The Age of Treachery (5 page)

Glastonbury got to his feet and began pulling his case down from the rack. “Do drop in to the church the next time you’re nearby. If I’m not there, feel free to knock on the vicarage door. Depending on the time of day, there may be some very bad sherry available.”

“Thank you,” said Forrester with a grin. “I may well take you up on that attractive offer.” And then, even before the train had come to a stop, he was on the platform, moving as fast as the crowd would allow.

The fog inside the vast canopy of the railway station, illuminated fitfully by overhead lights, muffled Forrester’s footsteps and blanketed the murmur of the throng, lending the whole place an air of vast conspiracy. Porters’ trolleys piled high with crates and suitcases rattled past him as he wove his way through the crowds, hoping that, hours before, Clark had fled through here on his way out of the country.

* * *

As Forrester left the train in London, in Oxford, about a mile from the college, Arne Haraldson was waking up in Ward Three of the Churchill Hospital. He had been brought in the night before by the police and carefully examined by a junior doctor who had been on duty for thirty-six hours, written up careful notes, put them in his briefcase and unwittingly carried them home with him.

As a result there was no-one with Arne Haraldson when his eyes first opened, and he was able to conceal his return to consciousness from both the patient in the bed next to him and the nursing staff. He woke in a curious state in which he seemed to drift between everyday reality and the mythic world of Ragnarök. He was conscious he was on the track of something deeply important and unable to remember exactly what it was. The faces of Duncan Forrester, the Master, Inspector Barber and David Lyall floated in and out of his mind, and he lay there, trying to fit them together. Forrester in particular puzzled him. Why had he been fighting him? What had he got against him?

His head hurt abominably, and he sometimes closed his eyes and went back to sleep before a thought had been fully formulated. Beneath the covers, the fingers of his large, powerful hands began to flex; and when he drifted off it was into a sleep perfumed by the metallic smell of blood.

* * *

Forrester took the Underground to Russell Square and then walked swiftly to the offices of the ECA in a tall, gloomy house in Bloomsbury, not far from the British Museum. He was twelve minutes late for his appointment but the twelve minutes, as is so often the way, dissolved into a sea of time as he sat waiting with the other supplicants outside the room in which the Advisory Committee were conducting their interviews. Who exactly the Committee was supposed to be advising Forrester did not know and suspected he would never find out.

He went over his papers again, surreptitiously eyeing his fellow applicants. A thin, weedy man balanced a small cork model of the Acropolis on his knees and stared unseeing into the middle distance. A large, hearty man tore little pieces off his copy of
The Times
, twisted them into tiny cones and thrust them systematically into the pockets of his tweed suit. A scholar bearing an uncanny likeness to the late Dr. Goebbels filled page after page of a cheap notebook with paragraphs of writing in purple ink. One after another they disappeared behind the green baize door that led to the committee room, and did not re-emerge.

When it was his turn and Forrester passed through the baize door, the suspicion that his quest was in vain turned to certainty. There were three men behind the long table and one woman. The woman glared at him the moment he walked in. She was about fifty, angular and angry. Forrester knew the anger had nothing to do with him; it was just he had been caught in its beam. Her name was Miss Henslowe. Beside her sat a tall man and beside
him
was a personage so old Forrester would not have been surprised to learn he had actually lived among the ancient Greeks. The chairman wore an expression of infinite sadness, which deepened steadily as Forrester described the Gorge of Acharius, the cave, and the hieroglyph-covered stone, which he was certain held the key to the mystery of Linear B.

Secretly, he had hoped that the dramatic circumstances of his discovery would help his case, but it was clear the committee disapproved of anything that smacked of derring-do, and kidnapping a German general was hardly the sort of thing they expected from a respectable archaeologist.

