Orders from Berlin (12 page)

The system worked well when Quaid had the right man in his sights, but sometimes Trave wasn’t convinced that the inspector had got it right, and there had been several occasions recently when his efforts to point out the holes in Quaid’s theories had led to angry clashes with his superior officer, who’d accused him of disloyalty and even sabotage.

Trave didn’t know why he cared so much. He looked at his pale reflection in the cracked mirror over the sink as he began to shave and felt he could make no sense of the thin, hollow-cheeked man staring back at him out of the glass. Hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of innocent people were dying in the city every night. Blown to pieces by high-explosive bombs so that sometimes there was not even a trace left of their bodies; or trapped underground, drowning in water or gas leaking from ruptured pipes. Why, then, should he spend his days worrying over whether Quaid had charged the wrong man with a crime? All he was doing was making Quaid hate him and pushing for the day he’d be kicked off the force and sent off to join the Army or what was left of it after the disaster at Dunkirk. Unless, of course, that was what he really wanted and his constant questioning of orders was no more than a protracted form of professional suicide.

When he was a boy, Trave had never had any doubts about what he wanted to be when he grew up. Other kids in his class at the local grammar school had fantasized abo
ut becoming fighter pilots or emigrating o
n a steamship to America like Charlie Chaplin and becoming stars of the silver screen. But as far back as he could remember, he had always known that he was going to be a policeman. Looking back, he supposed that his ambition was rooted in some ideal of fighting for the right side, making sense of a senseless world by bringing it order and justice; but where that idea had originated he could only speculate – perhaps in his vicarious experience of the First War, the one his father had fought in on the Ypres Salient twenty-five years before. Harold Trave had disappeared down the front garden path in his bright new khaki uniform with a smile and a wave of the hand one autumn day in 1915 and had come back three years later utterly changed. And from then on, it was as if he were somewhere else all the time, even when he was physically present in the house, living in a terrible unseen world entirely outside the boundaries of his family’s experience. Trave remembered as if it were yesterday looking up from his schoolbooks in the front parlour one afternoon in 1920 and seeing his father gazing sightlessly into the middle distance with tears rolling down his cheeks.

And he recalled how in the evenings after the Armistice his father would go to bed with the rest of the family but then get up quietly in the middle of the night, put on his shoes by the door, and go out God knows where until morning. Trave asked his mother about it once or twice, but she was harsh with him, telling him in that quick scolding voice of hers that she didn’t know where his father went – it was none of their business; something they had to accept; something his father needed to do. And now Trave thought that Harold had probably just walked and walked as so many other soldiers did in those years after they were demobbed, silently wearing out their shoes on the city streets, alone in the darkness with their memories until morning brought an end to their wanderings.

Once, in the summer of 1916, Trave’s mother had taken him down to Brighton for the day. He’d built sandcastles on the beach and paddled in the cold surf, but his heart hadn’t been in it. Over the sound of the waves, he could faintly hear the boom of the guns on the other side of the Channel and had known without asking that it was the war that was making the noise; it was where his father was. And now they were back where they had started – the war to end wars had kept the peace for barely twenty years.

Trave closed his eyes and was back in Oxford with Vanessa, listening to Neville Chamberlain’s sad, reedy voice coming over the radio from 10 Downing Street that hot summer’s day the year before: ‘This morning the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by eleven
a.m.
that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.’ At war with Germany. Trave had stood outside the railway station and watched the soldiers going off to fight and had seen them a year later coming back on the troop trains from the coast after Dunkirk with that same hollow, faraway look in their eyes that his father had had when he came home. And he had felt, still felt, that he should have been there with them.

Churchill was right: the civilized world stood balanced on the brink of an abyss, ready to fall into a new dark age. This new Germany was a terrible, frightening creation – all-powerful, all-conquering, certain of victory. Trave still found it hard to comprehend how easily France had crumbled. Hitler had accomplished in six short weeks what the German army had failed to achieve in four years of ceaseless fighting a quarter of a century earlier, so that now England stood alone with the panzer divisions massed on the other side of the Channel, ready to cross on the next good tide. Tracking down criminals on the London streets didn’t seem very important or worthwhile or even honourable when the destiny of the world hung in the balance, yet he didn’t know how to do anything else.

