ‘I desperately wanted to. It’s all such a haze. I’ve been over it so often in my mind. I think by then the malaria was really clouding my thinking. I had a jeep and was going to do it myself. We didn’t have radio communication, of course. But events quickly overtook us. Corps HQ was concerned that the Germans might use the ceasefire to infiltrate the forest, to set up defensive positions and booby traps. We all knew what had happened to the Americans in the Hurtgen Forest, one of the nightmare battles of the war. The Hurtgen Forest was one of the nightmare battles of the war. There was not going to be a repeat of that. We already knew that the remnants of the German 2nd Marine Infantry Division were regrouping beyond the forest, along with a few survivors from an SS panzer training battalion and the 1st Panzer Grenadiers. All of them tough troops who fought to the death. There were probably only seven or eight hundred of them, but that would have been enough.’

‘The Teutoburg Forest, Varus’ legions in AD 9,’ Dillen murmured. ‘Three crack Roman legions totally annihilated by the Germans. Same neck of the woods, I think, in upper Saxony. You were pretty obsessed with it at school, always seemed to bring it up in class.’

‘Now you know why,’ Hugh said. ‘The problem was, the main road of our planned advance ran through the western edge of the forest. We couldn’t bypass it without big delays. We had to take that road. The ceasefire would only last long enough for essential consolidation, to strengthen our line for a massive push. That was the priority for Corps HQ, regardless of what Intelligence wanted. Sometimes we felt Intelligence actually would have preferred us to halt, so they could find as much as possible before the Nazis destroyed it. We knew there was a whole secret war going on that we knew very little about. But we were soldiers, and we just wanted the war won. And keeping the momentum going wasn’t just a matter of reaching Berlin before the Russians. We were all terribly apprehensive about what the Germans might have up their sleeves. We remembered Hitler’s “all or nothing” speech about the Reich at Nuremberg before the war. He’d already unleashed the V-2 rocket against London. You’ve no idea how terrifying those weapons were. We didn’t know about Nazi research into nuclear weapons then, but V-1 rockets with deadly gas or biological payloads would have been enough. And we knew that as long as there was a single fanatical Nazi at large, then all hell could be unleashed. That’s why we fought the war to the bitter end. That’s why our bombers flattened the cities. That’s why we killed the enemy until there was no one left to kill. We felt we were fighting a desperate battle for humankind, a battle against impending doomsday.’

‘So you never did try to find Peter,’ Dillen said.

Hugh paused, swallowing hard. He shook his head. ‘The schedule when Peter and Lewes left HQ for the camp only allowed a thirty-six-hour ceasefire. A five-hundred raid by the RAF was planned on the forest the following night. But as we were recovering Lewes’ body, an SAS patrol came down the road, my own chaps. They’d bivvied that night on the far edge of the forest and had watched small groups of German troops moving in, with Panzerfaust anti-tank rockets and what looked like demolition charges, probably for taking down trees over the road. They confirmed what Corps feared would happen. So the whole schedule was brought forward. The decision had already been made to clear out the camp anyway, and that was done in a matter of hours. The RAF raid was advanced to that night. One and a half thousand tons of airburst high explosive, as well as incendiaries and four-thousand-pound impact HE. The camp was obliterated. The forest as far as the nearest firebreaks burned for weeks, a total firestorm. The German army units that had infiltrated the forest ceased to exist. But the road through was clear for our advance. Corps HQ had got the result they wanted. Probably hundreds, even thousands of Allied troops spared.’

‘But no sign of Peter and the American,’ Rebecca said quietly.

‘It was all down to me. I was the one who took the intelligence about the German troop build-up from the SAS patrol to Corps HQ,’ Hugh replied. ‘It was my responsibility. I could have decided to process Lewes’ effects first. An hour’s delay in passing on the intelligence and it would have been too late to reschedule the bomber raid. It might have given Peter a chance to get out, if he was still alive. But I went straight to HQ. That’s the worst thing. I was responsible for Peter’s death. Five years cheating death on the battlefield, and it was something I did that killed him. I’ve tried so hard to block it off, all my life, but I just can’t.’ He put his head in his hands, and took a shuddering breath. Rebecca leaned over and put her hand on his. He let his hands slip off his head and looked at her, his eyes red-rimmed. He took another deep breath, straightened up and wiped his eyes with his handkerchief. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said hoarsely, clearing his throat. ‘Stupid of me. Embarrassing. Not like me at all. Anyway, all that’s history now, isn’t it?’

