The Age of Treachery (24 page)

So he was blunt when he told her what had happened to him while he was abroad, what he had found out, and how the police had reacted. She didn’t seem to take that in – instead she seemed to be excited by his adventures, by the danger he had encountered.

“You could have been killed,” she said.

“Yes,” said Forrester. “I was very lucky.”

“Very
strong
,” said Margaret Clark, and Forrester knew those words would once have made his heart turn over. She took his hand. “Thank you,” she said.

Forrester let his hand remain in hers (how he would once have thrilled to that touch) just long enough not to offend her, and then withdrew it.

“We have to see if we can build on what I’ve found out,” he said. “We have to find proof that David Lyall
was
trying to blackmail Dorfmann.”

“Of course,” said Margaret.

“For example, that photograph I believe he took from Norway. Have you any idea where he might have hidden it?”

“No,” she said, “but I’ll think about it.”

“We also have to find out if someone killed Lyall on Dorfmann’s behalf. It can’t have been Dorfmann himself because he was beside me in the Master’s Lodge when it happened. But he may have hired someone, or perhaps brought some bodyguard with him that we don’t know about. I don’t expect there’s much you can contribute there, but keep your ears open; keep thinking whether there’s anything David told you that might provide a clue.”

“And then there’s the manuscript.”

“Exactly. If there’s anything you can do to help track it down, it could be crucial; anything David might have said, a hint he might have dropped.”

“I’ll do everything I can,” said Margaret Clark, and looked into his eyes to emphasise the intensity of her determination.

And as he returned her gaze Forrester realised he did not believe a word of what she was saying. That she would have been perfectly capable of killing David Lyall herself, if he had crossed her. And to the best of Forrester’s knowledge, of course, David Lyall had crossed and double-crossed just about everyone he had ever encountered in life.

Forrester had two more visits to make before his first tutorial; the first was to Gordon Clark’s solicitor, who undertook to do everything in his power to follow up Forrester’s suggestions, and who in Forrester’s opinion seemed terminally unlikely to do anything that would upset the Oxfordshire Constabulary.

The second was to His Majesty’s Prison Oxford, to visit Gordon himself.

He was shocked by what he saw. It was not just that Clark was pale, his eyes hollow and his cheeks sunken, but that he seemed to have given up. He showed polite interest in Forrester’s adventures in Berlin and Norway, and expressed the appropriate gratitude for the risks he had run, but it was as if he was looking back on his old life like a man at the stern of a ship heading out into a darkening sea. As if Barber had convinced him of his guilt, and his only task now was to resign himself to the consequences.

“I’m sorry I haven’t got anything more concrete for you, Gordon,” said Forrester, “but I’m certain Dorfmann was behind Lyall’s murder, and your lawyer ought to be able to make good use of that in court.”

“Thank you, Duncan,” said Gordon Clark, but there was no conviction in his voice – none at all.

As Forrester walked away from the visitors’ room along the narrow stone corridors of the prison, he felt his own hope draining away, and by the time he was being let out of the prison, all his remaining energy had drained out too, all the mental force that had been sustaining him since he caught the RAF plane to Berlin, and as he hauled himself up onto a bus towards Barnard College he was so tired he could barely stand.

He was not some super-brained sleuth who could take a couple of clues and work them into a brilliant theory. He was not even a methodical detective, with all Barber’s resources at his disposal. He was a historian, for God’s sake, an exhausted ex-serviceman who had seen too much service and no longer had the strength for a task like this. As he took his leave from Gordon Clark he had smiled reassuringly, but he knew his smile was as false as sin; that all his confident words about making this all come out right were no more than that: just words.

* * *

He went back to his room, fell into bed and slept long and dreamlessly, and when he woke the next morning and answered the knocking on his door there was his student and loyal assistant, looking at him, concerned. “I’ll come back another time,” said Harrison, but Forrester, not yet coherent enough for speech, gestured him towards the armchair while he went to the sink and splashed cold water on his face.

“I’m sorry, old chap,” he said as he dried himself off. “I’m not quite together yet.”

