The Mask of Troy (26 page)

Hugh nodded. ‘I was at Mycenae the summer before the war, you remember, digging with the British School. I recall sitting on the hillside staring at that magnificent place, wondering how on earth an archaeologist like Schliemann could have left it unfinished. I always thought there was something else driving him, something that allowed him to turn his back on the gold and other treasures he knew must still lie there, as if he’d found what he needed and had to move on, some kind of obsessive quest that we can only guess at now.’

Dillen pursed his lips. ‘It’s there in his papers, only it isn’t. It’s like a void. It’s everything he should have said, but didn’t. All the odd reasons he gave for going to those other places. To Egypt, to search for Alexander the Great’s tomb? Not likely. Why does someone on the cusp of revealing the truth about the Trojan War, the greatest discovery ever in archaeology, suddenly veer off and search for something completely different? I believe he was on a trail of clues that only he and Sophia knew about, one that began and ended at Troy.’

Hugh moved from the fireplace and sat down in the battered leather armchair opposite them, putting his mug on the floor and leaning forward on his elbows. ‘So,’ he said quietly. ‘Why have you
really
come to see me, James? You could have e-mailed me those scans of the ancient text.’ He looked at Rebecca. ‘And a Howard doesn’t pay a social visit in the middle of an excavation campaign. Not one producing finds like you’ve had in the past few days.’

Dillen gestured at the table. ‘Your other project. The one I encouraged you to start. Those pages I can see with the National Archives symbol at the top. Scans of hand-written British army unit diaries from the war.’

‘So that
is
it.’ Hugh sat back. ‘I’d guessed it when you started talking about Schliemann. All those years ago, that story I told you boys in your first Latin lesson. That’s it, isn’t it? About something I found during the war, a clue to the greatest treasure ever concealed?’

‘And then you clammed up on us.’

‘I thought you might have forgotten, or thought it was just a story to get unruly boys interested in translating Latin. I should have known better. For a long time I wished I’d never told you. I wanted to forget the war, you know. I’ve tried to, for more than sixty years. But as you get older I suppose the defences drop, and it’s all there again as if it were yesterday.’

Rebecca undid her backpack and took out a bundle wrapped in a sweater. She carefully extracted the copy of Alexander Pope’s
The Iliad of Homer
that Dillen had given her the day before and handed it to Hugh, who took it and stared at it for a moment, then put one palm gently on the cover. ‘How nice to hold this again. When did I give this to you, James? Your graduation, wasn’t it?’

Dillen nodded. ‘And now I’ve passed it on to Rebecca. I thought you’d approve.’

Hugh smiled. ‘Of course.’

‘I’ve seen the dedication,’ Rebecca said cautiously.

‘Ah.’ Hugh swallowed hard. ‘And you want to know about Peter.’

‘He’s tied in with this story, isn’t he? James told me something on the plane, about a sketch he’d found. The girl with the harp.’

‘
The girl with the harp
,’ Hugh whispered. ‘How do you know about that?’

‘My guesswork,’ Dillen said. ‘Once when I was a boy you let me use one of your old sketchbooks, and there was a page with those words written in pencil at the bottom. You’d tried to rub it out.
The girl with the harp
. You’d pencilled in some outlines above, a drawing, a sketch of her perhaps, but you’d abandoned it. I guessed it was something to do with the war. I’d seen your face whenever you heard harp music. I knew you were one of the first troops into Belsen, and I just guessed.’

‘She was in a camp, a small camp near there,’ Hugh said quietly. He paused, picked up his mug, then put it down again. Dillen saw that his hand was trembling. He wondered whether this was right, whether they should have asked him after all, but then Hugh continued. ‘The guards had gone. We’d seen to that. My chaps and I. We were in there before the liberating troops arrived, but there was already a Red Cross contingent. A nurse with the children, named Helen. Always remember her. She’d got a German living nearby to bring a harp. And there she was, the girl, sitting with the harp amidst all that death and squalor. I tried drawing it years later. It should have been Peter doing that. He was the artist, not me. I just couldn’t finish it. It was a mistake even trying. I thought it might help, but it didn’t.’

‘You mentioned the Ardennes,’ Rebecca said gently. ‘That was the Battle of the Bulge, wasn’t it? We did that at school. James told me you were in the SAS.’

