The Waiting Time

Chapter Four

It had been a late rail connection to the last ferry boat of the evening.

A squall had whipped off the harbour waters. The wind, even behind the high sea walls of packed rocks, had the strength to shake the pleasure boats, the tugs and the few fishing boats on their moorings, and to roll the ferry before the hawser ropes had been cast off.

Under scudding cloud, it ploughed through the waves, made a direct course across the Channel and towards the coast of Europe. It was the territory of the long-haul lorry drivers and the few passengers prepared to sacrifice comfort and time in the interest of economy.

She stood alone at the forward rail of the ferry boat, as far forward as passengers were permitted to be.

She did not seek the company of the lorry drivers in their lounge or other passengers, who clustered round the gaming table, the fruit machines and the cafeteria’s counter. She was unnoticed and unwatched. The night ferry was, for her, the most suitable way to travel from Britain to the Continent, the passport check would be the briefest. The spray, as the prow of the ferry ducked into the waves, spattered her hair and her face, her shoulders and her body. The tang smell of it was on her. She shouted her anthem to the night wind. It was a song of parting, waiting and death.

And she did not think of them, the men who had intruded into that aloneness and privacy in the last hours, days and weeks. If she had. .. Major Perry Johnson sat solitary in a corner of the mess, isolated, near to that place on the carpet where the drink stain had dried out. He was the man whose corporal had soured an excellent occasion. He was shunned. He was not called to the bar by Captain Dawson, or by Major Donoghue, and in the morning he would try again to attempt the impossible and discover the pattern of Tracy Barnes’s filing system. That afternoon, aggressive spite, he had told Ben Christie to keep the bloody dog out of G/9, and Christie had called him a ‘vindictive old bastard’ and applied for a transfer, immediate. He nursed his drink, he reflected that his world had fallen… but she had not thought of him.

The salt of the sea spray was on her lips and in her mouth.

Albert Perkins fought his tiredness. He sat at a plain table in the archive of Defence Intelligence. The material, too old to have been transferred to computer disk, was paper, bulging from a cardboard box, old sheets of typed and handwritten notes that were the bones, not the flesh, of an incident in the past that had a resonance of the present and might affect the future. He was brought coffee, a fresh mug every fifteen minutes. Without it, he would have slumped over the table.

The wind and the spray slicked the hair on her scalp. She did not feel the cold, did not shiver… Josh Mantle was by himself in the open area on the first floor. There had been a sharp note waiting for him from the partner, Mr Wilkins. Where had he been? Who was his client? Why had he not cleared his absence with Mr Greatorex? He worked on the cases that Mr Protheroe would be handling before the magistrates the next morning. He had returned to the grind of his daily life. He would be late away from his desk – it would be the small hours before he returned to his high flat near to the London road.

She did not try to wipe the water from her face or to keep the gale wind from her hair. The lights were ahead of her, winking and rolling with the motion of the ferry.

She came off the boat. She bought, from the one shop open in the middle of the night at the harbour terminal, a big gift box of Belgian chocolates and asked for them to be wrapped in fancy paper. She had her rucksack on her back and carried her gift to the waiting train. She huddled in the corner of an empty carriage and before the train pulled out she was asleep, at peace.

‘Another hundred and ten pounds in the kitty, but earned with blood and sweat, eh, Josh?’

‘I was surprised, Mr Protheroe, that he was given bail.’

‘Sick mother. I expect I laid it on rather heavily, as if the ambulance siren had already started up and she was on her way to intensive care. I tell you, Josh, if my Miriam ever makes the bench then a yob like that will need more than a sick mother to keep him out of the cells. Well, I look upon that revolting little creature as an investment for the future, lorryloads of legal aid at fifty-five pounds an hour where that one’s going.’

Josh Mantle, back in the familiar suit, the old shirt and the poorer shoes, walked across the hallway of the court with the partner.

‘And getting those louts bound over to keep the peace – some hope – was a second triumph for humanity, eh, Josh?’

‘There are serious tensions in the Sikh and Muslim communities. The youths are bound to reflect those tensions in their homes.’

‘You have a sympathetic eye, Josh. You know, Mr Greatorex did a run-through, last week, of the firm’s legal-aid earnings, criminal cases. Bit over a year you’ve been with us? Legal aid’s up for the firm more than twenty per cent. You’ve a good way in the police cells, drumming up business. Heh, God, you must need a damn good scrub when you get home at night, some of the scum you meet. I’m not complaining. .. but very sympathetic.’

