The Age of Treachery (28 page)

“I’m not sure,” said Forrester, remembering Calthrop’s conversation with Dorfmann. Was it coincidence that today, when he was in London to see the final nail put in Dorfmann’s coffin, Calthrop had happened to run into him? “You may have heard Gordon Clark is a friend of mine, and I’ve been trying to prove his innocence ever since he was charged.”

“Any luck?” said Calthrop.

“Too early to say,” said Forrester. Every instinct told him not to mention what MacLean had just discovered about Dorfmann.

“No new suspects?” said Calthrop.

“Nothing concrete,” said Forrester.

“Pity,” said Calthrop. “One always likes to help a friend in need. As long as it doesn’t distract you from your studies of Linear B.”

Forrester looked at him in surprise. “I wasn’t aware you knew of my interest,” he said.

“I didn’t, until very recently. Then by the most extraordinary coincidence your name appeared on a list that came across my desk only yesterday.”

“Oh, yes? What sort of list?”

“It’s not really my field, but the Empire Council wanted to know if you were a suitable chap to send to Crete.”

Forrester’s step faltered. “Really?”

“Yes, I gathered you’d applied for a grant to excavate there.”

“I had. But I’d rather given up on it, actually.”

“Oh, never say die,” remarked Calthrop lightly. “It’s not my decision, of course, but with resources so limited for sending people overseas, they wanted to know you were a fit and proper person to represent your country in a foreign land. Especially one where the communists are making so much trouble.”

“May I ask if you answered in the affirmative?”

“You may ask, old chap, but I couldn’t possibly answer without breaching the Official Secrets Act. But I have to say, from everything I know about you, I’m sure you’d be a credit to the nation wherever we sent you. What is Linear B, exactly?”

“A written language used by the ancient Minoans. You know, Knossos, the Labyrinth, that sort of thing. When I was there with Leigh Fermor’s lot I came across a set of inscriptions which may be the key to understanding it.”

“Sounds fascinating. I’d imagine there’d be great kudos for anyone finding out what King Minos had to say for himself. Let alone the Minotaur. Let’s hope your detective work doesn’t get in the way of a great scholastic coup. Well, lovely to run into you. Hope the Crete trip comes off.”

And he was gone, vanishing into the fog along Piccadilly, as Forrester stood, looking after him.

* * *

Ian Fleming was already holding court in the Café Royale, and the bottle in his champagne bucket was well breached by the time Forrester got there. “I’m sorry I can’t invite you to an actual lunch, Forrester,” he said, “but I’ve got to talk to a man who says he knows when the Russians are going to start World War III.”

“Bit soon for a sequel, isn’t it?” said Forrester.

“I agree, but it’ll sell papers, and that’s what counts for me right now. Anyway, have some of Lord Kemsley’s champagne and tell me what I can do for you. At Ann’s party Archie MacLean was bending your ear. What did he bamboozle you into this time?”

“Berlin and points north,” said Forrester, “to investigate Peter Dorfmann.”

Instantly Fleming was all ears, and Forrester knew he had to swear him to silence until he gave him clearance to use the story.

“Of course, of course,” said Fleming, “but this is very good stuff. It’ll set the cat among the pigeons with the Yanks, you can be sure of that. Dorfmann’s their blue-eyed boy; I’ve heard they see him as a future chancellor.”

Then Forrester told him about his odd encounter in Whitehall with Calthrop, and Fleming lit another of his gold-ringed cigarettes, drew in a deep lungful of smoke, and chuckled.

“You realise you’ve just been offered a bribe, don’t you?” he said.

“Seriously?”

“Yes. Calthrop wants you to back off exposing Dorfmann. If you do, he’ll recommend you get your grant to go to Crete. If you make trouble, you’ll never set foot there as long as you live.”

“But why?”

“Oh, why do these Foreign Office chaps do anything? They have so many agendas they can’t keep up with themselves. He’ll have his own game to play with the Americans. He may hand Dorfmann over to them himself, he may let them put him in place and then put pressure on him for something we want, he may suppress the whole thing for the sake of Anglo-American relations.”

“Devious bastard.”

“He’s in the Foreign Office. What do you expect?” Fleming drank some more champagne. “By the way, what I told you about your Master last time we met – it seems to be coming to fruition.”

