Death in Berlin (13 page)

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‘Captain Lang!’ -ow. ;,,.,ť, nijij. v:jfjvl.- -,,;,;.. ., i;,.. •;,;,••,;^.

‘Simon, to you.’ ť ; w

‘What are you doing here?’ ,; ,

‘Oh, just seeing the sights you know.’

‘And keeping an eye on your suspects at the same time, I suppose!’ said Miranda angrily.

‘That, of course - among other things.’ He met her indignant gaze with a bland look that held a trace of amusement; though whether the amusement was directed against her or himself she could not be sure.

She said abruptly: ‘Why did you go in for a job like this? Being a policeman. Did you have to?’

‘Frankly, because I like it. For an unspectacular type with a morbid taste for drama and the seamy side of life, it offers a pleasurable escape from monotony. Or were you merely inquiring as to whether I have an adequate private income? It’s all right. I have.’

Miranda turned and began to walk rapidly away down the path, Simon Lang beside her.

‘What are we training for?’ he inquired after a moment. The quarter mile, or London-to-Brighton?’

Miranda’s sense of the ridiculous overcame her temper, and she laughed.

That’s better,’ approved Simon. ‘Now suppose we walk gently back to the bus at a normal pace.’ He glanced at his wristwatch and said: ‘We’ve got about five minutes more here.’

‘How did you get here?’ demanded Miranda.

The same way as you did. As a matter of fact, in the same bus.’

‘But I didn’t see you!’

‘Why should you? I’m a very unobtrusive sort of chap,’ said Simon Lang regretfully.

‘Only when it suits you!’ retorted Miranda tartly. And stopped suddenly to turn to look at him: ‘Why is it,’ she demanded, puzzled, ‘that I always seem to quarrel with you?’ , n, j r

• ,w

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Simon Lang looked slightly surprised. ‘Do you? I can’t remember quarrelling with you.’

‘Oh, you don’t quarrel,’ said Miranda impatiently. ‘I can’t imagine you quarrelling with anyone. You’re too - too ‘

‘Dull?’ offered Simon Lang.

‘I was going to say “lazy”. Or too detached.’

‘Let’s just say that I have a nice, peaceable disposition.’ He took her arm and turned her into a long, gravelled path that ran parallel with the paved way that led up to the red marble flags: ‘You only try to quarrel with me because you feel on the defensive. There’s no need for you to be you know. I’m not your enemy.’

‘Then why do you behave like one?’ said Miranda with a quiver in her voice. ‘If you don’t suspect me, why don’t you tell me things straight out?’

‘What sort of things?’ asked Simon gently.

‘Things like why you had my room searched, and why you have followed me here and ‘

What’s that?’ Simon’s voice was suddenly sharp and he stopped dead and pulled Miranda round to face him: ‘When was your room searched?’

‘While you were so conveniently interviewing me in the lounge of the hostel, I imagine,’ said Miranda bitterly. ‘Or are you going to pretend that you didn’t know anything about it? Surely your underlings don’t do anything like that without orders, or a searchwarrant or something?’

‘Wednesday afternoon …’ murmured Simon Lang. He was looking directly at Miranda but his eyes appeared curiously blank and opaque as though they did not see her but were looking inwards at some picture in his mind.

A knot of East Berliners in the drab clothes and shabby raincoats that seemed to be almost a uniform of the sector passed by and stared at them curiously, but Simon did not move.

‘What is it?’ asked Miranda uncertainly.

His eyes seemed to focus her again and his fingers tightened about her arm. ‘I don’t know. That’s the devil of it. Listen to me,

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Miranda, if anything like that ever happens again - or anything odd or unusual - will you tell me at once? I mean that. This isn’t just a social gesture of the “let me know if there’s anything I can do to help” variety. This is important.’

He did not wait for an answer, but releasing her arm, took a small flat leather-bound notebook out of his pocket, and having scribbled something on a leaf of it in pencil, ripped the page out and gave it to her: ‘That’s my personal telephone number. If I’m not there myself there will always be someone who is and who can contact me.’

He glanced at his watch again and said: ‘If we don’t get a move on, we shall find that the bus has got tired of waiting for us and we’re stranded behind the Iron Curtain. In fact here, I think, is a search party.’