‘As long as you’re not complaining, Mr Protheroe.’ Most nights he was on call, or down at the police station at Slough beside the court, to argue for bail, to sit in on the interviews, to take statements from inarticulate and hostile youths. ‘What about this afternoon?’

‘There’s a problem, Josh. The bottle-slashing, yes? It’s a remand in custody, no question of letting him out. I’d rather thought it was for this morning, up and down. The problem is, I’m on the golf course this afternoon, a charity job, good cause. Look after it, will you, Josh? We’re not arguing with a remand. I’m going to dash.’ He was away, hurrying up the street.

She must have seen him with Mr Protheroe, and she must have waited, diffident.

‘Afternoon, Mrs Barnes.’

‘They told me you’d be here – at your work they said you would.’

‘How can I help, Mrs Barnes?’

‘It’s my Tracy..

She was breathing hard. He wondered how far she had walked to come to the court. There were bag lines at her eyes, as if she had been crying. She seemed to him so tired and so frail.

‘Hold it there, Mrs Barnes. Let’s go and find somewhere we can sit down.’

He took her arm, led her into a deserted court-room and sat her on the polished bench where the public could sit when the court was in session. He saw the fear on her face. He touched her hand. ‘Now, Mrs Barnes, what about Tracy?’

‘She’s gone.’

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Barnes, where has she gone?’ He was trying to concentrate, trying to focus, and she was difficult to hear even in the hush of the empty court-room. ‘Where has she gone?’

From her handbag she took a small piece of paper. It had been crumpled, squashed in a fist and discarded as rubbish, then carefully smoothed out. ‘God forbid, I’d ever spy on her. I went to bed early. I’d got her back – you’d brought her back. I suppose it was the relief. Slept solid. I woke this morning, to go to work. I made my usual cup of tea and one for her. She wasn’t there, her bed wasn’t slept in. It was on the floor, like it’d been dropped.’

She passed him the slip of paper. He did not have to be a solicitor’s clerk, or a former staff sergeant in I Corps, or a one-time captain in the Royal Military Police to register what was on the paper. There were columns of figures, written precisely. He read them as arrival and departure times. Above the figures was the single word ‘Victoria’ and below them ‘Bahnhof Zoo’.

‘What’s it mean, Mr Mantle?’

It meant that she had kicked him in the teeth. It meant that she had taken the boat train from Victoria to Folkestone or Dover, then a ferry, then a train across Europe to the station in Berlin for trans-European trains.

‘She’s gone to Berlin.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s about what’s happened to her.’

‘Please, Mr Mantle, because I’m frightened for her.’

‘I really don’t see what I can do.’

‘I don’t suppose there is anything.’

‘You want me to find her, bring her home… I’ve a very busy workload at the moment, Mrs Barnes.’

She was into her handbag. The purse of worn leather was out of it. Her fingers, thin, dried out, took the roll of banknotes from the purse and unfolded them. She held them out for him to take. There would have been a biscuit tin under the bed, or at the back of a drawer, or under the spare blankets in a cupboard. The money would have been her savings. A few coins and the odd banknote would have been put by each week and each month… Her voice shouted in scorn at him, ‘It was murder. Murder is murder. Or do you compromise’… She would have saved the money over many years. He put his hand over hers, pushed it back towards the purse.

She said, accusingly, ‘What’s wrong with my money? Good enough, isn’t it?’

‘It won’t be necessary.’

Tracy Barnes walked out of the Bahnhof Zoo. It was seven years since she had been in Berlin. There were men doing the hard stuff outside the station, small swarthy men against the wall of the station, protected by their dogs. Seven years ago there had been men here doing hard drugs. She heard the music against the traffic hum. She had always liked the music on the plaza by the ruined Nikolaikirche. She carried the wrapped gift and idled towards the church, which had been firebombed more than half a century before and was kept as a monument to war’s ravage. She watched the band. They might have been from Peru, or perhaps from Costa Rica.

She was another youngster come to the city of history. She was unnoticed. She was small and overwhelmed by her rucksack and unremarkable, just another kid who had travelled to the heartbeat, the core, the junction point of Europe.

She walked boldly towards the east, a fine strong stride, as if she were not intimidated by the city, as if she were not cowed by the history of Berlin. Past the funfair, where she remembered it. Through the Tiergarten, the trees bared by winter and snow powdered on the ground. She came to the Brandenburger Tor. At the great gate of grey-brown stone old history had been renovated and new history had been destroyed. She paused on the pavement corner and faced it: the cars swarmed between the columns over which was the victory chariot.

