High Jinx (13 page)

‘Roger. I'll call you there.'

Rufus was off the telephone. ‘There is nothing we can do now until London calls us.'

‘Rufus,' Blackford said, ‘is that picture album where you can lay your hands on it?'

Rufus nodded, rang the duty officer, and together they descended to the vault. Rufus was back in ten minutes. He pointed to a chest-high table above which hung a flexible light. From a drawer he brought out a large magnifying glass.

They turned the pages quickly, past the gibbet scenes to the picture of Henry sitting strapped on the chair, holding up the Albanian newspaper. Rufus examined carefully the bruises on the right side of Henry's face.

‘Could be real, could be faked. But the photograph doesn't reveal facial swelling. Perhaps a pathologist could tell the difference.' He flicked quickly over to the next page. It showed Henry bent over, the bullet piercing first the newspaper and then, apparently, the victim's forehead.

Once more Rufus examined the photograph in detail.

He shook his head. ‘Impossible to say whether there is actual identation as when a bullet passes through. Here, Blackford, you have a look.'

‘There's something protruding, I can see, from the forehead. But that could be anything. Inked putty. A bit of cereal. Just can't tell.'

The telephone rang. Rufus picked it up. Blackford looked at his watch. It would be 7:15 in London.

Rufus listened. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘Yes.' His eyes narrowed. ‘Thank you, Mr. Ambassador. We'll be back in touch.' He put down the telephone. And paused before addressing Blackford:

‘The police knocked, then entered the room with a passkey. It was empty. An overnight bag was left behind. There was no identifying material anywhere. They are taking everything personal to the laboratory for examination and will report further in a few hours.'

Blackford Oakes, still standing over the photograph table, gritted his teeth. He felt rising in him a sensation that was absolutely novel: a total personal revulsion against another human being he had only a few weeks ago thought his friend and brother-in-arms.

‘Rufus'—he spoke softly—‘let me go back. I want to go after Henry myself.'

Rufus paused, then nodded.

At nine in the morning Blackford was aboard Pan American's Flight 823, Washington-London. They didn't need to schedule a stop in the Azores; the wind was with them.

13

The large stuccoed study on the second floor of the safe house at James Street became Blackford Oakes's laboratory. He felt after two weeks as he assumed that biographers begin to feel, granted the special problems of biographers who deal with subjects who are dead. On the other hand, biographers' dead subjects aren't usually inconspicuous. He wondered idly how many lives of Julius Caesar had been written … dead a couple of thousand years, yes. But more of the people who surrounded Julius Caesar thought to record his words and deeds, and reactions to them, than had devoted themselves to recording the thoughts and deeds of:

Bertram Oliver Heath.

Yes, that was the full name by which ‘Henry' had been baptised. Imagine baptising such a monster, he permitted himself to think, immediately reproaching himself for sacrilege. It had been right to baptise Stalin. And Hitler. Perhaps, baptised, there would be less theological red tape in dropping them into the inferno.

The study, under Blackford's supervision, was well organised; the project—so to speak, the reification of Henry—well under way.

He was born in Sussex, the second of three children and the only boy. His father, Daniel Oliver Heath, a qualified chemist, owned and operated a small pharmacy at Seaford. He was still alive, though not so his wife, who had died in a car accident while driving to a celebration on V-E Day.

Daniel Heath, on being approached to talk about his son, resolutely refused to do so. ‘I am not in touch with Bertram, and not inclined to talk about his youth.' Enquiries in the neighbourhood revealed that there had been an estrangement many years ago, toward the end of Bertram Heath's career at Cambridge. The elder sister, Patricia, had married an American bomber pilot and gone to Los Angeles to live. Interviewed there, she said that she had maintained perfunctory touch with her brother—‘Christmas cards, that kind of thing'—that, really, she hadn't known him very well, inasmuch as he had gone to Winchester at age nine and ‘was only home for the hols.'