Sally Page ran towards them, waving. ‘Where on earth have you been?’ she panted. ‘We’re all waiting for you and the driver is fuming. We thought you’d been kidnapped by the Kremlin or something. Do hurry!’

The remainder of the tour was uneventful. They did not again leave the bus, but were driven through the American sector, past the Tempelhof airfield where something like a huge, curving, three-fingered hand groped helplessly at the impersonal sky, and was, the guide explained, a memorial to the Airlift: an ‘abstract’ in concrete, symbolizing the three air corridors by which West Berlin had been fed and fuelled during the Russian blockade of the Allied sector.

More ruins; a honeycomb of roofless, ruined walls like a modern stage setting for hell.

The Kurfurstendamm; the Haffensee Briicke; the tail, steel trellis work of the Funkturm. The Reichskanzler Platz once more, and the parked cars waiting to take the sightseers to their homes in the swiftly gathering dusk.

’”.‘M

It was raining again next morning, and Robert drove his family to morning service at St George’s in a steady downpour.

Stella huddled the collar of her fur coat about her ears, its delicate silver-grey exactly matching the heavy rain outside the car windows. She looked cold and tired, and the eye-veil of her smart little hat failed to disguise the dark shadows of sleeplessness under her blue eyes.

Mademoiselle, lean and taciturn in black, also appeared to be in poor spirits. She had discovered, with considerable annoyance, that the Wilkins lived in a small house less than a quarter of a mile from the Melvilles, and Wally, exploring the neighbourhood, had been caught by Mademoiselle on the previous afternoon plastering Charlotte’s face with coal dust in the Melvilles’ boilerroom. Mademoiselle had pursued him, armed with one of the boilerroom pokers, but Wally had been too quick for her.

The three houses now occupied by the Melvilles, Leslies and Marsons had previously been lived in by three families whose children had been inseparable friends, and gaps in the hedges and the wire that separated each garden from the next had been made for their convenience, so that they could go from one garden to the next without running out into the road. These gaps still remained open, and Wally had darted through the one in the Melvilles’ hedge and escaped across the Leslies’ lawn and by way of the Marsons’ garden into the no-man’s-land beyond.

Mademoiselle had been forced to abandon the pursuit, and had not been appeased by Charlotte’s assertion that she had asked

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Wally to make her face black, as how could she be Eliza crossing the ice with a white face?

Despite the rain there was a large congregation, and Miranda, glancing surreptitiously around her during the singing of the psalm, saw that they were all there - Simon Lang’s eleven suspects. We ought to get up a cricket team, thought Miranda wryly: ‘Suspects versus the Rest’.

She did not realize that Simon was also present until the service ended and the congregation were streaming out of the church. She had not seen him out of uniform before and thought how different and unfamiliar he looked in a dark suit.

I suppose he’s keeping an eye on us, even in church! she thought bitterly; and then remembered what Simon had said of her only the day before. She was being on the defensive again.

Stella stopped to speak to him while Robert went to fetch the car, and Miranda said sweetly: ‘I didn’t recognize you without your uniform.’

‘I practise being a plain-clothes man on Sundays,’ explained Simon Lang, straightfaced. He turned back to Stella, and Miranda walked quickly over to the car, feeling both snubbed and childish.

The rain had stopped and there were patches of blue sky overhead, and a rainbow drew a gleaming arc over the distant skeleton tower of the Funkturm. The air held a fresh, clean smell as of newly mixed mortar - that characteristic smell of Berlin on a wet day, that has its origin in rain falling on mile after mile of rubble.

They did not go straight back to the house, but drove instead to the Lawrences: Mrs Lawrence having buttonholed Robert and asked them to come in after the service for drinks.

Colonel Lawrence, in contrast to his wife, was small, thin and vague, and looked more like the popular idea of an atom scientist than the commanding officer of a regiment. He obviously did not know who Miranda was, or catch her name, but he smiled kindly, pressed a glass into her hand and made a few observations on the weather before drifting off to meet more of his wife’s guests.

‘What did you think of old,Snoozy?’ inquired Robert, exchang—

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ing Miranda’s pink gin - a form of drink that she detested - for a tomato juice. ‘The Colonel. He always behaves like that on social occasions, but don’t let it fool you. It’s protective colouring. He loathes large gatherings, unless they are strictly in the way of business.’