Either side of the gate was emptiness, where the Wall had been seven years before. The Wall had been her life. Through it she had carried the equipment, the unexposed films and the instructions for Hansie, and she had brought back the equipment, the exposed films and the reports he had made. The Wall had gone. In place of the Wall were cranes. She had never seen so many in one place. Huge, lofty, caterpillar-driven cranes replaced the Wall… She was about to cross the wide road, green light showing, when she saw the crosses. Fifteen white plastic crosses were tied to a fence between the pavement and the Tiergarten. They had been there seven years before, but prominent and confronting the Wall. Now, they were tied to a fence. Behind them was an advertisement board for a museum and they were ignored. The young men and women who had died on the Wall were forgotten, their memory consigned to plastic crosses pinned in obscurity against a fence, hard to see.

She crossed the road. She walked past the emptiness where the cranes gathered, where the Wall had been.

She went by the stalls where the Romanians or Poles or Turks sold military souvenirs of the Soviet Army and the NazionalVolksArmee, the caps and camouflage uniforms, the binoculars and flags, the gear of the men who had killed those remembered by the white plastic crosses, who had murdered her Hansie.

She reached the small garden. It was on the junction of Prenzlauer and Saarbrucker in the hinterland of the Unter den Linden. A long time ago, she had stood on the pavement beside the garden, and Hansie had given the camera to a stranger. They had posed. One snapshot, a boy and a girl. One picture with which to remember him. For many hours, in the chill wind, Tracy Barnes sat on a bench in the garden. The leaves were no longer swept away, as she remembered they had been. On a crude shaped stone in the garden was the relief portrait of Karl Liebknecht, revolutionary, tortured and killed in the Tiergarten in 1919, on a day as cold as this one. Hansie had told her about the life and death of Karl Liebknecht. His face was marked with bird droppings. Who remembered him? Who remembered Hans Becker? Twice a snow shower came. When it had passed over she brushed the frozen flakes from her chest and shoulders.

She waited for dusk to fall on the city, and the memories danced in her mind.

‘I’m very sorry for the inconvenience, but I’ve given my word.’

‘For how long?’ snapped Greatorex.

‘I know where the daughter will have gone. One night and one day will be sufficient.’

‘Who’s paying?’ whined Wilkins.

‘I will. I hope at a later date to be able to recover the expenses.’

‘Who’s going to handle your workload?’ demanded Protheroe.

‘I’ll work late this evening and early tomorrow before court. If I went tomorrow at the end of the day, then I’d be up and running at the start of the day after, and back that night. I’d seek to cause the minimum disruption.’

Greatorex said, ‘As I would hope. Your late wife may have been a valued client of this firm, but you should be damn grateful that we lifted you out of the gutter. Is this the way to repay us?’

After her death, after his collapse and living as a derelict, after he had been taken to a police station and was about to be charged with vagrancy, after Mr Greatorex had seen him and recognized him, he had been given the chance. He was fifty-four years old and he worked as a clerk.

‘I have not forgotten your kindness.’

Wilkins said, ‘This business, what you’ve told us, involves Army intelligence, the Germans, our security people. What are you getting into? This has always been a respectable, careful firm and we don’t aim now to change that. Are you stirring trouble for us that we’ll be left to clear up?’

‘There won’t be any trouble. I’ll just be into Berlin and out, back in twenty-four hours.’

Protheroe said, ‘You do realize, Mantle, that sometimes you stretch our tolerance pretty taut? We decide what clients the firm handles, not you. We decide what time and effort we commit to a client, not you. You are a clerk, not a partner. You are aware of that before you go off on this jaunt to Berlin?’

‘They never told us what had happened to him. They never brought us his body.’

‘I know who killed him. I know the name of that man.’

When the dusk had come, and the high lights had dimly lit the street, she had left the garden and walked along Saarbrucker Strasse, past the big wooden front door of the apartment block, past the small shop deserted and barricaded against squatters; she had turned on the corner at the end by the cafe with the grimed windows. She had been on the courses and knew what she should do: she had checked that she was not followed, that there was not a tail in place. She had stood in front of the old door and pressed the bell button. It was as she had remembered it from a long time before.

‘And it will do you no good, or me, to know the name.’