Instead he concentrated on the potential significance of the inscriptions, the problems Evans had encountered with Linear B, and what riches deciphering them would uncover, but there was no response. The tall man made copious notes, the old man doodled, the chairman shook his head sadly and Miss Henslowe kept up her unrelenting glare. In the end they told him they’d let him know, but warned him of the “extreme” restraints the Treasury had just put on them, of the “draconian” limitations on the use of foreign currency, and of the “deeply uncertain” political situation in Greece. He made his last bid for their attention as he approached the small door through which, it turned out, the candidates were expected to depart.

“What I’d like you to think about is this,” he said. “Crete was the bridge between ancient Egypt and the beginning of civilisation in Europe. The key to our understanding of Minoan culture lies in deciphering the surviving texts; and I believe the expedition I propose could be a major step forward in helping us achieve that.”

“Thank you,” said the chairman. “We’ll let you know.”

Moments later Forrester was outside again in the fog. The British Museum was closed, most of its collection still hidden in disused stretches of the London Underground. Taking his life in his hands he stepped into the murk that obscured Tottenham Court Road (most of its shops still boarded up) and passed into the narrow alley leading into Rathbone Place, his footsteps sounding almost metallic in the strange yellow gloom. He drank a half pint of tasteless beer in the Wheatsheaf and failed to see anybody he knew. He had occasionally seen Dylan Thomas there, when home on leave, complaining about the boredom he suffered writing film scripts for the Ministry of Information. Once he’d seen Orwell wagging his finger at J.B. Priestley, doubtless rebuking him for excessive cheerfulness, but today there was nobody except a few BBC radio producers arguing about whether the advent of the Light Programme spelt the end of civilisation as they knew it.

Unable – after his unsatisfactory meeting with the committee – to face the prospect of an immediate return to Oxford, Forrester left the pub, pulled the belt of his British Warm tighter to keep out the cold, and began walking south through the fog-shrouded ruins.
So might a Goth or Vandal have made his way through the smoking wreck of fallen Rome
, he thought. But then, he reminded himself, the British Empire was still intact. So far.

Ruins befitted Soho; its seedy charm was perfectly suited to heaps of blackened bricks and weed-grown basements open to the sky for the first time since the reign of Queen Anne. Even the hand-written offers from tarts in newsagents’ windows looked more interesting in the context of fallen church spires. The phrase “Love Among the Ruins” came to his mind, and with it the memory of walking here with Barbara.

He had met her at a club off Denmark Street and it wasn’t her beauty that first struck him, but her voice. He had turned his head as he heard her speak, and though he could never for the life of him remember what she had been saying, it was as though the sound itself came from somewhere he had always longed to be – or perhaps not longed to be, but believed existed, just out of sight, beyond the drab banality of the real world. The word
melodious
was appropriate, but it didn’t quite capture it; it was as if he was hearing an echo of a melody from the dawn of time, when the world itself was pure and unspoilt. As soon as he caught her eye she smiled at him without hesitation or self-consciousness and moments later he was laughing till his eyes watered at her description of the elderly general she drove around the countryside making snap inspections of the Home Guard.

Most of the people around Barbara Lytton seemed to come from the same sort of background as she did: country houses; large, interconnected families; good schools; skiing holidays at Gstaad. In other circumstances this would have set his teeth on edge, but he felt as comfortable in her presence as if he had not been born in a two-up-two-down terrace house on Hessle Road or seen his father boarding the trawlers on Hull docks. Among Barbara’s many gifts was one for inclusion.

And when, that weekend, he found himself among the party she had assembled at Cranbourne, the country house in a wooded Kentish valley that was her family home, she made him feel as if he had been in such places all his life. When they climbed to the folly and looked down the ride towards the house and she told him how she’d hidden there as a child and read
The Golden Age
, it almost seemed as if he had been there with her instead of playing among the broken fish crates beside the River Humber.