Hugh stared at the fire, picked up and cradled his mug, then looked back at Rebecca, his eyes steely again. ‘There was no glamour in it then, you know. No mystique. Nobody knew about the SAS. That was the whole point of it. I always thought the acronym was a bit silly, actually.
Special Air Service
. The only time I ever jumped was from a practice tower in the desert. Our job was to go behind enemy lines and kill. In North Africa, we crept into airfields at night and bombed and shot up sleeping men. In France before D-Day, we knifed and strangled. In Germany, after the Rhine crossings, we ambushed remnant SS and Wehrmacht, and old men of the Volkssturm, and Hitler Youth, boys as young as twelve. We didn’t take prisoners, unless we were ordered to. We gave as good as we got.’

‘Hitler’s commando decree,’ Dillen murmured.

Hugh nodded. ‘All captured commandos were to be executed. I lost most of my stick - my patrol - that way, in France. They should never have surrendered. Didn’t drum that into them well enough. New chaps mostly, hadn’t been with us long. Always felt guilty about surviving. But sometimes they were handed over to the Gestapo first. That’s why we went to Belsen, to this other camp. We were looking for one of our chaps. We didn’t find him, but we did find some SS who tried to surrender to us. Those guards I mentioned. Gave them pretty short shrift. That was when I saw the girl with the harp. She’d made a drawing, and I saw it, saw something extraordinary in it, and asked Helen if I could take it. The girl had done others, but not that image. Intelligence at Corps HQ were pretty interested too. And that was the last day I ever saw Peter.’

‘Was he in the SAS too?’ Rebecca asked.

Hugh shook his head. ‘We’d served together early in the war in North Africa, in the Long Range Desert Group.’ He gestured at the photo on the mantelpiece. ‘That’s when I took that picture. After the LRDG wound down, he went back to his infantry battalion, and I volunteered for the SAS. But Peter went into another outfit after he was wounded in Italy. Another silly acronym for a tough unit, 30 AU.’

‘I know about that,’ Rebecca said. ‘It kept coming up when I was researching that painting, the art stolen by the Nazis. They operated behind enemy lines too, didn’t they? Not ambushing, but searching for intelligence. Sometimes they linked up with the Monuments and Fine Arts men, the MFAA, whenever they came across stolen art and antiquities.’

Hugh nodded. ‘That’s exactly what happened that day. I was the one who fed the intelligence back. The place where I was given the drawing was a kind of satellite of Belsen, a small labour camp in a forest clearing. We had our suspicions that there was something in the forest and I passed them on to VIII Corps HQ, who had arranged a ceasefire to clear out the camp. Peter’s unit happened to be the one operating in the area, and he was sent to the camp with his driver and an American officer, one of the Monuments Men. And of course these covert ops were never just about stolen art. Those places could conceal more sinister secrets. It was the possibility of chemical and biological weapons that was so terrifying. By then we knew what the Nazis were capable of doing. We’d heard about the death camps in the east, Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, about Zyklon B gas.
A pesticide
, for God’s sake. My biggest fear was disease, epidemic. What they might have bottled up, what they could unleash.’

‘And what might still be out there, still hidden away,’ Dillen said.

‘Unquestionably,’ Hugh replied. ‘That’s the horror of it. Europe in 1945 was like a huge Aladdin’s cave. How could we possibly have found it all? Buried bunkers, lake beds, disused mines. And it ties in with missing works of art. What you were saying about Schliemann’s diaries, James. It’s the same thing. It’s as if there’s a void. With the art, we know what’s missing. We know the names of the canvases.’ He pointed to a faded print above the fireplace. ‘Raphael’s
Portrait of a Young Man
, from Krakow. That’s a pre-war print I had on my wall at Oxford. Peter gave it to me, actually. It’s one of dozens known by name, vanished. And if that’s
known
to be missing, what else is there we don’t know about? I’m not talking about art and antiquities. It could be the biggest legacy of the Second World War, and the most terrifying. Where it might be, and who might get hold of it. For some of us, for me, that war still rumbles on, not just because I can’t get it out of my head, but because it’s unfinished, as if there’s a gigantic concealed bomb under Europe with the clock still ticking.’

‘Tell us what happened to Peter,’ Dillen said. ‘That final day.’