‘You can demand justice.’

She had waited on the pavement and gazed up at the pocked stonework of the block where the shrapnel of the bombs had fallen more than half a century before, and she had seen the rotted old window fittings of the apartments. The facade of affluence might have reached Unter den Linden, but the money had not seeped as far as Saarbrucker Strasse. It was all as she remembered it. He had gazed at her in shock, wide eyes in a white, wearied face, leaning on his stout stick, the same stick. The father of Hansie Becker had clung to her.

‘There were a hundred thousand of them, and there were more who informed for them. They have not disappeared. They are here, a rot in the timber. I tried… When the new time came, when the city was joined. I went to the government offices, days in queues, I asked the questions. Where is my son? I was shuffled between city police and federal police. What happened to my son? I was passed between the city prosecutor and the federal prosecutor. They are still here, they block the answers, they are a decay. Who wants to see them punished? I ask you, how many did they kill? How many hundreds? How many did they destroy? How many thousands? Then, I ask you, how many trials have there been? How many have been brought to the court? Six or seven out of one hundred thousand, a token, are in the Moabit gaol.’

‘If there is evidence…’

The room was as she remembered it. Hansie had only brought her to it after dark and taken her fast up the stairs so that the neighbours in the block would not see her, could not inform on her and on him and on his parents. The radio had always been played loudly while they talked. An old stove in the corner of the room, the old smell of gas, the old kettle steaming. The old chairs with the old covers. The old sideboard of dark wood. The old photograph… The face of Hansie, where the line of his smile ran at his mouth, had been joined together with Sellotape, as if the photograph had been torn into two pieces and dropped, maybe stamped on, maybe spat on. Beside it was a glass of old, faded plastic flowers.

‘You will be disappointed, my dear, if you have come here to find someone who is interested in the past. Believe me. I could not find that person. They are a network, they are an organization, they protect themselves. Twice in fifty years I hear the justification of the obeying of orders. And then, twice in my life, I hear of the need to close the book of the past. Did they hunt the Gestapo men before? Will they hunt the Stasi men now? I tried… I was ignored.’

‘But evidence cannot be ignored. There must be files, and in the files will be the names of eye-witnesses.’

The mother, older and more gaunt, stood by the stove. She had unwrapped the chocolates but not eaten one; neither had Hansie’s father. She had long ago warned her son that meeting with the English student was an unnecessary danger to him. Tracy imagined the trauma it would have been for the mother, her son missing and her home searched. They had owned the barricaded shop on the corner, had sold household fittings when they could get them, second-hand clothes, brushes, and thin paint if it was available. The shop would have been closed down when the Stasi had come to the apartment on Saarbrucker Strasse. Hansie had told her that his mother and father flowed with the tide, supported the regime, would have voiced quiet, mild criticism of its failures, would have existed inside the system. They would have been disgraced, ostracized, after the Stasi had come to Saarbrucker Strasse, destroyed. It was possible that his mother hated her, believed her responsible.

‘You will not be allowed near the files.’

‘It was murder.’

‘You wifi not be permitted near the ifies.’

The mother lifted the boiled kettle from the stove. Her voice was reedy thin. ‘Joachim’s daughter works at the Bundesbeauftragte. Hildegard works with the files…’

‘Please try, Doktor Krause. It is necessary, I assure you. Myself, I have served in Washington. I know. To Americans, the substance of the message is important, but its presentation is critical.’

It was the main briefing room of the complex at Cologne. Goldstein stood at the locked door. The room would have seated two hundred, but the room in Washington would be larger and they had been told that 320 invitations had been sent, and that more had been refused. He watched.

‘My friend, Pyotr Rykov, used to tell me, when we were together, when we were out on a lake, when we were fishing, that the lifeblood of Mother Russia was the Army. The KGB to him were filth, the word he used, “filth”, and it would only have been to me, his friend, that he would have dared such a confidence… But the Army was the lifeblood. He would say to me, his friend, that it was criminal of the politicians to have allowed the Army to be weakened, the lifeblood running from a wound. Only when the Army is strong, he would tell me, will Mother Russia be listened to. If the Western powers are nervous of the power of the Russian Army, always his argument, then the voice of Mother Russia will be respected… How is that?’

He stood at the podium, erect and composed.

Raub was beside him. ‘Brilliant, Doktor Krause, impressive. Please continue.’

Goldstein murmured, ‘Perhaps they will keep you to front the network news. God and we will miss you.’

