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They set off, walking side by side along the wooded path that led from the Berghof to Hitler’s teahouse on the Mooslahnerkopf hill, with the Führer’s Alsatian dog bounding along in front of them. Heydrich knew that this was one of Hitler’s favourite walks – he went to the teahouse almost every day when he was at the Berghof, and Heydrich had accompanied him there on several occasions, but never alone like now. It felt awkward to be walking casually with the supreme leader, and Heydrich watched his pace and walked with a slight stoop to ensure that Hitler wasn’t aware of his height advantage.
There was a cold grip in the air, but no clouds in the pale blue sky. To their right, the trees were laden with golden leaves turning to red before they fell, and to their left the spires and roofs of the small resort town of Berchtesgaden were clearly visible spread out across the valley floor three thousand feet below. All around, the mountains of the Bavarian Alps towered above their heads. Heydrich instinctively understood why Hitler loved this place and had chosen to make it his home. They were in the very heart of the Reich. There was an elemental energy in the air, in the vista, that reminded Heydrich of Caspar Friedrich’s painting, The Wanderer Above the Sea of Mists. Heydrich liked beauty – he could create it himself at home in the evenings when he stood at the window of his study with his violin, playing the Haydn sonatas that he’d learnt from his father when he was a boy. He understood it just as he understood the web of complex emotions that motivated the actions of his fellow human beings; but his understanding was clinical, an entirely cerebral analysis. Heydrich had no capacity for empathy whatsoever and, like his leader, he stood apart, utterly unmoved by the suffering of others. All that mattered to him was the use and pursuit of power.
They walked in silence, with Heydrich waiting for Hitler to open the conversation. The wind had died down and their footsteps on the hard ground were the only sound, apart from the tap of Hitler’s walking stick. The dog had gone on ahead. Soon they reached the point where the path bent out from under the trees, providing a panoramic viewing point. Hitler sat on the wooden bench looking out over the railings, and Heydrich followed suit.
‘I never get tired of this place,’ Hitler said meditatively. ‘I have tried to paint it several times from different angles, but it is too vast, too much a theatre in the round for me to capture on a canvas. Its essence escapes me.’
‘They say that Charlemagne sleeps under that mountain,’ said Heydrich, pointing across the valley to the majestic Untersberg, which reared up to a distant snow-capped peak thousands of feet above them, barring the way into Austria.
‘And they say that Jesus is the son of God,’ said Hitler tartly. ‘Why do you talk to me of Charlemagne? He’s been dead a thousand years.’
The riposte was typical of the Führer – always challenging those he was with, refusing to relax. But Heydrich was ready with his answer.
‘Because he did what you did,’ he said. ‘Charlemagne united the Volk; he made a Reich just like you have done. He had the will and the vision and the power to accomplish his mission. Men like you come rarely. They can change history, but there are always spoilers like Churchill who stand in their way, trying to destroy their work.’
‘And without Churchill the British would make peace. Is that what you are trying to say?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, you are probably right,’ said Hitler, nodding. ‘This war makes no sense for them and none for us. It’s like I have always said – I am England’s friend. There is room for them in the world and room for us too. We are all Aryans. But Churchill will not listen. He is the Bolsheviks’ greatest ally. I am sure Stalin has a picture of fat Winston in his bedroom in Moscow and that he kisses it with his filthy icons at night.’ Hitler’s sudden harsh laughter cut the air before he abruptly resumed the quiet, serious voice with which he had been speaking before. ‘What is it you are trying to tell me, Reinhard?’ he asked. ‘Don’t talk in riddles.’
Heydrich took a deep breath of the cold mountain air. He felt his heart beating hard under his uniform and a sense of vertigo rising through his body that didn’t come from their elevated position. He knew instinctively that this was his opportunity. With the credit for Churchill’s assassination, he could be Hitler’s deputy. With England out of the war, he would have succeeded where Goering and the generals and admirals had failed.
‘I think I can solve the problem,’ he said quietly. ‘I think I can remove Churchill from the equation.’
‘Kill him, you mean? How are you going to do that?’
‘As you know, I received a radio message from our agent yesterday. What I didn’t mention in my report is that he saw Churchill in person, and he seems to think that if he’s summoned to see Churchill again, then there might be an opportunity. I don’t know the details, obviously – it was a very short message.’
‘Well, get the details.’ Hitler snapped out the order. He got up from the bench, smoothing the crease of his black trousers into place, and walked over to the railings, standing with his back to Heydrich and looking out towards the mountains, drumming his fingers on the wood.
After a moment, he turned around. ‘We must not get ahead of ourselves,’ he said slowly. ‘I need to know whether this is a harebrained scheme or a real chance to eliminate Churchill once and for all. We don’t want to throw away our best intelligence asset on a thousand-to-one bet. But if it can be done, then let it be done.’ Hitler rubbed his hands together, a characteristic gesture when he was excited. He smiled, exposing his teeth, and his blue eyes glowed. ‘This is the best idea I have heard in a long time. The worms will have a feast when Churchill’s fat body goes underground. But you must be quick in finding out what is possible, you understand? East is where we must go. And before next year is too far advanced; before Stalin is ready for us. We must give our troops enough time – I have no intention to be another Napoleon, freezing to death in the Moscow cold.’