Trave gritted his teeth, forcing the negative thoughts out of his mind. He might doubt the value of his work, but it was not in his nature to simply go through the motions, and he needed to know where Albert Morrison had gone in the taxi on the last afternoon of his life. The words on the note that Trave had found in the dead man’s pocket kept echoing in the recesses of his mind: ‘Provide detailed written report. What are the chances of success? C,’ and then the name written underneath followed by the question mark – Hayrich or Hayrick. Quaid might not be interested, but Trave needed to know what the message meant and whom the strange name referred to and why Albert Morrison had written it down in such a hurry. First the careful, spidery handwriting and then the name scrawled almost illegibly. Why? It was as if Albert had written down the line, copied it from the note he’d received, maybe, and then suddenly realized what it all meant. Was it Hayrick he’d rushed off to visit in the cab, and if so, had he found him or had he met someone else, someone who’d followed him home?

Trave had questions aplenty but no answers, and if he was to find any, then the obvious place to start was at the cab office in Chelsea that Ava had phoned for her father’s taxi. It was still early, and if he was quick, he wouldn’t need any excuse for getting into work late. Or maybe he would turn up something interesting, in which case punctuality wouldn’t even be an issue. Whatever happened, Trave had worked hard to become a detective and he wasn’t prepared to just be Quaid’s errand boy. The job was too interesting for that.

Trave was in luck. The driver he was looking for came into the office only a few minutes after Trave had asked for him. He acknowledged Trave’s warrant card with a grunt, poured himself tea from a battered tin urn in the corner, stirred in sugar until his spoon stood up almost vertical in the cup, and then drank down the concoction noisily while warming his hands at a paraffin heater positioned under an army recruitment poster on the back wall that had begun to fray at the edges. It was cold, and Trave felt grateful for the warmth of his greatcoat.

‘Yes, I remember him. Of course I do. Old bloke in a mackintosh with no hair on the top and a lot on the sides. Looked like he was a mad scientist or something. And worked up something terrible, he was – I couldn’t go the quickest way because there was an unexploded on Horseferry Road and your lot had all the streets roped off round there. But he couldn’t sit still; kept tapping me on the shoulder, wanting to know how much longer it would take to get there.’

‘Get where?’ asked Trave, interrupting.

‘St James’s Park Underground. He wouldn’t give me an address – got really cagey about it when I asked him. And then when we got there he wanted me to wait, but I wouldn’t. Told him I’d had enough of him poking at me, he wasn’t the only one in this town in a hurry.’

‘Did you see where he went?’

‘Some building on Broadway a few doors down. Couldn’t tell you which one except it was on the same side of the road as the Tube. He was running in there when I was turning round. Looked like bloody Professor Brainstorm,’ the cab driver added with a harsh laugh before he went back to his tea.

Trave was tempted to tell the man what had happened to the old bloke that he’d left stranded the previous day, but he knew there was no point. Maybe Albert had been followed home, maybe not, but there was nothing this cab driver was going to say that would change what had happened. And like Albert the previous day, Trave was a man in a hurry. He thought for a moment about asking the driver to take him to St James’s Park but dismissed the idea. He didn’t have the money for such luxuries.

He crossed the King’s Road, passing a tall nineteenth-
century building in which the name of a school for boys had
been engraved in the red-brick façade; but the school
had bee
n closed since the evacuation of children from the capital at the beginning of the war and had now been taken over by the council’s emergency housing department. Strange, Trave thought, the Victorians’ faith in the permanence of their institutions, a naive arrogance that two world wars had destroyed forever.

It was still too early in the morning for the housing office to be open, but already a line of families had formed a queue snaking back past the bus stop. Trave knew who they were. You could tell from the pushcarts and prams piled high with their remaining possessions – pots and pans and teddy bears, all that they had been able to salvage from the wreckage of their bombed-out homes. It was a nightmare existence they led, these urban dispossessed, shunted from one rest centre to another, surviving on inadequate rations until they were finally found somewhere to live, often in an area far removed from their previous home, where they knew nobody and nobody knew them.