“Totally understood,” said Harrison. “Let’s reconvene when you’re back on your feet.”

“No,” said Forrester. “You have a tutorial. I’m your tutor. Let’s just do it. Do you have an essay to read to me?”

“Solon,” said Harrison.

“Solon, very good,” said Forrester. “You read it, I’ll come back to consciousness while you do.”

So Harrison read it, and as he read, Forrester returned to the land of the living.

The essay dealt with Solon’s effort to legislate against the political and moral decline of Athens in the sixth century
BC
. His reforms, proclaimed Harrison stoutly, may have failed in the short term, but they also laid the foundations for the whole great experiment of Athenian democracy.

Forrester was inclined to agree, but felt obliged to point out that the archaeological evidence for Solon’s greatness consisted of little more than a few carved stone inscriptions, that what fragments of his writings survived were probably full of interpolations by other writers, and that those later orators who claimed to be championing his beliefs were actually using Solon’s name to give their own ideas credence. “There are some scholars,” he said, “who claim that the whole Solonic achievement is no more than a fictive construct based on insufficient evidence. How do you respond to that?”

Harrison grinned.

“The same critique applies to all history,” he said. “How much evidence is ‘sufficient’? Even if we had all Solon’s writings, what about the writings of the people who opposed him? The graffiti by the people his laws affected? The treasury rolls showing whether his reforms actually worked? Not available, any of them. The same applies to Sumer, to Assyria, Rome, your beloved Crete. We always have to construct coherent narratives based on the evidence that
is
available, however much or little of it there is. That’s what being a historian is all about.”

“Very good,” said Forrester. “I’ll accept that.”

“Thank you,” said Harrison. “And now I absolutely refuse to leave the room until you’ve told me what you uncovered among the wretched Huns.”

And so Forrester told his story – fairly streamlined by this time – and Harrison listened, lighting and relighting his pipe judiciously throughout the narrative. When Forrester had finished he said, “You’ve had quite a time of it, haven’t you?”

“It hasn’t been boring,” said Forrester.

“By all rights you should be dead by now under a pile of bricks in Berlin.”

“I was lucky.”

“You were bloody good. And even better in Norway, I suspect. I hope I’ve got you on my side if I’m ever in trouble.”

Forrester was obscurely gratified by Harrison’s praise, because the feeling was entirely mutual. “Well, let’s hope you’re never in this kind of trouble,” said Forrester. “Because all these efforts of mine, however valiant, don’t seem to have been of much help to the Senior Tutor, do they?”

“I’m not sure about that,” said Harrison. “Let’s focus on the Norse saga part for a minute. What’s our starting point for thinking that’s an element?”

Forrester considered – and this time found it a relief to talk, as if Harrison’s question had released the jammed cogwheels of his mind. “The starting point is the fact that Lyall told Arne Haraldson he had a Norse manuscript to show him, hinted it might contain some encryption of occult significance, and then discussed it with various Scandinavian students in Oxford.”

“And conspicuously did not discuss it with, or show it to Tolkien or Winters, whose field it is,” added Harrison.

“Exactly. Then in Berlin I found witnesses who testified that Dorfmann had been seen carrying something that sounded remarkably like a Norse manuscript when he went off to consult with Nazi intelligence.”

“Plus the reference in German intelligence files to a saga having been used in some sort of espionage operation involving the Russians.”

“Exactly.”

“Then when you went to Norway to see the woman who sheltered Lyall during the war – this countess of yours – the Norse manuscript came up again.”

“Yes; her husband, who had in fact been involved in black magic, had apparently sold off or gambled away several of these manuscripts before the war.”

“And among the possible recipients was at least one German, who you believe, from the photograph you saw, to have been Dorfmann.”

“Yes. Although I can’t be certain of that.”

“And you think David Lyall stole a second photograph, which
proves
it was Dorfmann.”

“Yes.”

“We have to find that photograph,” said Harrison.

“I assume the police have long since searched Lyall’s rooms.”

“They may well have done,” said Harrison. “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t search them again ourselves, does it?”