‘You can count on me,’ said Heydrich, getting up from his seat and standing to attention opposite Hitler, the image of a loyal soldier.
‘I hope so,’ said Hitler, looking searchingly at his subordinate. ‘We are playing for high stakes. Do not let me down, Reinhard.’
Hitler whistled and the dog came running up through the trees. ‘We will go back now,’ he said, turning towards the Berghof. ‘You have work to do. But next time you come, we will walk all the way to my teahouse. The view from the Mooslahnerkopf is excellent, even better than from here. And you can tell me more about this opportunity.’ Hitler smiled as he repeated Heydrich’s word. ‘I shall look forward to it.’
There was a spring in Hitler’s step now as he walked, and he hummed a tune under his breath. They rounded a corner and, looking up, Heydrich caught sight of the Eagle’s Nest, the retreat built for the Führer by the party faithful on a ridge at the top of the Kehlstein Mountain, three thousand feet above the Berghof. Thirty million Reichsmarks, five tunnels, and an elevator – an engineering miracle – yet Hitler hardly ever went there, preferring his small teahouse on the Mooslahnerkopf Hill. Heydrich smiled, thinking of the wasted effort. Results were what mattered; they were what led to advancement up the ladder of power. And now finally he believed he held the keys to the citadel dangling in his hand.
They parted in the hall. The map had been cleared away and the oak table moved back against the wall. It was as if the conference had never happened. Heydrich raised his arm in salute and felt Hitler’s pale blue eyes fixed upon him again, boring into his soul, before the Führer turned and walked away, releasing him back into the world.
IV (#ulink_4d3446c9-18c9-5806-81a6-1755107a527b)
They sat restlessly around the long table arranged in a kind of hierarchical order, with the least powerful among them exposed to the wintry draught by the door and the most important positioned closest to C’s empty chair and the fire behind it, which had died down to a black, smoky residue of itself in the last half-hour. There was no coal left in the scuttle, and nobody had volunteered to descend the seven flights of stairs to fetch more from the store in the basement.
It was ten in the morning outside, but inside it might as well have been the dead of night. The thick blackout curtains were kept permanently in place in Con 1, as this room was known – God knows why, as there were no other conference rooms in the building – and the only illumination came from two milky-white electric globes hanging by rusty metal chains from the ceiling overhead. Up until yesterday there had been three of these lights, but the one nearest the door had given up the ghost during the previous night’s air raid and Jarvis, the caretaker, had not yet got round to replacing it.
Far too busy ministering to C’s ceaseless stream of demands, thought Seaforth with wry amusement. By long-hallowed custom, the head of MI6 was always known by the single letter C – short for chief, Seaforth supposed. And even though he hadn’t been in the job that long, this C was already notorious for his enjoyment of life’s luxuries: the best Havana cigars; malt whisky brewed in freezing conditions on faraway Hebridean atolls; pretty girls in the bar at the Savoy. Not that Jarvis was likely to be providing them, thought Seaforth, glancing across at the bent, skeletal figure of the caretaker standing over by the half-open door.
Jarvis was clad as always in the same grey overall that reached down to just below his arthritic knees. Seaforth had never seen him wearing anything else – the old man would have seemed naked in a suit and tie. Service rumour had it that Jarvis had fought as a non-commissioned officer in the Boer War and killed five of the enemy with his bare hands during the relief of Mafeking, but Seaforth had no way of knowing if this was true, as Jarvis made a point of never discussing his personal history. He’d been at HQ longer than any of the current occupants or indeed most of their predecessors and had over the years become a fixture of the place, like the soot-stained walls and the ubiquitous smell of cheap disinfectant.
Seaforth had only recently been permitted to join these meetings of the top brass, and he knew that if Thorn had had his way, he would still be sitting marooned in his tiny windowless office at the back of the building. But C had overruled Seaforth’s boss in this as in numerous other matters, and now Seaforth sat two chairs up from the door, three chairs away from Thorn, and four away from C’s empty seat, savouring his position as an up-and-coming man.
With a sigh of contentment, he ran his hands slowly through the mane of his thick, dark hair and stretched out his long, athletic legs under the table, rocking slowly back on his straight-backed chair, expertly keeping his balance. Like everyone else in the room, he was working harder than ever, existing on small amounts of sleep snatched between air raids; but unlike them, he managed somehow to look healthy and rested, his good looks enhanced if anything by the faint thin lines that had recently begun to crease his brow.