The boom of the amplified voice: ‘He despises the politicians whom he regards as responsible for the weakness of the Army. He will work until his last breath to change that weakness into strength…’

The head waiter leaned to speak discreetly into the ear of the judge, Court of Appeal, and made the slightest of gestures towards the door. The judge’s guests in the old timbered dining room of Middle Temple would not have noted the brief movement of his head. It would be wrong for them to be disturbed, and their conversations rippled uninterrupted around the table. There was a man at the door, hovering, a pale, stoat-faced man with a brush moustache, a black overcoat folded over his arm. The judge took a leather-encased notepad from an inner pocket, wrote, ‘Phlegm, you have a visitor – don’t bugger up a good evening, Beakie’, then tore out the page, folded it for the head waiter, and pointed his index finger across the table.

The head waiter circled the table, handed the note to Fleming. The frown settled on his forehead. The glance arrowed on the doorway, found Perkins. Fleming, so politely, apologized to the lady on his right, a tax consultant with no other avenues of conversation, and left the table.

He didn’t have to question the importance of whatever had brought Albert Perkins to Middle Temple. Fleming would have said that nothing in Perkins’s working life involved the trivial.

‘She’s gone, Mr Fleming, good as gold. Of course, I challenged her to produce evidence of murder, and I warned her. The challenge and the warning made it inevitable that she would go – actually she’s there.’

‘As you said, Albert, she would. Do you know where she’ll head for?’

‘Yes, Mr Fleming, I think I have that.’

‘Our friends and allies, they would be privy to the same information?’

‘I doubt it, Mr Fleming. Rostock would only have dealt with the incursion and the death. The follow-up would have been handled from Berlin. I doubt the Hauptman would have been told details of the follow-up. My understanding is that that sort of material is long gone from the Berlin files. I don’t think they’d have that information. They’d certainly want it but not have it.’

They murmured in the doorway.

‘But they are, Albert, friends and allies..

‘Exactly so.’

‘And, Albert, there is a moral obligation to share with valued friends and respected allies..

‘Out of sharing, Mr Fleming, comes the opportunity of barter.’ Fleming mused quietly, ‘All that Iran stuff they’ve gathered.

If we shared, Albert, the Iran stuff bartered for her location, then would we be cutting her off at the knees?’

‘Maybe, and then maybe not.’

‘If we share, if they catch up with her – your Hauptman said on the tape that he would deal with matters himself, yes? – what would be her position?’

‘First they’d warn her – my opinion. If she kept going forward they’d rough her. If she continued going forward and they began to believe themselves threatened, then they would kill her. If it’s their freedom or her life, there’s no choice.’

Fleming looked into Perkins’s eyes. They were the coldest eyes he knew, the eyes of a ferret going into a rabbit’s burrow. ‘If we shared, Albert, as we should with valued friends and respected allies, just at the start, would we condemn her?’

‘Not necessarily. Right now she’s out in front, so we might handicap her, but she can still win… We would be making it harder for her to win, but still possible. You want my assessment of her, Mr Fleming. She is truly incredible. I hammered her, no sleep, no food, no heat, I was about to drop. Not a single word. She said nothing. People pass through our Resistance to Interrogation course who wouldn’t have lasted more than a few minutes alongside her. Her mental focus, her strength, they are fantastic. But that determination will cause her to ignore warnings and a softening beating. She will go for her evidence, she will threaten them. She’s driven by love for the agent who was killed. She won’t be deflected. She will win or she will be killed. That’s only my assessment.’

‘Go with it, Albert, share it.’

‘What might interest you – her file, the personal one, it tells nothing. Plenty of reports on her work, but inadequate on the personality. Her work is always highly praised, but I don’t know her. The person is locked away, kept from sight. You can read a file, most files, and proffle an individual – not her. She hid, very successfully, behind her work. Private, alone

·.. It makes her so much more interesting, Mr Fleming, don’t you think?’

‘Share it.’

‘So very sorry, Mr Fleming, to have disturbed you.’

Fleming wandered back towards the table. He felt a little sick.

The guests were standing in small knots and talking.

The judge, the host, came to him. They had been at school together, then at the same Oxford college, had played rugby together for Richmond 4th XV, they were godparents to each other’s children. The judge advised the Service on legal matters.

‘You all right, Phlegm?’

‘I’m fine, Beakie, but sometimes I disgust myself.’

‘Want the shoulder for the old weep?’