‘Like Simon,’ said Miranda thoughtfully.

‘Like who? Oh, you mean Lang? I shouldn’t have thought he hated large gatherings.’

Miranda flushed. ‘I didn’t mean that. I meant what you said about protective colouring. He seems to have quite a lot of that.’

Robert looked interested. ‘I think I see what you mean. You don’t notice him unless he wants you to.’

‘That’s it,’ approved Miranda. She slipped her hand through his arm and smiled at him. ‘Oh Robert, you are such a comfortable person! I don’t have to explain things to you.’

Robert grinned affectionately at her. ‘Probably something to do with blood being thicker than water,’ he suggested. ‘Are you by any chance getting interested in young Simon Stylites?’

‘He’s interested in me!’ said Miranda bitterly. ‘And not in the way you mean, either!’

‘You mean you think he suspects you of having bumped off the Brigadier? Don’t you believe it! If he’s given you that impression you can take it from me that he’s after something quite different. That young man has not acquired a reputation as the best poker player in the combined British, French and American sectors for nothing. You should hear “Lootenant” Decker on the subject. Hank Decker says it’s plumb against all the laws of nature that a limey should be able to clean out a bunch of boys who cut their teeth on poker chips and could say “I’ll raise you” before they could say “Da-da”!’

Miranda did not smile. She was silent for a moment, and then she said abruptly: ‘Robert, who do you think did it?’

Robert did not answer her. He was looking past Miranda to someone behind her, and she saw his mouth tighten queerly as

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Sally Page’s clear voice cut through the babble of talk and the clink of glasses.

‘I’m so sorry we’re late, but Andy had to go down to the office about something.’

Robert’s eyes came back to Miranda. ‘I’m sorry - what did you

say?’

Miranda repeated the question.

‘Stuck a knife into the Brigadier, you mean? God knows! Some nasty little ex-Nazi I suppose. I’d stop worrying about it if I were you ‘Randa.’

‘But Simon Lang says it could only have been one of the people who went to the Families’ Hostel in Bad Oeynhausen; because of the knife. And that means us - those of us who dined there I mean.’

‘Oh yes, I heard that too. But I don’t believe it means a thing. Look at that bunch of kids for instance. Any one of them might have walked off with the paperknife - you know what a fascination knives have for children - and then got bored with it and dropped it on the platform or in the corridor or the loo. Forget it sweetie!’

He smiled down at her anxious face and covered the hand on his arm with one of his own in a brief and comforting pressure.

Miranda grinned at him affectionately, and looking away, encountered Simon Lang’s coolly observant gaze.

She had not realized he was here and the discovery came as something of a shock. He was standing at the far side of the room near the door that led into the hall, and he did not make any attempt to disguise the fact that he had been watching her. His face was unsmiling and his eyes, across the width of the room, were very bright. He looked, thought Miranda, as though a new and interesting idea had suddenly occurred to him.

She tried to stare calmly back at him, but could not do it; and after a moment her gaze wavered and turned aside. Her hand tightened convulsively on Robert’s sleeve and Robert said: ‘I can’t think why we should be having such a gloomy conversation at a

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Sunday morning beer party. Let’s talk about something cheerful … Hullo, Norah!’

Miranda released his arm and turned to see Mrs Leslie, wearing a distressingly sensible tweed suit, standing beside her.

‘We saw you in church,’ said Robert. ‘Is your husband here?’

‘Yes. He’s gone into a huddle with your C.O. and one or two others in the diningroom. They appear to be talking shop as usual. Good-morning, Miranda.’

Mrs Leslie smiled at Miranda and sat down on the arm of a

chair. ‘Do you think you could get me a glass of sherry, Robert?’ I do so dislike beer before luncheon.’

Robert departed in the direction of the diningroom, and Mrs Leslie turned to Miranda.

‘Well, what do you think of Berlin? I hear you went on a conducted tour yesterday.’

‘Interesting, but very depressing,’ said Miranda. ‘It looks as if it would take a hundred years to clear up the mess. It must have been a beautiful city once.’

‘It wasn’t. Imposing perhaps - bits of it - but not beautiful. And you’re wrong when you say it will take a hundred years to restore it. You don’t know the Germans! Frankly, they terrify me.’

‘Terrify you? Why? Do you think they’ll go Nazi again?’