Even when she persuaded him to tell her about his father’s life on the trawlers and the cleaning jobs his mother had taken on after her husband was drowned, there seemed to be no gap between them: it was as if he had been living the other half of her life for her, just as she had been living the other half of his. His love for his own parents did not prevent him falling for hers. He delighted in doing conversational battle with her father as much as her father enjoyed jousting with him. He felt no resentment at the generations of privilege that had given the Lyttons the life they led but he made no bones about his determination that after the war things would change, and what they enjoyed now would one day be available to the millions, not the few.

Sir Phillip Lytton told him the millions were simply incapable of appreciating it, and Forrester told him he was talking through his hat. Lady Elspeth Lytton told him on the terrace one day that her husband looked forward to his debates with Forrester almost as much as Barbara looked forward to his visits. And she teased him for being so obsessed with social justice. Social justice was always something just out of reach, she said. Men got far too carried away trying to grasp it, as they got carried away with most things. All that really mattered in life was having a good seat on a horse. And some decent hounds. And a fox to chase, added Barbara. Of course, said her mother. Everybody needed a fox to chase. Shortly after that conversation Forrester had been parachuted into Sardinia.

When he was posted ‘Missing Believed Dead’ Barbara had wangled her way into the SOE and been sent to France. By the time he returned safely to England, she’d been caught and shot by the Gestapo.

A numbness had enveloped Forrester’s soul when he heard the news, and in the years since had lessened only enough to allow slightly unreal infatuations with other women, of whom Margaret Clark was one. In his soul he did not believe this state of being would ever change. So he concentrated on going to Crete, finding his cave again and losing himself in a world that had been gone for four thousand years.

* * *

At this same instant Arne Haraldson – still in his Oxford hospital bed – was finding that his head had cleared sufficiently to allow him to take note of the comings and goings of all the staff, so that he could begin to make plans for the moment when he could slip out without being observed.

He had realised that the chances of him being able to do this were greatly increased by the fact that he was in some kind of administrative no-man’s land, with each shift convinced the other was responsible for him. Now all he had to decide was the optimum time for his move. As the short winter day began to wane, he knew that time was coming closer.

* * *

As Forrester reached Whitehall he saw that the sandbags had gone but many of the windows were still boarded up. He remembered the hurried night-time summonses to map-filled offices along this street during the war; the clipped orders about this or that mission; the hair-raising drives through the blackout to various military airfields on the outskirts of the city; the all-too-brief flights over occupied territory – followed by the “Mind how you go” from the drop-masters as he stepped into the void.

“Mind how you go.”

He was smiling at the absurd memory when he saw Calthrop emerge from the Foreign Office with Peter Dorfmann – and felt an odd prickle of unease. There was no reason why a Foreign Office official should not be speaking with a German academic on a visit to Britain. If Dorfmann was being groomed for political power in the new Germany, it made sense that Calthrop was in communication with him. But Forrester was aware that neither of them had appeared to know each other the night before, either before going in to High Table, during the dinner itself, or afterwards in the Lodge. In fact, he was certain they hadn’t even spoken. Had he failed to notice them speaking? Or had they avoided alerting anyone to the fact that they were acquainted? It was odd.
And irrelevant
, he told himself. The facts of what had happened the night before were all too obvious, however much he wanted it to be otherwise. His friend had killed the academic rival who had stolen his wife.

Before either Calthrop or Dorfmann could notice him he had slipped into the passageway leading to Old Scotland Yard and made his way down to the Embankment. The stone of the balustrade was clammy under his hand as he looked out through the fog; invisible barges hooted mournfully from the river. Clark had taken another man’s life and ruined his own. Bloody idiot! A train whistled as it passed over Hungerford Bridge. Forrester knew he ought to be heading back to Oxford. Reluctantly, he began to walk towards the nearest Underground station.

There was a note from Margaret Clark waiting for him in his rooms, asking him to telephone her. Involuntarily he found himself holding the note close to his face, breathing in the scent, and then damned himself for his weakness, screwed up the page and dropped it in the wastebasket. Then he went down to the Porter’s Lodge, called her and agreed to meet by Magdalen Bridge in half an hour.