They were in a corner. Fleming’s hand trembled around the brandy glass pressed on him.

‘Our friends and allies, the Germans, they flick us at every turn. Our Bank, our City, our food, our EU membership, our diplomacy, our American link – every way we turn they seek to fuck us. Now it’s Intelligence. They’re looking for a way in, their usual delicate style, kicking and blundering towards influence. They resent that there, at least, we still punch above our weight.

They’ve some dreadful little creature from the old East German secret police and they’re trailing him round because he’s an alpha-quality source on a particular Russian in whom we have an interest. The Americans are panting because the German source – we cannot match it – is to be paraded before them, which will lead to increased German influence at our expense. I aim to destroy the credibility of that source, but at second hand. I am using a young woman to do my work, a very ordinary young woman, and I am endangering her. Can’t dress it up in fancy words, Beakie. In order to maintain correct relations I am sharing information with our friends and allies which will have the certain effect of hazarding that young woman’s life. Why will she do the job I want done? Love, boy-and-girl stuff. The target killed the boy she loved. I cannot be seen to help her, not when she works against the agenda of friends and allies, so I have to hope that she is resourceful enough on her own to destroy our mutual target.’

Krause said, pleasantly, ‘You had a good journey yesterday, Julius?’

He had discarded his jacket, unbuttoned his collar, loosened his tie. The clothes had been paid for with BfV funds. The organization owned him, dressed him, fed him and put the roof over his family’s heads. Goldstein poured the whisky. Raub studied the script and pencilled minute adjustments on it. Sprawled comfortably in his chair, Krause took the whisky and smiled to Goldstein as if he were a servant.

‘The aircraft did not crash so it could be described as a good journey.’

‘Doktor Raub said yesterday you were in Berlin. In Normannen Strasse? How is it there?’

‘Like any other piece of shitty socialist architecture, but still standing.’

‘I presume you visited the archive.’

‘I did.’

‘And I presume you searched for evidence of a criminal act by myself in violation of human rights.’

‘I did.’

‘And you found nothing… nothing.. nothing.’ He rapped his glass on the table, in emphasis.

He rang the bell for the third time. The bastards had checked that he worked late in the office. He kept his finger on the bell until the light came on, sliced between the drawn curtains of the upper window. First Wilkins, then Greatorex and Protheroe, had telephoned him on the direct line with some damn feeble query about the morning. He heard her coming down the stairs. They’d be asleep now in their homes in Gerrards Cross, Beaconsfield and the Chalfonts.

A nervous voice: ‘Who is it?’

He called softly, ‘It’s Josh Mantle. I need to speak. Would you let me in, please?’

A lock was turned. The door with the nailed plywood panel was opened.

‘I’m afraid I need some help, just couldn’t get away earlier.’

She led him into the kitchen. The cat was asleep in a cardboard box on the floor. She went to the cooker, lit the gas ring, put the kettle on it. He smiled. ‘Too right, I could murder for a cup of tea.’

She stood by the gas ring, as if to take the heat from it.

‘Mrs Barnes, what I agreed to… Go to Berlin, yes. Bring back Tracy, yes… But I didn’t stop to reckon. Where do I find her? Where do I start to look?’

Disappointment creased her face, worried at the wrinkle lines. He thought she was the sort of person to whom promises were made, broken.

‘Did Tracy have an address book?’

‘Not here.’

‘Did she have a particular friend in the Corps, someone she’d have confided in?’

‘Not mentioned to me.’

‘Are there letters from anyone in the Corps?’

‘Not letters.’

‘I don’t know where to look.’

‘There wasn’t letters. There was a Christmas card, years back.’

‘Who was the card from, Mrs Barnes?’

‘From her commanding officer in Berlin. He sent her a card the first Christmas after she came back from Berlin.’

‘You don’t have that card, Mrs Barnes…?’

She left the kitchen. He drummed his fingers on the table and the cat stared at him. He went to the cupboard on the wall and took two mugs. If he did not know where to look, there was no point in travelling to Berlin. The kettle whistled. He rehearsed what he would tell her. He did not think she would complain that he had promised: she looked to him as though she had lived a life of disappointment. He wondered where her husband was, Tracy’s father. Dead or walked out? He would extricate himself from his promise and he would tell the bastards, Greatorex and Wilkins and Protheroe, that it had all been a mistake. He made the tea. They’d smirk, pull long faces, tell him it was for the best, that it wasn’t the sort of business the firm went running after.