“Intelligence?”

“Absolutely. The word is he’ll be the new ‘C’. Calthrop’s very much behind that too. Has Winters dropped any hints?”

“None whatsoever. Although he’s clearly becoming distinctly embarrassed by my efforts to clear Gordon Clark.”

“Not trying to stop you?”

“No, no, on the contrary – he’s been very helpful. But we put our foot in it the other night while searching for evidence and he’s gone off us a bit.” And he told Fleming the story of the dirty picture in the light fitting. Fleming was delighted, and was only with difficulty persuaded to keep the yarn to himself, at least until later. As he was chuckling, and saying how much he wished Forrester had kept hold of the saucy postcard, Forrester offered him another photograph instead.

Fleming snatched it up like a hungry seagull.

“Not for publication at this stage,” said Forrester, “but there’s Dorfmann, facing camera, and that’s Vidkun Quisling’s yacht. What I want to know is who the man in the blazer is. From the caption in the original album, I suspect he was English.”

Fleming examined the photograph carefully. “And probably a member of Henley Sailing Club,” he said. “If I identify the blazer correctly.”

“MacLean’s people are looking into that,” said Forrester. “I’ll pass the suggestion on. But here’s the point: if this chap was English, and a pal of Quisling, and associated with Dorfmann, I wonder if their association ended when the war began.”

“How do you mean?” asked Fleming.

“Whether this pro-fascist Englishman kept in touch with a German literature professor who was working with Nazi intelligence after war was declared.”

“I see what you’re getting at,” said Fleming.

“Was there ever any suggestion during the war that there was a traitor in British intelligence?”

“There was almost certainly someone – perhaps several someones – passing information to the Russians.”

“The Russians?”

“Oh, yes. They clearly knew all sorts of things they shouldn’t have known. For example, when Roosevelt sprang news of the atomic bomb on Stalin at Yalta, he showed not the slightest surprise. Someone had told him, and I think that someone was in British intelligence. My personal belief is it was the Cambridge lot. They were all communists in the thirties, you know.”

“Of course the Russians
were
our allies.”

“That’s what made it so difficult. There were people in the intelligence services who felt we weren’t treating them as allies, but as potential enemies.”

“Which they were.”

“Exactly.” Fleming emptied the last of the bottle into their glasses and signalled the waiter for another.

“But what about people passing information to the Germans?” Forrester persisted. “Was there any hint that was happening?”

“All the time,” said Fleming, and leant closer. “But it was supposed to. We rounded up most of Jerry’s agents as soon as the war began, and those we didn’t hang, we turned. They were sending stuff back to the Abwehr and the S.D. that we wanted Jerry to believe.”

“And
only
stuff we wanted them to have?”

“As far as I know,” said Fleming. “Do you have any reason to think otherwise?”

“I was just wondering if the other man in the photograph was in British intelligence,” said Forrester.

“Why?” said Fleming. “Because he’s wearing a striped blazer?”

Forrester grinned back. “Absolutely,” he said. “I mean, if he was a member of the Henley Sailing Club he was clearly a wrong ’un, wasn’t he?” Fleming chuckled appreciatively.

“You chaps from the lower orders,” he said. “You don’t trust your betters, do you?”

“Absolutely not,” said Forrester, and raised his glass across the table. “That’s how we survive.”

He saw a large, smooth man in a well-cut suit striding purposefully towards the table; Fleming’s lunch partner, he guessed. Getting up, he retrieved the Bjornsfjord photograph and slipped it into his pocket. Fleming looked wistful, and Forrester decided to give him a consolation prize.

“While I was in Berlin I came across a misfiled page in a bunch of Abwehr documents which talked about two agents, one codenamed ‘Erik’ who I think may have been Dorfmann, and a second codenamed ‘Saint’ who was giving Jerry information on things like the timing of the Murmansk convoys and Soviet plans for Stalingrad. They seemed to be using some kind of Norse saga in their communications.”

“Good God,” said Fleming.

“I wondered if Saint might have been one of the German agents we didn’t round up. Someone who managed to keep in touch with Berlin throughout the war.”

Fleming blinked. “I’ll make some enquiries,” he said.