By the time he went up to Cambridge, Patricia Heath had taken a job as a secretary in London. It was there, during the war, that she met her pilot, with whom she eloped, which marriage made it possible to follow him abruptly to America when he was shot down over France. Her sudden departure from London had simply ended her relationship with her brother ‘except for, you know, I do send him a birthday card and as I say a Christmas card, and every now and then he sends me one.' But she gave the matter serious thought, anxious to help the interviewer. He was from a law firm, the caller had told her, and was attempting to expedite a small bequest made on behalf of her brother, whom they had not been able to locate. ‘He always gives the same postal address: P.O. Box 378, Knightsbridge, London SW3. You know, Bert moves about a good deal. I think he maintained his ties with the Commandos even after the war. But I have never had any of my cards returned, so I am certain that is the right address. Do let me know where you find him, and give him my love and tell him to write.'

Heath's younger sister Priscilla was unmarried and helped her father run the shop. She was ten years younger than Bert. Approached during her father's lunch hour, she wanted to know, ‘Why are you being so persistent? Is he in trouble? He never comes here, you know. He and my father don't get on. And, really, I never knew him.' She was cooperative, however, and volunteered to look in her mother's family album to see if there was anything there that might help the insurance company looking for Bert to find him, to answer questions about the car that had been stolen from him some time ago.

The album contained report cards from his little grammar school (he had done very well in all subjects), a letter from the headmistress advising his parents that young Bert was very intelligent but also very headstrong, and a bit of a bully with the younger boys.

There were, then, the report cards from Winchester. Once again he had excelled in his schoolwork, but there were complaints—again, about bullying. And there was a letter from the headmaster reporting that he had had to punish Heath for going without permission to a local pub where he was detected, having first lied about his age. In addition to the caning administered, the headmaster reported, Heath was put on probation for ninety days. The final entry pertaining to Heath in the album was the letter from the Admissions Office of Trinity College accepting his application for entrance in the atutmn of 1936. Opposite it was a picture taken on the day of his graduation from Winchester. Slim, serious, a prominent jaw, a trace of haughtiness in the carriage of his head.

George Callard, the retired headmaster of Winchester, invited in to tea the pleasant young solicitor who had asked if he might interview him to ask a few questions on behalf of a client to whom Bertram Heath had applied for employment. Dr. Callard, silver-haired, rotund, and genial, poured the tea and reminisced. Certainly he remembered Heath, remembered him very well; he had after all been six years at Winchester. A very gifted scholar and a first-rate rugger player; indeed, he had been the captain of the rugby team. ‘In fact, you will find—I think my memory is correct on the point—that he went on to be captain of the team at Trinity.'

The retired headmaster then put down his teacup and leaned forward, lowering his voice slightly. ‘Is this entirely confidential?' he asked.

‘Absolutely,' the young solicitor assured him, discreetly fingering the little wire recording machine in his pocket to make certain it was running. ‘No one except my client will ever know of our conversation.'

‘Well,' Mr. Callard said, ‘I should tell you that six weeks before graduation, Heath got into trouble. He was a prefect, you know—at Winchester it is very nearly inevitable that you become a prefect, if you become the captain of the cricket team or the rugby or soccer team—something of a tradition. Even so, I considered passing him over. This is so because twice, when he was a fourth- and then a fifth-former, I received complaints that he had bullied some of the younger boys. At Winchester, complaints of that nature get referred to the prefects, and I saw to it that this was done, and I would assume that they administered a beating. But when at the end of that year he was himself elected a prefect, recalling those complaints I viewed his election with some misgiving.

‘And,' Mr. Callard lit his pipe, ‘unfortunately my fears were realised. In the Michaelmas term—it was just before Christmas, I believe—I had a most irate telephone call from the father of one of the boys, himself a Wykehamist, who told me that his son, a third-former, had been savagely beaten by a prefect named Heath. I investigated, and indeed the prefect was Bertram Heath, and the beating was indeed inordinate—we ordered the school doctor to investigate, and I give you his judgement of it.

‘In any event, I immediately relieved Heath of his authority as a prefect. There was some sentiment among the staff that the incident should be reported to the admissions department at Cambridge—Heath had just then been accepted at Trinity—but I thought it better simply to reprimand Heath, which I did. Most severely.' George Callard nodded his grey head knowingly.