Hugh paused. ‘I wasn’t terribly well that morning. A recurrence of malaria, something we’d both picked up in Egypt. Only a few hours of shivers and hot flushes, but enough to make me a liability in the field. I knew that the nurse in the camp, Helen, saw there was something wrong, but I didn’t want to ask her, not in that place with all those poor children dying, needing her every second. But when I returned to Corps HQ after leaving the camp, the MO checked me over and I was temporarily grounded, reassigned to Corps Intelligence. Bloody nuisance, you know. There’s nothing worse than being pulled from your chaps. But there was nothing else for it. At least they kept me in touch with our ops by putting me in charge of recovering effects from anyone killed behind enemy lines. It was pretty important, in case there was anything the Germans might use, or any intelligence being brought back. A few hours after Peter had left to go to the camp, an army spotter plane reported an overturned jeep beside the road leading back from the camp. An accident, a pothole in the road. It was Peter’s jeep, but it only held the body of his driver, a Corporal Lewes. I was puzzled to find that he had that drawing made by the girl in his pocket. I knew the colonel in charge of 30 AU had given it to Peter when I’d handed it in to Corps Intelligence earlier that morning, before he and Lewes set off for the camp. I’d already shown it to Peter.’

‘Was that the last time you saw him?’ Rebecca said.

‘We only had a few moments, in the middle of a busy HQ tent, with a howitzer battery blatting away behind us. Not much time to say anything, let alone hear what we were saying. Not that it mattered, perhaps. There was a flash of exhilaration in his face, and that’s what I remember. He was in a pretty bad way, too. But enough of that. You want to hear about the drawing. Peter would have been very careful with it, I’m sure. But then Lewes was his batman, so he would have trusted him with it. That was often the closest relationship, you know, officer and batman. Unspoken bond, all that.’

‘Were you ever close to anyone? Like that?’ Rebecca asked.

‘Me?’ Hugh paused, taken aback. ‘Good Lord. No. Not by then. Not like before the war. We . . . were romantic then. Naïve. We even looked forward to war, to that bond amongst men we’d heard so much about. It was extraordinary, so soon after the Great War, yet it only seems to take a generation for men to forget. It’s as if war has become part of our nature, as if our biology has found a way to make us forget, to allow us to do it over and over again. It was General Lee, in the American Civil War, who said, thank God war is so awful, otherwise it’d be addictive. The difference was, the civilians in the Civil War saw the horror around them. We all knew terrible loss, our fathers, our uncles, killed in the Great War, but few of us in 1939 had seen carnage close up, seen death and dying. That might have done it.’

‘When you say we, you mean you and Peter,’ Rebecca said.

Hugh paused, looking down. ‘We were a small group. Close friends, at university. But yes. Peter was the closest.’

Dillen leaned forward. ‘Corporal Lewes. Why was he driving back to Corps Headquarters?’

Hugh took a deep breath. ‘I assumed they’d found something in the camp, perhaps in the forest. Peter had probably sent Lewes back for the usual follow-up team: extra riflemen, an interrogator, sappers for breaking into buildings, a bomb disposal expert, that kind of thing. The unit were a pretty impressive outfit and knew their stuff.’

‘Did anyone try to send word back to Peter? Did you? About what had happened to Lewes?’

‘I wanted to,’ Hugh replied. ‘I
desperately
wanted to. It’s all such a haze. I’ve been over it so often in my mind. I think by then the malaria was really clouding my thinking. I had a jeep and was going to do it myself. We didn’t have radio communication, of course. But events quickly overtook us. Corps HQ was concerned that the Germans might use the ceasefire to infiltrate the forest, to set up defensive positions and booby traps. We all knew what had happened to the Americans in the Hürtgen Forest, one of the nightmare battles of the war. The Hürtgen Forest was one of the nightmare battles of the war. There was not going to be a repeat of that. We already knew that the remnants of the German 2nd Marine Infantry Division were regrouping beyond the forest, along with a few survivors from an SS panzer training battalion and the 1st Panzer Grenadiers. All of them tough troops who fought to the death. There were probably only seven or eight hundred of them, but that would have been enough.’

‘The Teutoburg Forest, Varus’ legions in AD 9,’ Dillen murmured. ‘Three crack Roman legions totally annihilated by the Germans. Same neck of the woods, I think, in upper Saxony. You were pretty obsessed with it at school, always seemed to bring it up in class.’