The only blemish on his day so far was the cigarette smoke. It hung in a thick, blue-grey cloud in the unventilated room, blending with the fumes from the dying fire, and clung to Seaforth’s suit, making his eyes water. He hated cigarettes – the poor man’s narcotic. They reminded him of home, of labourers coughing in the gloomy public houses after work, drowning their sorrows in watered-down beer. He looked round the room at his fellow spies sucking greedily on their John Player’s Navy Cut and Senior Service and did his best to conceal his disgust. C’s cigars were different – a symbol of his power, like the thick Turkish carpet that began at the threshold of his office in the next-door building or the slow, careful way in which he spoke, the perfectly rounded vowels enunciated in his aristocratic, Eton-educated voice. C was old school, but old school with a new broom, ready to give the young generation its head. Not like Thorn with his Oxford University tie and his visceral suspicion of anyone who hadn’t been to a public school. As far as Seaforth was concerned, the last war had been about sweeping away men like Thorn, but so far, at least, Thorn didn’t seem to have got the message.
To hell with Thorn, Seaforth thought. Unlike Thorn, he was here on merit – because he’d been able to produce intelligence out of Germany that the rest of the pathetic pen pushers in this room could only dream of, and his recent summons to Churchill’s bunker had sealed his advancement to the top table. And there wasn’t one damned thing that Thorn could do about it. Seaforth grinned, thinking of the way Thorn hadn’t said one word to him on the walk back through St James’s Park, just stared down at his feet as if he were thinking of putting an end to it all – which would be no loss to the Secret Service, Seaforth thought. Alec Thorn had become an encumbrance that MI6 could most certainly do without.
Over by the door, Jarvis cleared his throat. ‘’E’s coming,’ he announced in a thin, wheezing voice, and seconds later C entered the room, dressed in a green tweed suit and a red bow tie. He was a tall, impressive figure, possessed of a natural authority and an air of resolution intensified by the piercing blue of his eyes. They were a tool that C knew how to use to his advantage. ‘Look a man in the eye, and if he shrinks, then ten to one he’s a bounder,’ was one of the chief’s favourite adages.
C was nearly five years Thorn’s senior, but looking at the two of them, chief and deputy chief, sitting side by side at the end of the table, Seaforth thought that Thorn looked far and away the older man. He was careworn, with worry lines etched deep into his wide forehead and thinning grey hair receding from a rapidly spreading tonsure on his crown. And he sat bent over in his chair, alternately turning his filterless cigarette over in his fingers and then tapping its fiery end against the overflowing ashtray in front of him. His suit was worn and the edges of his shirt collar were frayed. Everything about him contrasted with the dapper, handsome figure of C on his left. It wasn’t hard to see why Whitehall had picked C for the job when the old chief had been given his marching orders three years before.
‘All present and correct,’ said C, glancing affably round the table. ‘Now we can’t be too long today, I’m afraid. I’ve got to be at the Admiralty by twelve for one of their invasion conclaves. I assume everyone’s seen young Seaforth’s latest intelligence report about the German plans – the one that was circulated three days ago?’ he asked, waving a piece of densely typewritten paper with ‘Top Secret’ stamped across the top. ‘Good. Well, it’s pure gold as usual. Winston’s delighted with the quality of the intelligence, apparently, although not so happy with what the Nazis have got pointed at us across the Channel. Did he say anything about the situation when you saw him, anything you can share with us?’ he asked, turning to his deputy.
Everyone else had their attention fixed on Thorn too. The whole country was jittery about the threat of the invasion, and the people in the room had access to privileged information about how real the threat actually was. A week earlier, GHQ had sent out the code word ‘Cromwell,’ meaning ‘invasion imminent,’ to all southern and eastern commands. Church bells had been rung – the agreed signal for an invasion – and widespread panic had ensued.
‘The PM doesn’t see how they can invade without air supremacy, and they’re a long way from having that,’ said Thorn. ‘He says we’re going to fight to the death even if they do come, but we already know that. Still, it was inspiring to hear it from him first-hand.’
‘I’m sure it was. Must have been an experience for you too, young Seaforth. Not every day an officer of your rank gets summoned to an audience with the Pope. But, as we all know, the PM likes to get his information first-hand and you’re the one providing it this time, so full credit to you,’ said C, lightly clapping his hands for a moment. Everyone joined in except Thorn, who looked stonily ahead, keeping his eyes fixed on a photograph of Neville Chamberlain on the opposite wall that no one had got round to replacing since Chamberlain had resigned the premiership back in May after the Norwegian disaster.
‘And what we need now is more of the same,’ C went on. ‘All the powers that be want from us is news of when the bastards are coming and what they’re bringing with them, and Seaforth’s man is giving us exactly that – and on a regular basis.’
‘Yes, pretty convenient, isn’t it?’ Thorn said softly.
‘What, you don’t trust the source, Alec?’ C asked sharply, turning to his deputy. ‘Well, he’s been right every time up until now, you know – about the build-up of the expeditionary force, about troop movements, about bombing objectives.’
‘Except for when the Luftwaffe switched their attention from the aerodromes to London. He didn’t tell us about that, did he? Might have spoilt the surprise,’ said Thorn, whose doubts about the authenticity of Seaforth’s intelligence had mushroomed in the three days since their visit to Churchill’s bunker.