“It may not be easy,” said Forrester. “I asked Archie MacLean at the War Ministry to do the same thing, and all he’s got is the run-around. I get the impression this is a bit of house-cleaning which for some reason the powers that be are reluctant to undertake.”

“Well it may be one of their own,” said Fleming.

“Anyway,” said Forrester, “if you can find out anything about bad eggs in wartime intelligence, people who might have been in touch with the Nazis, the chances of my being able to let you have the photograph for publication are that much higher.” Fleming looked at him wryly.

“I see you’ve learned something from Brother Calthrop,” he said.

“I have,” said Forrester. “Like how to swim in deep waters. Thanks for the champagne.” And retrieving his overcoat from the cloakroom, Forrester headed back into the real world.

Out in Regent Street, the fog was thicker than ever, and the buses moving more slowly than ever, and he decided to walk back to Paddington. But as he walked his mind was moving much, much faster than his feet.

When his train finally reached Oxford, Margaret Clark was walking into the station as Forrester was walking out of it. As he saw her, Forrester felt a jolt, like an electric shock, of pure dislike. Dislike, and deep distrust. Whatever he had found out about the role wartime espionage might have played in the death of David Lyall, he no longer trusted Margaret Clark.

“Hello, Margaret,” he said as they came abreast. She stopped, letting the crowd flow into the station around her like a rock in a stream.

“Any progress?” she asked.

Forrester gave her an edited summary of what he had learned so far.

“That sounds promising,” she said, “though I’m not quite clear how it helps.”

“At this stage neither am I.”

“Gordon’s not holding up well,” she said. “He seems to have given up hope.”

Forrester looked at her, and was certain that her concern for Gordon’s state of mind was a performance. Once again he considered the possibility that after some lovers’ quarrel, it was she who had lured David Lyall up to Gordon’s rooms and stabbed him in the heart.

But with such force that he crashed backwards through the window? Not really physically possible. And as this thought came to him he had the sudden sensation of holding the broken inner tube in his hands on Chalfont Road, and the ping of the snowball as it catapulted into the wheel of his bike.

Catapulted. Yes. It was as if David Lyall had not just been stabbed, but catapulted out of the window of Gordon Clark’s rooms. So vivid was this image – if impossible to conceive how it might have been achieved – that for a moment Forrester did not realise that Margaret was speaking.

“…he was sympathetic,” she was saying. “But I don’t feel he’s going to be any use.”

“I’m sorry, who are we talking about?”

“Why, the Master, of course. I thought he might be able to help, but I sensed he just wanted to distance himself from the whole thing.”

“That may be my fault: we had something of a debacle the other night searching Lyall’s rooms.”

“No, it wasn’t that. He’s been against me from the start.”

“I don’t understand. What do you mean, from the start?”

“Of my affair with David.”

“I don’t understand. He knew about that?”

“I’m sure he did. Well, not exactly sure; it wasn’t him who saw us.”

“Saw you where? What are you talking about?”

“Lady Hilary came across us on the towpath one day. She pretended not to have seen anything, but it was perfectly obvious. And I’m sure she told the Master. I’d hoped it wouldn’t matter, but I’m afraid it does. It’s so unfair, though – it’s Gordon I’m asking help for, not me!”

Forrester stared at her. “Just to be clear, you’re saying Lady Hilary knew you were having an affair with David Lyall all along? She knew Gordon was being cuckolded?”

“Don’t use that horrible word! But yes, she did. Is it important?”

Forrester was silent for a moment. “It depends who she told, doesn’t it?”

There was a crackle of incomprehensible chatter from the station loudspeaker, and a guard blew a whistle.

“That’s my train,” said Margaret. “Do go and see Gordon soon, Duncan. He needs all the support he can get.”

And she was gone. Forrester stood there for a long moment, his hands deep in the pockets of his overcoat, thinking about what she had said. Then he set off for the college, where a letter was waiting for him in the Porter’s Lodge.

It was postmarked Copenhagen.

* * *

Back in his rooms, before he could open the letter – before, indeed, he had taken off his coat – Harrison was knocking at the door in a state of some excitement.

“I’ve had an idea,” he said, without preamble, as soon as Forrester had let him in.

“Fire away,” said Forrester, taking off the British Warm and hanging it up.