SIMON TOLKIEN
Orders from Berlin

For my father and for my son

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

September 1940: In High Places

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Part One: Murder

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Berlin

Part Two: Assassination

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Berchtesgaden

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

SEPTEMBER 1940

I

Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the intelligence division of the SS, stood to one side, a few yards away from the group of generals and admirals gathered around Adolf Hitler. An unfamiliar figure in his eyeglasses, the Führer was standing, looking down at a large map of Europe spread out across an enormous Teutonic oak table that had been moved for the purpose of the meeting into the centre of the main hall of the Berghof, Hitler’s summer residence high in the Bavarian Alps. One by one, the military leaders took turns to brief their commander-in-chief on the state of preparation for Operation Sea Lion, the high command’s code name for the invasion of England. It was due to be launched any day now according to timetables that had been agreed upon at previous conferences held during the summer either here or at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.

The line of the sharp late-summer sunlight coming in through the panoramic picture window at the back of the hall lit up the group around the table but left Heydrich a man apart, lurking in the shadows. He hadn’t been called on to speak yet, and he knew that this was unlikely to happen while the meeting remained concerned solely with issues of invasion strategy. He was here not as a soldier, but because it was his responsibility to plan and organize the control measures that would need to be taken against resistance groups and other undesirables once the panzer divisions had seized control of London, and he had already identified a suitably ruthless SS commander to take charge of the six Einsatzgruppen cleansing squads assigned to carry out the first wave of arrests and deportations. A special list of high-value targets assembled on Heydrich’s orders contained 2,820 names ranging from Winston Churchill to Noël Coward and H. G. Wells.

This was a military conference, so other than Heydrich and the Führer and Hermann Goering – here by virtue of his command of the Luftwaffe – there were no party men present. Heydrich’s thin upper lip curled in a characteristic expression of contempt as he watched the debate unfold. He hated these army and navy grandees bedecked in their medals and gold braid, and he sensed that the Führer did, too. They were careerists, men who had climbed the ladders of promotion in the inter-war years, drawing their state-guaranteed pay at the end of every month, playing war games in their barracks, and toasting the Kaiser, while true National Socialists like Heydrich had fought behind their Führer in the streets, prepared to die for the cause in which they all believed.

But there was another reason for Heydrich’s antipathy. Once upon a time, he too had been an officer with good prospects, an ensign on the battleship Schleswig-Holstein, until he had been summarily dismissed for conduct unbecoming an officer back in 1931. A woman he’d spurned when he’d met another he preferred had turned out to be a shipbuilder’s daughter who complained to her father, and Heydrich had paid the price. Admiral Raeder had taken away his honour with a stroke of a pen: the same Raeder who was now standing ten paces away from Heydrich, briefing Hitler on the naval preparations for the invasion. Every time he saw the admiral, Heydrich felt the injustice and humiliation flame up inside him again like a festering wound that would never heal. He fully intended to get even with Raeder, but not yet. The time wasn’t right. Heydrich was good at waiting. As the English said, vengeance was a dish best served cold.

Heydrich had no doubt that Raeder remembered. Not only that – he was sure that the admiral regretted his decision. It probably kept him up at night worrying. Everyone in this room knew Heydrich’s reputation. He’d observed the way they had all kept him at a distance when they first came in, throwing him uneasy sideways glances as they’d milled about the hall before the meeting began, drinking coffee from delicate eighteenth-century Dresden cups, until Hitler entered through a side door on the stroke of two o’clock and they all came to attention, raising their arms in salute.

Heydrich knew the names these men of power and influence called him behind his back – ‘blond beast’; ‘hangman’; ‘the man with the iron heart’. He knew how much they feared him, and with good reason. Back in Berlin, under lock and key at Gestapo headquarters, he had thick files on each and every one of them, recording every detail of their private lives in an ever-expanding archive of cross-referenced, colour-coded index cards that he had worked tirelessly to assemble over the previous nine years.