‘Well, there really wasn’t time for that, was there?’ said C equably. ‘The Germans were provoked into bombing London by us bombing Berlin. Stupid fools! Winston tricked them. The RAF couldn’t have withstood it much longer if the Luftwaffe had carried on attacking planes rather than people, or at least that’s what I’ve heard on the grapevine. There were just not enough Spitfires to go round. Instead Goering’s given them a chance to catch their breath and reinforce.’
‘You asked me a question,’ said Thorn, looking C in the eye and acting as though he hadn’t heard anything C had just said. ‘And here’s my answer: No, I don’t trust the source, and I don’t buy the idea that his access has improved because he’s just been promoted. It’s too damned convenient if you ask me.’
‘But people get promoted in wartime, Alec,’ C said smoothly. ‘You should know that – it’s one of the facts of life.’
‘I know it is. And not just in Berlin, either,’ said Thorn, making no effort to disguise his meaning as he darted a furious glance down the table at Seaforth and angrily ground out his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray. C watched his deputy carefully for a moment and then began to speak again.
‘So, moving on, our agent tells us that Hitler’s ordered a short delay to Operation Sea Lion while the expeditionary force is expanded and the rest of the heavy armour is brought up to the coast,’ he said, holding up Seaforth’s briefing paper again. ‘So this is what I need, gentlemen: reliable information about what’s actually happening on the ground – in Belgium, in France, all the way round to bloody Scandinavia. Soldiers practising amphibious landings; sailors kissing their sweethearts goodbye … you know what I’m talking about. We need to fill in the blanks. And quickly, gentlemen, quickly.’
C paused, glancing around the table, but no one spoke. Jarvis, standing behind his boss’s chair, darted forward and filled up C’s glass from a decanter of cloudy water.
‘All right, then,’ said C. ‘Let’s get to work. Is there anything else?’
‘We’ve had several decodes in this morning,’ said Hargreaves, a small bespectacled man sitting opposite Seaforth who was in charge of liaison with the boffins, as the communications branch of the Secret Service was euphemistically known. He had thick grey eyebrows that incongruously matched his grey woollen cardigan. ‘One of them’s interesting – it’s an intercept from yesterday. It’s quite short: “Provide detailed written report. What are the chances of success? C.” Seems like it’s someone called C somewhere in Germany who’s communicating with an agent here in England, although apparently there’s no way of pinpointing the receiver’s location without more messages. They’re checking to see if there are any other messages that have come in up to now using the same code, although it could well be the agent is using a different code to communicate back to Germany. That’s an extra precaution they take sometimes. I’ll let you know what they come up with.’
‘Someone pretending to be me,’ said C with a hollow laugh. ‘I’m flattered. Well, we all know that the Abwehr’s been dropping spies on parachutes and landing them from U-boats all over the place this year. But they’re in a rush – none of the agents are well trained, and some of them can’t even speak proper English from what I’ve heard. MI5 catches up with them all in a few days, and I believe they’ve even turned one or two, so I can’t imagine this one’s going to be any different.’
‘Except that most of them don’t have radios,’ said Thorn. ‘Can I see that?’ he asked, leaning forward to take the piece of paper that the small man had just read from.
‘Well, thank you, Hargreaves,’ said C after a moment, with a glance of slight irritation at his deputy, who was continuing to turn the paper over in his hand. ‘Like I said, I’m sure MI5 will deal with the problem. Now, let’s get to work. Alec, you stay behind. I need to pick your brains for a moment.’
C stared ahead with a fixed smile as the people around him got up from their chairs, gathered their papers together, and headed for the door. Once it was closed and the sound of voices had disappeared down the corridor, C turned to Thorn.
‘This has got to stop, Alec, you hear me? You and Seaforth have got to work together—’
‘Not together,’ interrupted Thorn angrily. ‘He works for me, in case you’ve forgotten. I’m his section chief, although you’d never know it to hear him talk.’
‘All right, he works for you. But he also works for me and for the PM and for the good of this dangerously imperilled country, and his agent in Berlin is producing intelligence product of a quality that we haven’t seen out of Nazi Germany in years. And just when we need it the most …’
‘Exactly,’ said Thorn, banging his fist on the table. ‘Doesn’t that make you suspicious?’
‘No,’ said C. ‘Because it’s corroborated by other reports. And by what happens after Seaforth receives the intelligence. His agent says they aren’t going to invade in the next two weeks and they don’t. He says they’re about to station heavy artillery across the strait from Dover and that’s exactly what they do. Yes, treating what we get with caution is healthy, but refusing to use it is stupid. Yes, stupid, Alec,’ said C, holding up his hand to ward off Thorn’s protest. ‘You know how Whitehall used to treat us before Winston took over – like the last man on the bloody totem pole. And now we’re given everything we want. More money; more agents; more access. You’ve seen the change in attitude yourself when you go and see the old man.’
‘It’s not me he wants to see any more; it’s Seaforth,’ Thorn said irritably. ‘I sat at the back of the room three days ago saying sweet Fanny Adams while Churchill practically ate out of the little runt’s hand. You should have seen it.’