Trave hurried past and made his way through the
backstreets
to South Kensington Underground, where the platform
s had already been cleared of the hundreds who took shelter there every night. Every wall was covered with government information posters, ordering citizens to do this and not do that:
look out in the blackout; we need your kitchen waste; the enemy is listening – careless talk costs lives
. Was that what had cost Albert Morrison
his
life? Trave wondered as he waited for his train. Talking to the wrong man because he was in too much of a hurry?

Trave emerged out of the Underground into the morning light and began walking down the Broadway, knocking on doors. There was no response from an import–export company that looked as if it had seen better days – unsurprising with the U-boats wreaking havoc on the country’s merchant shipping – and the building next door was a bank, which wasn’t what he was looking for. However, the one beyond seemed like a possibility: tall and wide and grey, with a flat, featureless façade and blacked-out windows on every floor.

An old man answered the door, dressed in a grey overall that reached below his knees. He was thin almost to the point of being skeletal.

‘I’m a detective,’ said Trave, producing his warrant card. ‘I’m making some enquiries. It’s about a murder that happened yesterday – over in Battersea.’

The old man said nothing, didn’t even glance at the warrant card. He just stood blocking the doorway, waiting to hear what else Trave had to say.

‘The dead man was called Albert Morrison. We think he may have come here, and we need to know why and whom he spoke to.’ Trave noticed a definite reaction on the old man’s face to the name, but it was gone too quickly to tell whether it was one of pain or pleasure.

‘Well, dead or alive, ’e didn’t speak to me,’ said the old man. ‘I’m the one who opens the door and the only people who came ’ere yesterday were the people that have got a right to be ’ere – the people who work ’ere.’

‘What work? What goes on here?’ asked Trave, his curiosity aroused by the old man’s unnecessary rudeness.

‘None of your business,’ said the old man, beginning to close the door.

But Trave was too quick for him. He put his foot out and pushed the door back with his hand. The old man took a step back, looking furious.

‘Do you live here?’ Trave asked.

But the old man ignored his question. ‘I’m calling security,’ he said, but he made no move away from the door.

‘All right, I’ll take that as a no,’ said Trave. ‘The man I’m talking about – he came here late in the afternoon, so maybe you’d already gone home. Maybe someone else answered the door.’

The old man looked Trave up and down for a moment and then seemed to come to a decision. ‘I’ll check the book,’ he said grudgingly. ‘You wait ’ere.’

This time Trave did not stop the old man from shutting the
door. He waited patiently on the step, resisting the temptation to knock again. Something told him that the old man mi
ght be
cantankerous and unpleasant but that he was
no lia
r – if he said he was going to check the book, then that was what he would do. Several minutes later, he was proved right when the door opened and the old man
reappeared
.

‘There were no visitors yesterday before or after I left,’ he said with sour satisfaction, turning to go.

But Trave hadn’t finished. ‘Does a man called Thorn work here?’ he asked. ‘Middle-aged, balding, no glasses—’

‘I know what ’e looks like,’ said the old man, interrupting.

‘Is he here? I need to see him.’

‘That’ll depend on if ’e wants to see you,’ the old man said laconically. ‘You’d better come in, I suppose.’

The old man stepped aside and Trave went past him into a wide, dimly lit entrance hall. There was a threadbare colourless carpet on the floor, and the walls, void of pictures, were badly in need of a coat of paint. There were several doors on either side, but they were all closed and probably locked, Trave thought, noticing the large bunch of keys attached to the old man’s waistband. Maybe one of them contained the visitors’ book, Trave speculated, but the old man didn’t ask him to sign anything. Instead he pointed to a hard-backed chair set against one of the walls; told Trave to wait, speaking in the same peremptory tone he’d used outside; and then went up the staircase at the back of the hall. Trave could hear the sound of the old man’s knee joints cracking even after he’d disappeared from view.