‘Peter might well have been dead already,’ Dillen said. ‘If there were enemy troops in that forest, and renegade SS camp guards. That might have been why Lewes was driving back alone.’

‘And he would never have forgiven you if you hadn’t taken that intelligence straight back,’ Rebecca said. ‘From what you’ve said, he was the kind of guy who would have put the lives of all those men way ahead of his own, the soldiers who would have died fighting in the forest if the Germans had been allowed another day to get established.’

‘What happened to the drawing?’ Dillen asked.

Hugh blinked hard, wiped his eyes again and cleared his throat. ‘I put it in my battledress tunic pocket. After I passed on the SAS intel to HQ, everything was a whirlwind. HQ was packed up immediately and moved out. I knew Peter’s fate was sealed, but I hadn’t yet connected myself with it. I’d passed on the intel without thinking. It was my absolute duty. And I was in a poor way, really. Then the malaria really whacked me, dropped me stone cold. Next thing I remember was coming to in a hospital in France three weeks later, hearing the church bells ringing. The war was over.’

‘And you still had the drawing?’ Rebecca whispered.

‘Carefully folded with my belongings,’ Hugh said. ‘And I still have it. Over there, on my desk.’

‘Can we see it?’ Dillen asked.

Hugh gestured at the table. Rebecca got up and went over, scanning the papers. She pointed at a yellowed sheet of notepaper beside the computer screen, and Hugh nodded. She carefully picked it up, and stared at it, then looked at Dillen, her eyes wet with tears. ‘These two people, holding hands. I know they’re the girl’s parents, because

…’ Dillen stood up and put his hand on her shoulder. She sniffed and wiped her eyes, looking apologetically at Hugh. ‘Stupid of me, now. Sorry.’ She swallowed, and blinked hard. ‘It’s just that when I was a little girl, her age, I grew up without my dad, and my mum had sent me away to my foster parents in America to keep me from the Mafia world she’d grown up in. I often used to daydream, and I drew pictures like this. We were always together, holding hands, we three.’

Hugh stared out of the window. ‘She would have been about seventeen when I saw her, but this is like a drawing made by a child, a little girl. After the war, I found out that most of the children I saw in those camps had survived Auschwitz, where they had seen their parents selected at the railhead for immediate gassing. Those children had been kept alive for some reason. I was told that this girl was in the orchestra. And worse. There was a brothel. But drawings like these preserved the last memory they had of their parents, as if they were still little children. As if their whole world had ended at that moment on the railhead.’

Dillen leaned over, and stared at the drawing. ‘How strange,’ he said. ‘A reverse swastika. She’s drawn it above her, and coloured it gold and silver.’

Rebecca took a deep breath, and blinked hard. ‘A swastika,’ she said, swallowing. ‘So, what’s the big deal about that? Isn’t that what you’d expect? The hated symbol?’

Hugh spoke quietly. ‘The last time I saw Peter, the last time I ever spoke to him, was those few moments we had in Corps HQ when I handed over this drawing. He and I both saw that reverse swastika at the same moment. We were both suddenly overcome with excitement. That’s how I try to remember him. To understand why we were excited, I have to tell you about an extraordinary discovery at Mycenae.’

‘ Mycenae,’ Rebecca exclaimed, sniffing. ‘Huh?’

‘Before the war. When Peter and I were digging there.’

‘You mean when he made the dedication in the book.’

‘A lifetime before everything I’ve been telling you. But what I’m about to say may be the key to the whole mystery. The key that may unlock Troy, but also open up a terrifying discovery. Are you with me?’

Dillen nodded, looked at his watch, then got up. ‘Before that. Quick breather to call Jack for an update.’

‘Are you all right?’ Rebecca said to Hugh, putting her hand on his arm. ‘This must be so difficult for you. Are you tired?’

‘After all these years bottling it up, I feel I’ve been waiting a lifetime to tell this,’ Hugh said. ‘I’m not going anywhere. And a breather gives me time to do another brew-up.’

‘Give Dad my love,’ Rebecca said to Dillen. ‘And everyone else.’

‘Will do.’ Dillen opened the door and turned back. ‘Fifteen minutes.’

Hugh checked his watch, and leaned over the fire. ‘No more, no less. Your drink will be ready.’