‘And you’ll just have to bloody well put up with it. Of course the boy’s ambitious – he probably wants your job. But that’s not a bad thing. We need youth and energy if we’re going to win this war. Most of those RAF pilots who’ve saved our necks up to now are barely out of school, and it doesn’t matter what school they went to, either, or whether their parents are in trade if they can shoot down Junkers and Heinkels before they drop their bombs,’ he added with a sharp look at his deputy.
‘Well, it’s easy for you to say,’ said Thorn sourly. ‘You’re the one in charge.’
‘And I know what you’re thinking – you’re the one who should be sitting where I am now,’ C shot back. ‘Well, perhaps you should. You were the crown prince, weren’t you? Albert’s heir anointed, with more years of service under your belt than anyone in the building except old Jarvis? But then when it came to it, Whitehall didn’t agree, did they? They chose me instead of you. I wonder why. Do you think it was maybe because they’d had enough of Albert Morrison’s non-stop navel-gazing? You and he were so obsessed with searching for your elusive mole inside the Service that you ended up doing nothing else. Morale was at rock bottom, intelligence production was down every year – we were in danger of being shut down. And look at us now, riding the crest of the wave. And that’s thanks in good part to young Seaforth. So get off his back, Alec, you hear me? I won’t stand for any more trouble from you where he’s involved.’
C got up from his chair without waiting for an answer and headed for the door. Left alone, Thorn glanced down at the decoded radio message that he’d taken from Hargreaves during the meeting: ‘Provide detailed written report. What are the chances of success? C.’ Asking for a written report implied that the agent had a means of sending a document back to Germany. But how? There was something about the decode that bothered Thorn, some scrap of memory tickling at the back of his mind that he couldn’t put his finger on. Maybe it was nothing, but he needed to be sure. Carefully, Thorn folded the paper and tucked it into the inside pocket of his jacket. He’d go and ask Albert about it. That’s what he’d do. Albert was no fool, whatever C liked to say. It was bloody stupid the way he’d been put out to grass since his retirement with all he knew about the Nazis. Thorn rubbed his hands, pleased with his decision. It was a long time since he’d seen his old chief and even longer since he’d seen Ava. A visit was overdue.
PART ONE (#ulink_391e9c87-c09b-5306-b4f1-27ecfe5a8272)
CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_fd9b5705-3063-5fe8-acdf-4b9ddba03f5a)
Albert stood waiting at the bus stop for a full half-hour before he gave up. He’d have taken a taxi if he’d had the chance, but the only ones that passed were already taken. He cursed the driver that had brought him over from Battersea and refused to wait – a stupid little man who’d gone the longer way deliberately just so he could charge a higher fare. The only choice now was the Underground. It was getting late and Albert knew he should have bitten the bullet and taken the Tube earlier, but he had delayed because he hated it below ground. He always had. It was why he made his daughter so angry, refusing to go down in the basement with the rest of his neighbours at Gloucester Mansions during air raids until she’d started coming round and forcing him. Ever since the last war, he’d had nightmares about being buried alive. He didn’t want it to happen even after he was dead, and he’d left strict instructions in his will that he was to be cremated. He’d even made Bertram swear an oath to carry out his wishes, and Bertie, not Ava, was his executor. Albert was no fool. He knew that his son-in-law was never going to set the world on fire, but he’d do what he was told. Not like his daughter, Ava, who always thought she knew best. She’d abandoned him just when he’d needed her most – after her mother died and he’d been forced out of HQ and his world had come tumbling down on him like an avalanche of broken rocks.
Buried alive … Albert was claustrophobic, chronically claustrophobic, and now he had no choice but to confront his fears. He couldn’t stay where he was, waiting for darkness and the German bombers to appear overhead, and besides, he was convinced he was being watched. He was a sitting duck out here in the open; he’d be much better off below among the crowds sheltering on the platforms and the stairs, even though his hands shook and his heart thumped at the prospect of being pursued through the subterranean passages under the flickering lights, stepping over the shelterers, tripping on their possessions until at last he fell.
Unless his imagination was playing tricks on him, of course, and there was no one observing him from across the street or around the corner, waiting for the chance to strike. God knows it was possible. The sensation that he was being watched was just that, a sixth sense, nothing more. He hadn’t actually seen anything suspicious since he got out of the taxi. Once upon a time, he would have known how to secure his position; how to find out for sure if anyone was there. Thirty years earlier, in another lifetime, he had been an agent himself, out in the field in Austria-Hungary and the Kaiser’s Germany, with a mission to scent out war plans and assess military intentions in the years before Sarajevo, before the old order crumbled and fell to the ground. His language skills had qualified him – he was fluent in German – and as a young man he had been quick on his feet and clever with people. He’d known how to look after himself in a hostile environment – how to check for telltale shapes in the shadows, how to tell innocent from purposeful footsteps, how to double back on himself at the critical moment of a pursuit. But it was all too long ago: he’d spent too many years since then sitting behind a desk reading the reports of other agents to know how to survive as one himself, so he would just have to trust to luck and hope that his anxiety was the product of an old man’s overactive imagination. After all, wasn’t that what Ava said when he worried too much about his health?