She laid the bundle in front of him. The Christmas cards were held together with an old elastic band. They were all cheap, except one: pheasants in snow on expensive paper. The Special Branch searchers had missed the collection of Christmas cards.

To Tracy and family,

With all seasonal good wishes,

Col. Harry Kirby DSO… and Frances…

The Bothy, School Lane, Sutton Mandeville, Wilts.

‘He just sent it the once. Just the first year after she’d come back from Berlin, after he’d retired. Didn’t send one the next year. Is that any good?’

Yes, he would have owed her a card. She might have won the Colonel – her ‘Sunray’ – his medal.

‘That’ll do me fine, Mrs Barnes. That gives me as good a start point as I could have hoped for.’

She had hung back, and Hansie’s father had talked with the man, Joachim – low voices as if the danger still confronted them – at the door of the apartment.

Most of the bulbs of the block were gone. They had passed drunks, young men, and her foot had struck a syringe. The lift had broken and they had climbed eleven ffights of stairs. She had hung back, not interfered. As if she had brought him determination, Hansie’s father whispered at the man, Joachim, and jabbed at his chest with the crown of his old stick. The man, Joachim, spoke, and fear lit his face. He turned away, slammed the door on them, and the lock was turned.

When they were in the darkness outside, Hansie’s father said, ‘Perhaps, Tracy, now that you have seen the fear, you do believe me. There were one hundred thousand of them, they did not disappear. They are here, around you, on the street with you, close to you. They have the network and the organization, and the power – why my friend Joachim still has the fear. I tell you, Tracy, if you threaten them, they will take you between their fingers and break you as if you were a dried branch. It is the way that they know, their old way. There are two thousand people working on the administration of the files. This week she does the night shift.’

The wind caught them. They stood on the pavement near the tunnel down to the U-Bahn of Magdalenen Strasse. The great tower blocks before them diverted the wind into chilling corridors. She held his arm and gripped the threadbare sleeve of his coat. They waited outside the entrance to the old headquarters of the Staatssicherheitsdienst. Past midnight. A trickle of men and women, huddled in heavy coats, scurried towards the U-Bahn tunnel.

The woman was wrapped tight in scarves and a woollen hat and gloves. The light hit the heavy spectacles on her face.

‘Joachim and I, we thought once that Hans and Hildegard would come together. It was before we knew of you, Tracy.’

Tracy said, ‘Then tell her it’s for love, and twist her arm till it hurts, till she screams.’

He sat on his folded coat. The darkness was around him. His fingers brushed the earth in front of his feet. He could feel the strong stub stems of the daffodils that he had planted the last summer and he touched them with a reverence. He only ever came to the grave at night.

‘What I’m saying, I was a lamb to the slaughter. The money was the final straw. I mean, she must have got the money from her savings tin, pitifully little, and she’s trying to give it me. No, Libby, I couldn’t have come and told you about it, about taking her money or about turning my back on her. You’d have given me a grade-one rollicking. I always do that, Libby, wonder whether you’ll give me a rollicking or that little tap of the hand, approval. Yes, well, you’ll need to know about our Tracy, our Corporal Tracy Barnes… She’s opposites, you understand. She’s sweetness and vilely rude. Sour, cheeky and funny. You like her, you detest her. She makes you feel important, she rubbishes you. Tough as an old boot, small and vulnerable. She is utterly sensible, she is lunatic. It’s because of what happened to her, what she lost, that she can be so hideous. I won’t get any thanks from her but, you have to understand, I don’t have the chance, not any more, to do many things that are worth doing, and she’s worth crawling on a limb for. I’m going to Berlin, Libby, to try to bring her home. She has travelled to Berlin to find evidence against the man who killed her boy, but the man is protected.

It’s like she’s putting her hand into a snake’s hole. Don’t worry, I’m not about to embark on anything idiotic. I’m going to Berlin to find her and to frogmarch her to the airport. I’m going to bring her home. She taunted me, Libby, she asked me if I compromised

And something else, the only thing we have in common, her and me. The person we loved was taken from us. Before you ask, she’s not at all beautiful, not even very pretty, so don’t get any dumb ideas… Goodnight, watch for me…’

He wiped his eyes, once, hard. An owl was hooting in a tree nearby. He picked up his coat. The time he spent at the cemetery, alone, was precious to Josh Mantle. He started to grope his way towards the wall where his car was parked.