And Forrester knew he was right. Suddenly all his weariness was gone. He had a goal: to find the photograph Lyall had taken from the Arnfeldt-Laurvig estate.

“You know, Harrison,” he said, “you are a tonic.”

* * *

That evening Forrester found himself once again in the Lodge, talking to the Master. Winters listened with total concentration to everything he said, and then congratulated him on his persistence and fortitude.

“Although I have to agree with Inspector Barber,” he said, “about the real significance of any intelligence activities Peter Dorfmann may have engaged in during the late hostilities. I’m not surprised the Abwehr or the S.D. called him in: he was a distinguished professor. They had codes to break. He was a German citizen in wartime – he would have had no option but to comply. I myself worked for British Intelligence, as you know. I can’t see that Lyall, even assuming he’d found out that Dorfmann assisted German intelligence, had much to blackmail the man with.”

“What about this Norse manuscript?” said Forrester. “We do know Lyall was hawking it around, and conspicuously avoided showing it to you or Tolkien or anybody else who might really have been able to evaluate it.”

“Except Haraldson,” said Winters.

“Well, he told Haraldson about it,” said Forrester. “Haraldson never actually saw it.”

“In fact nobody ever actually saw it,” said Winters, “including the students Lyall consulted. We don’t even know what it was.”

“I’m certain it came from the Arnfeldt-Laurvig library in Norway,” said Forrester, “and that Dorfmann was there before the war, in 1937.”

“Because of the photograph?”

“Exactly.”

“Do you have the photograph?”

“I gave it to the police.”

“Ah, of course. No copy?”

“A contact of mine at the War Ministry made one, but I don’t have it.”

“Who was that? It may have been someone I worked with.”

“Archibald MacLean.”

“MacLean… No, doesn’t ring any bells. And you say it showed Dorfmann and another man on the fjord below the estate?”

“I think so. One man was rowing and had his back to camera; the photo was too small to be certain that the other man was Dorfmann – but that’s what MacLean is looking at.”

“Well let’s hope he finds something out,” said the Master. “What’s your next move?”

“I’d like to search Lyall’s rooms to see if the photograph he took – the photograph I think he took – is hidden there somewhere.”

“You don’t think the police would have already found it if it was there?”

“They weren’t looking for it.”

“Well, that’s true, I suppose.”

“I’m not sure about the legality of it. Is it technically a crime scene?”

“I don’t think so,” said Winters. “They asked me to keep it locked, but they didn’t ask me not to let anyone in there.”

“You wouldn’t mind if I took a look?”

“Not at all,” said Winters. “In fact, I’ll come myself to give the enterprise an air of legitimacy if anyone questions it.”

“That’s very good of you.”

“It’s the least I can do,” said the Master. “I’ve lost one of my scholars to a murderer, I’ve no desire to see another succumb unnecessarily to the hangman’s rope. When do you want to undertake this expedition?”

“As soon as possible.”

“Shall we do it after High Table?”

“That would be perfect. I’d like to bring Ken Harrison along? The chap who’s been helping me.”

“By all means,” said the Master. “He sounds like a useful fellow.”

And so it was agreed.

High Table was thinly populated that night, which left Bitteridge and Norton free to get into a rebarbative discussion about the new Labour government’s efforts to set up a National Health Service, which Norton championed fiercely and Bitteridge denounced as creeping communism, with the Master gamely trying to create a middle ground. Norton told them about people who hadn’t eaten properly for years because they couldn’t afford false teeth, and children who didn’t learn to read because they couldn’t afford glasses, and Bitteridge talked about doctors who had devoted their lives to medicine suddenly finding themselves being ordered about by ignorant bureaucrats with the power of the state behind them. Forrester thought a National Health Service was what every decent society should provide, but he was too preoccupied to give Norton the backing he needed, and the issue remained unresolved by the time the Master announced – with a meaningful look at Forrester – that he had some reading to do.

Forrester waited a few moments – Norton and Bitteridge were now arguing about whether it had been wise to raise the school leaving age to fifteen – and then slipped away himself. He glanced down into the body of the hall to make sure Harrison was aware he was going, and then headed out into the quiet darkness of the quad.