Reluctantly, he crossed the road and joined the straggling queue of people who were heading down the concrete steps into the Underground. They were a ragtag lot, these refugees from the bombing, Albert thought. Whole families with blankets and pillows and portable stoves and in one case even a wind-up gramophone, all desperate to get below and claim the best pitches until every inch of platform space was taken and latecomers had to sleep as best they could, sitting up on the winding stairs or flattened against the walls in the narrow corridors. All of them crammed in together like sardines because they thought they’d be safe, except that that was an illusion. Albert knew that even if they didn’t. Only the day before a heavy bomb had fallen on Marble Arch station, rupturing the water mains and fracturing the gas pipes. Seven people had died, enduring horrible deaths that didn’t bear thinking about, buried under piles of broken masonry, slowly drowning in sewage and seeping water, choking on the dust and gas. And the Tube would be hit again. It was only a matter of time. Nowhere was safe any more in this God-forsaken city.
Albert bought his ticket and picked his way down the stairs to the westbound platform, holding his nose against the stench of the overflowing toilets in the booking hall. And down below it was even worse, with the stink of hundreds of unwashed bodies crammed together in the fetid, airless atmosphere. The heat was extraordinary after the cold outside; some of the men were stripped to the waist, and most of the children were half naked. And the noise too was overwhelming. People were singing and shouting; a few were even playing mouth organs and beating on home-made drums. Albert was astonished by their cheerfulness inside this living hell. At least the overpowering assault on his senses meant that he no longer had the sensation of being followed. Someone could have been right on his shoulder and he would have neither known nor cared. All he wanted to do was get on a train and escape.
Slowly and laboriously, concentrating only on remaining upright, Albert picked his way between the shelterers and their possessions – filthy mattresses and battered suitcases, several that were serving as beds for tiny babies – until he reached the edge of the platform, where he waited nervously for his train, staring down at the columns of mice running this way and that between the tracks.
None of the shelterers seemed to be paying any attention to the rule that only passengers could stand in front of the white line painted eight feet from the platform edge, and when the westbound train finally arrived, there was a further delay while it waited in the tunnel as a team of London Passenger Transport Board officers went up and down the platform with sticks, pushing back the stray feet and arms that were overhanging the line.
Finally the train doors closed and Albert slumped back in his seat, exhausted by his ordeal. All this for a wasted journey, he thought bitterly, unless the message he’d left got through, and even then it might be too late. No one took him seriously any more at HQ except Alec. He knew that. He was yesterday’s man, and his fears were yesterday’s news. He closed his eyes for a moment, lulled by the noise of the train, and then came wide awake again, starting up from his seat. Someone was touching him, feeling at his neck, feeling for that point where a man could be killed with a single chop of the hand. But when he turned around, he saw nothing – just people getting on and off at Victoria, brushing against him as they passed.
He got out at Sloane Square and walked down to the river. A few cars and bicycles passed him by, but once again there were no taxis and the only bus he saw was going in the opposite direction. Albert looked up at the passengers’ anxious faces behind the meshed-over windows and wished he were home. He was too old for this, he thought as he stumbled and almost fell over a green hose twisting like a snake across the pavement. Glancing to his left, he saw its nozzle lying useless in the front garden of a half-destroyed Victorian house – a casualty of the previous night’s bombing. It had been sliced down the middle by a direct hit. Upstairs, the front wall had been blown away and an unmade bed and an open wardrobe hung on the edge of what was left of the sagging floor, like an unlit film set for a cheap movie, while at the back a full-length mahogany mirror swung gently to and fro in the breeze, creaking on its hinges but yielding no reflection, as all its glass was gone, shattered into a million silver fragments that glistened like raindrops on the dark blue carpet. But on either side of this scene of devastation, the other houses in the terrace were all untouched – rows of placid doors and windows, even a smoking chimney or two. Albert didn’t need reminding that this war was random in its choice of victims, the destruction it wrought entirely indiscriminate and unpredictable.
He turned away. He’d seen worse, far worse, in France and Belgium twenty-five years before – severed limbs and bloated soldiers’ bodies sinking in the oozing mud. But that had been when war was somewhere else, fought by soldiers in foreign places, not here in London, falling in a steel rain from the moonlit sky night after night, killing and maiming defenceless women and children as they trembled in inadequate shelters.
Two children hurried by, a girl and boy tightly holding hands with gas masks in Mickey Mouse satchels bouncing on their backs. There’d been no gas yet, but there would be. Albert was sure of it. Because gas was the worst. Shutting his eyes for a moment, he remembered the mustard gas attacks he’d endured with his company on the Ypres Salient in 1915 – the blinded, dying men with blistered yellow skin struggling to breathe, whispering for their mothers. Beyond hope or consolation.
Hitler had been gassed too, on the Western Front in 1918. Albert had read the intelligence reports; he knew everything there was to know and more about the Austrian corporal and his gang of murderous henchmen. All through the Thirties he’d warned Whitehall about them, but no one had listened. They’d all been obsessed with Stalin and the creeping threat of Communism, and where had that got them?