‘And I am certain I did the right thing. He had a quite brilliant career at Cambridge, studying physics, or science of some sort. And then he went off to war. But then everybody did, didn't they? You would perhaps have been too young.' George Callard smiled the smile that says well now, we're glad that subject is over, are we not?

At Cambridge three tutors were found who remembered him well. But they all said much the same thing that Harry Bacchus said, who had taught chemistry to the class in which Heath had distinguished himself. ‘There was only one figure at Trinity who mattered for Bertram Heath, and that was Alistair Fleetwood. He spent all his time with Fleetwood. To be sure, they were very nearly of the same age—Fleetwood was preposterously precocious, you must know. Anyway, Heath worshipped him. And Fleetwood was very generous with his time, giving him a great deal of individual coaching notwithstanding that it was all very time-consuming and that Fleetwood was then at work on one of his important research projects. Don't waste your time with me, or anyone else at Cambridge. Go and see Alistair Fleetwood. Oh yes—“Sir” Alistair he is now, of course.'

But Fleetwood had declined to be interviewed. His secretary had said over the telephone, ‘Sir Alistair very much regrets, but he simply does not have the time to discuss his former students. You must know that they add up to perhaps over a thousand. No. No. No, it does not matter in the least whether it was a particular student with whom Sir Alistair spent a great deal of time. He has spent a great deal of time with a great many students. Sir Alistair has to answer categorically: He will not give interviews. Thank you very much.' And she hung up.

A letter addressed to Sir Alistair Fleetwood by a well-known firm of London solicitors divulged that an American foundation was considering an application for a grant by a physicist who had listed Bertram Heath as a possible collaborator. The foundation required evaluations of all prospective collaborators by their former tutors, which evaluations had to be given personally to the solicitor, and might he therefore make an appointment with Sir Alistair? The request was answered by a printed postcard which read: ‘Sir Alistair Fleetwood regrets that his studies make it impossible to grant your request.'

Two technicians who had worked at Bletchley Park during 1940 and 1941 remembered Bertram Heath. One said only that Heath's dependence on Fleetwood was manifest, and that to all intents and purposes Heath had been Fleetwood's apprentice. The second added that Heath seemed very bored with the work in hand, that he tended to arrive late for work in the morning, and that he had acquired a reputation for being something of a dissolute, patronising the local bars, often with a girl. ‘Arse-chaser, he was,' a laboratory technician said. ‘But remember, he was only twenty-two, twenty-three. Went off to the commandos, you know. Don't know what they did to him. Or he did to them. Not a very genial gentleman. When he had a hangover he dealt with us as if we had force-fed the alcohol into him the night before. Never bothered to say much, except the absolutely required “Good morning,” “Good evening.” Ate either with Fleetwood or alone. You have, of course, seen Fleetwood?' The visitor said it was down on his list to talk to Sir Alistair.

The War Documents Office revealed that Bertram Heath had served with the Eighth Army in North Africa, and that he had taken part in the invasion of Sicily. There he had been wounded by shrapnel. The medical report revealed that six pieces of metal had been removed from his body, leaving scars, including a four-centimeter horizontal scar just below the hairline at the back of his neck. By the time he recovered, the war was going into its final phases and he was sent to a training camp for commandos. The reports there from his superior officers gave him excellent grades as an instructor, but promotion to major was denied on the grounds that ‘Captain Heath is given to occasional acts of severity so extreme as to damage the morale of the men. He has three times been reprimanded on this account, and on one occasion threatened with a summary court-martial.' Bertram Oliver Heath was discharged from the army on September 10, 1945.

General Rory Islington had been put in charge of Operation Tirana by its architects. He was a veteran of sceptical turn of mind and accordingly received the young officer cautiously. The young man appeared in naval uniform, presented his papers, and said that he had been assigned by MI5 to write for the archives a highly classified study of the background of the commando team sent to Albania, perhaps to be published ‘a generation or so down the line.' And the first question of course had to do with the leader, who had been known as ‘Henry'.