Read The Age of Treachery Online
Authors: Gavin Scott
The Age of Treachery (31 page)
“The real enemy was Bolshevism,” said Winters unexpectedly. “I was there, you know, not long after the revolution. Part of the British mission. I saw the Bolshevik massacres, the starvation, the destruction of culture. Do I plead guilty to wanting to protect my country from all that? Yes, I plead guilty. Do I plead guilty for wanting to save my race from the pollution of lesser breeds? Yes, I do. I risked my neck for Britain, Forrester. And I am about to be rewarded for it, by being put in charge of the fight against Bolshevism in its most dangerous form. Calthrop knows how much I hate Moscow and all it stands for; he knows I am the perfect man to wield the sword of intelligence against our foes. And if David Lyall was endangering that, he deserved to die.”
And without warning Winters seized the
Heimskringla
from Forrester’s hands and struck him a crushing blow across the temple, sending him staggering backwards.
“As do you, damn you!” he said, and too late Forrester saw the blade glitter as Winters brought it down into his chest.
Where half an inch of the lapel of Forrester’s British Warm slowed the knife sufficiently for his fingers to close around the Master’s wrist. He pulled the older man close to him, and spoke almost in a whisper.
“I realised, by the way, why you had to hurry up to Gordon’s room as soon as we found the body:
to scoop up the extra glass
. Because if Lyall had really been propelled
out
through the window, there shouldn’t have been much glass on the inside, and of course there was. That was why your hand was bleeding. You were covering your tracks.” And then, as his unarmed combat instructor had taught him long ago, Forrester swung himself upright again, so he and Winters were face to face – and the knife fell from Winters’ paralysed fingers and skittered along the stones into the shadows.
“I saw what your pure Aryans did to men, women and children all across Europe,” said Forrester. “I saw what your treachery cost this country in young lives that need never have been lost. You are a rotten, rotten man and I will make sure you hang for it.” And then he heard the step behind him where the knife had fallen and knew he had miscalculated. Everything he had done and said had been on the assumption that they were alone on the tower – and suddenly he knew they were not.
“My husband is a good man,” said Lady Hilary, “and you will not hurt him,” and she brought Winters’ knife slashing down at Forrester’s unprotected neck.
Without a conscious thought, Forrester swung Winters around to take the blow.
For a moment he was looking beyond Winters’ face, wide-eyed with pain and astonishment, into Lady Hilary’s, as she realised what she had done.
And then Winters collapsed like a rag doll onto the chute that had brought him so close to the perfect murder, and slid out into the night, through the crenellations and over the edge of the tower, curving in a perfect arc until he thudded into the snow in the middle of the quad.
“Oh, God,” said Lady Hilary. “Oh, God.”
The tower door slammed back against the stonework and Barber came rushing towards Forrester, the headphones still on his head, Harrison close behind him still holding the army surplus recording equipment they had installed earlier in the day, with MacLean on his heels.
“It’s alright,” said Forrester. “It’s all over. Everything’s – sorted itself out now.” And he sat down suddenly on a pile of building equipment.
Beside him, the hollowed-out book which had been masquerading as the
Heimskringla
fell open, and Harrison’s microphone rolled out onto the frosted leads.
“We got everything on the wire recorder,” said Harrison. “And Barber heard it all as it came through. Well done, Dr. Forrester. Dr. Clark should be a free man by tomorrow morning.” He clapped a formidable hand on Forrester’s shoulder.
“Thank you, Harrison,” said Forrester, “but I couldn’t have done it without you.”
THE GORGE OF ACHARIUS
The path wound through the gorge beside the stream, almost invisible in the mist. Forrester could see, at the top of the cliffs enclosing him on either side, the tortured pines clinging to the bare slopes of the mountain; but down here in the narrow coolness, immense cypress trees, luxuriating in the water far beneath their roots, rose majestically past layer after layer of the ancient rock worn away by the modest, persistent work of the tiny river that had cut the gorge.
Vetch, speedwell and asphodel had lodged themselves in the crevices, and as Forrester inhaled their scent on the morning air he felt as if he were breathing in time with the Minoan priest kings who had walked here four thousand years before, when Egypt was still young and the Tower of Babylon not yet built.
The air was thick with the murmur of bees and somewhere in the distance he heard the tinkling of goat bells and the questioning, plaintive cries of the kids. Then he turned a corner and squeezed past the gnarled and ancient pine tree and there was the cave, waiting for him since the day he had first taken shelter there.
Inside its dark recesses, he knew, was the stone, its pictograms and hieroglyphs ready at last to give up the secrets of the dawn-time of Europe, when gods were real.
He hefted the pack off his back, leant it against the entrance to the cave, and turned to the Grevinne Sophie Arnfeldt-Laurvig.
“Well,” he said, “this is it.”
Gavin Scott is a British Hollywood screenwriter, novelist and journalist, based in Santa Monica, California. He spent twenty years as a radio and television reporter for BBC and ITN, during which time he interviewed J.B. Priestley, Iris Murdoch and Christopher Isherwood, among many others. He is writer of the Emmy-winning mini-series
The Mists of Avalon
, he developed and scripted
The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles
for George Lucas, wrote the BAFTA-nominated
The Borrowers
, and worked with Stephen Spielberg on
Small Soldiers
. His film,
Absolutely Anything
, which he co-wrote with Monty Python’s Terry Jones, was released in 2015.
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