A voice crying in the wilderness – that was how the years of his career seemed to Albert now. Warnings, endless unheeded warnings, about Nazis and traitors and the need for more money. It hadn’t been what they’d wanted to hear. They’d called him C to his face and Cassandra behind his back, and then, when the opportunity had come, they’d stabbed him in the back and got rid of him – sent him out to pasture like a broken-down old carthorse with a B-level Civil Service pension and a gold watch engraved with their thanks. Thanks! All those years of service to his king and country and he hadn’t even come away with a knighthood. Not like his predecessors or the new man they’d brought in from the Navy to replace him.
Albert halted in the middle of Chelsea Bridge, gazing down into the murky depths of the slow-flowing river below his feet. He thought of all he had to offer, all his accumulated knowledge and years of experience, and realized with sudden insight that none of it mattered. No one was interested in what he had to say. He had no friends. Bertram was interested only in his money, and Alec hadn’t been round in months – until today, and that wasn’t a social call. He was good for nothing now. The only person who cared a jot about whether he lived or died was his daughter, and she’d be better off without him. The Luftwaffe would be doing him a favour if they got him with one of their bombs or a piece of shrapnel through the neck. Or perhaps he should just throw himself into the dark water and put an end to it all, right now. But Albert had no sooner thought of jumping than he pushed himself violently back from the white iron parapet and into the road, where an air raid warden on a bicycle had to swerve hard to avoid a collision.
‘Mind where you’re bloody going,’ the man shouted as he remounted. ‘You’d better take shelter, you know,’ he added in a more kindly voice. ‘Wireless says they’re over the coast already. You’ll hear the siren soon.’
Albert nodded, watching the man ride away. He was frightened now, and his hands were shaking. He looked across the river towards the bomb-blasted trees in Battersea Park. There were anti-aircraft guns in there that the Germans had tried to target the previous week, and overhead a silver-grey barrage balloon swam in the air like a strange airborne elephant, its wires a last defence against the incoming bombers.
Leaving the bridge behind, Albert walked down the road past the towers of Battersea Power Station on his left sticking up like chalk-white fingers into the evening sky. Looking around, he realized he was alone. The street was silent, but the air was still and heavy, weighing him down so that he found it hard to put one foot in front of the other. He listened to the sound of his footsteps on the sidewalk and once more sensed an echo coming at him from behind. He turned and looked back, but there was nothing, just the grey outline of the curving suspension cables of the bridge. It had to be a trick of the senses, like the way in which shadows seemed to be moving under the trees on his right. The park seemed closer than it had before, reaching out towards him. The wrought-iron railings that had marked its borders had been removed the previous year for melting down to help the war effort, and Albert didn’t think he’d ever get used to the change.
He turned the corner into Prince of Wales Drive. Now he couldn’t get it out of his head that he was being followed. Perhaps it was some ne’er-do-well looking to attack vulnerable passers-by and steal their wallets. Rumour had it that all the London parks were infested with such people, particularly since police resources had become stretched to the limit by the bombing. Albert willed himself not to run. In the night men were like animals – to show fear was to invite attack.
A dog barked somewhere out of sight, and as if in response, the air-raid siren began to wail – its agonizing cry undulating up and down through octaves of pain, building to a despairing scream at the end before it stopped abruptly and then started again. And suddenly people were running in the street, materializing as if from nowhere, and the park sprang to life as the white searchlights camouflaged in the bushes shot their beams high into the sky, crisscrossing one another as they searched for the as-yet-invisible incoming planes.
Albert had his key in his hand. In a moment he’d be home. He always felt safe inside his flat; he didn’t need to take shelter, cowering in the basement with his neighbours. It was people that unnerved him, not bombs.
Everything was going to be all right. With a surge of relief he pushed open the heavy front door of his building and was halfway over the threshold when he suddenly felt a hand on his shoulder and the muzzle of a gun thrust into the small of his back, propelling him forward into the hall and up the stairs towards his empty flat.
Ava went and got her coat as soon as she heard the siren. She knew that her father would ignore it just as he’d done before, sitting alone in his flat among the tottering piles of books, peering at old papers in the candlelight while the bombers passed overhead and the ack-ack shells burst like useless white fireworks in the sky all around them. Perhaps he was right and his neighbours huddled in the basement were wrong – perhaps Gloucester Mansions would come through the war untouched while all the surrounding buildings were blown apart. But she couldn’t take the risk. She couldn’t accept the responsibility for him not taking shelter, so she set out across Battersea with her torch, heading for the park. She kept her eyes fixed on the sidewalk as she walked, hunching her shoulders against the cold, trying to ignore the first spatterings of rain on her face.
The wailing siren had done its work, destroying her fragile self-possession, and she cursed her father under her breath as she walked. Always demanding, always complaining, expecting her to minister to his every need and yet giving nothing back. She couldn’t remember when he had last asked her a question about herself. He just seemed to assume that she would always be there, cooking for him, darning his socks, taking over her mother’s duties when the poor woman had inconsiderately upped and died four years earlier. The doctor had said it was her heart, but Ava sometimes thought that it was her father who’d killed his wife with his endless demands. At the very least, he’d given her nothing to live for.
But she hadn’t stayed at home. Instead she’d married the doctor who wrote her mother’s death certificate. She didn’t love Bertram Brive, wasn’t attracted by his portly figure and thick-featured face at all, in fact, but she’d jumped at his proposal when he’d awkwardly popped the question over tea and cake across a rickety table at the back of the Lyons Corner House on Coventry Street one Sunday afternoon. He was her passport to a new life away from her father, or so she’d thought. She’d wished Bertram’s surgery were a little further than three streets away from her old home, but she’d hoped that in a few years they might move – across the river into Chelsea, perhaps, where the people were better off and there was more money to be made from general practice.
Except it hadn’t worked out that way. For some reason, Bertram didn’t seem able to get ahead. Quite the opposite in fact. He had debts, spiralling debts that he tried to conceal from her by locking all his papers inside the bureau in the sitting room of their tiny flat. And his practice was suffering just when he needed to work harder. He was heavy and humourless and lacked the bedside manner that was so crucial to inspiring confidence in patients; but what made it worse was that he didn’t seem to want to try, except with his father-in-law, who’d become far and away Bertram’s most lucrative patient in the last year or two. Albert had embraced a new career as a professional hypochondriac since his retirement from the job in the City that he’d always refused to tell anyone anything about. Ava smiled bitterly at the irony: her marriage had only served to make her more beholden to her father than ever before.
He telephoned day and night, but never to say anything significant. He’d lost this, he needed that; he was feeling pain or he wasn’t feeling anything at all. It was all a means of controlling her, she felt: a slow revenge for having left him to marry Bertram. He wasn’t really worried about his health; he’d take shelter when the bombers came over, if that was the case. And in her heart she believed that his interest in Bertram was just another way of hurting her, of making her jealous. The two men had nothing in common, yet her father had Bertram round there day and night, treating him like a long-lost son.
She knew her father was angry, knew that since his retirement he’d become disappointed with his life in some fundamental way, but he wouldn’t tell her why. The two of them were like dancers who never touched, circling each other endlessly in the same slow, metronomic step. She raged against her sense of responsibility to him, yet she couldn’t escape his hold over her. It would have been easier to bear if her husband had been fun or sympathetic, but he was neither. Now that it was too late, she wished that she hadn’t married him. She knew she was still attractive. Not as pretty as she had once been – Bertram and her father had seen to that – but her long brown hair when brushed out was still luxuriant, and there was a gleam in her green eyes on good days that could make men stop and take notice. But really it didn’t matter if she looked like Greta Garbo, she thought bitterly. She was a prisoner of her marriage – the wedding ring on her finger was her personal ball and chain.
Life was passing her by, but she couldn’t reach out and take hold of it. She thought sometimes that it was as if she were watching the world from inside an empty train that she had caught by mistake and couldn’t get off – a train moving slowly but steadily in the opposite direction from where she needed to go.
And the war had made it worse. All around, London was a hive of activity. Women were working in jobs that no one would have heard of them doing a year earlier. Driving the buses that Ava took to go shopping across the river; putting on steel helmets to work as ARP wardens. She’d even heard that there were female operators of the mobile anti-aircraft gun batteries. It was a new world with new opportunities, but they all seemed out of reach. Bertram wouldn’t hear of her working, and neither would her father. ‘A woman’s place is in the home’ was one of their favourite sayings. ‘Looking after us,’ they might have added, except there was no need. Ava knew exactly what was expected of her.
She reached her father’s apartment block without incident. The searchlight beams crisscrossed the sky, but there was still no sign of the enemy. Perhaps they were coming into London by a different route; probably Battersea wasn’t even the target tonight. You never knew – that was the problem.
After taking out her key, she opened the door and stepped into the hallway. It took her a moment to get used to the darkness. Above her head somewhere there were voices – one soft, almost inaudible; the other angry, frightened, getting louder. She recognized the second voice – it belonged to her father.
‘No, I won’t. No, no, I tell you.’
Ava stopped with her hand on the newel post of the banister at the bottom of the staircase, craning her head to look up. There was a little light now up above where there had been none before. It was leaking out onto the landing two floors up, the landing in front of her father’s door. It had to have been opened, the noise drowned out by the sound of her father’s shouts.
Now all at once she could see two entangled shapes by the railing at the top of the stairs. They swayed back and forth, a contortion of shadows, and she tried to cry out, to make what she was seeing stop. But her voice wouldn’t come and her legs wouldn’t move, and she remained rooted to the spot, standing with one foot on the ground and one foot on the bottom stair as the smaller shape rocked back and forth in mid-air for a moment and then with an inhuman cry of agony fell down through the darkness, transforming itself into her father as he landed with a terrible thud, spread-eagled at her feet.
The noise released her. She screamed, a gut-wrenching cry torn from deep inside her body. But she knew in the same instant that her father was dead. She stared immobilized at his body, recording in an X-ray photograph seared forever on her mind’s eye the contorted way his limbs splayed out on the carpet as if he were some child’s discarded puppet.