Some of them he’d even enticed into the high-class whorehouse he’d established on Giesebrechtstrasse with two-way mirrors and hidden microphones embedded in the walls. Within moments on any given day, he could summon to his desk photographs and sworn statements, letters, and even transcribed tape recordings of them spilling their sordid secrets to the girls he had had specially recruited for the task. Facts and falsehoods, truth and lies – it didn’t matter to Heydrich so long as the information could be of use in controlling people, forcing them by any means available to do his and the Führer’s will.

Heydrich smiled, thinking how one word from him in Hitler’s ear and the highest and mightiest of these strutting commanders in their glittering uniforms could find themselves down on their hands and knees, naked, manacled to a damp concrete wall in the cellar prison located in the basement underneath his office at 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. It amused him to have his victims cowering and screaming so close to where he worked, seated behind his magnificent nineteenth-century mahogany desk with an elaborately framed photograph of the Führer staring down at him from the oak-panelled wall opposite, ready to provide him with inspiration whenever he looked up from the stream of documents that required his constant attention every day.

From the outset, when he first joined the party back in 1931, Heydrich had felt a sense of kinship with Hitler that he had never experienced with anyone else he’d met before or since. And for several years now he had sensed that the Führer felt it too. Once, closeted together in the Führer’s apartment on the upper floor of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, where Heydrich had gone to brief Hitler in the aftermath of the Kristallnacht pogrom two years earlier, the Führer had held up his hand for silence and looked Heydrich in the eye. It was only for a moment or two, but it felt to Heydrich as if he were back in the church at Halle where he had grown up, with the Catholic priest examining his soul. As a child he had turned away ashamed, but as a man he had met Hitler’s gaze and felt as though the Führer were looking inside him, turning him inside out, searching for the truth of who he really was. And then, after a moment or two, Hitler had nodded as if pleased with what he’d seen.

‘We will go far together, you and I,’ the Führer had said – Heydrich remembered his exact words – ‘because you are a true believer, and because, like me, you have the will. The will is everything, Reinhard. You know that, don’t you?’

Afterwards they had carried on talking about round-ups and press releases and other administrative measures against the vermin Jews, but the moment had stayed with Heydrich, vividly engraved on his memory as a life-changing moment. He admitted it to no one, but secretly he thought of himself as Hitler’s heir and the Third Reich, vast in size and purified in blood, as his own personal inheritance.

Nowadays he looked forward to meetings with Hitler almost like a lover awaiting his next tryst, and when he was in the Führer’s presence he watched him intently, as if he were storing up every impression of his master in the filing cabinet of his mind, packing each one carefully away for later scrutiny when he was alone, back in Berlin. There was a power, a certainty, in Hitler that drew Heydrich like a magnet. It always had, even in the early days when the National Socialist faithful had been so few, meeting in the back of smoke-filled beer cellars and conspiring together in the watches of the night, dreaming the impossible – Heydrich had known from the outset that Hitler was the one who could make the impossible come true.

But today the Führer seemed unlike himself for some reason. He was uncharacteristically silent, allowing the debate between the Wehrmacht commanders to carry on unchecked. Backwards and forwards, reproach and counter-reproach, the argument growing more heated by the minute. It was as if he were unsure of what to do, uncertain of his next move. To Heydrich it felt as if they were on a ship in a storm, keeling from side to side while the rudder stood unattended, crashing around with the buffeting of the waves.

‘The weather conditions in the English Channel are extremely variable,’ said Raeder mournfully. He sounded just like some miserable provincial schoolmaster reading from an instruction manual, thought Heydrich, and a Cassandra too – everything he said seemed negative, designed to undermine the invasion plan. ‘And we lack specialized landing craft,’ Raeder continued. ‘Instead we are relying on converted river barges and ferryboats. Many of these are unpowered and can only be used in calm seas. They will make easy targets for the enemy. And there are also problems with transporting the heavy armour. We are working on making our tanks submersible, but we need more time. It is not the same as when we attacked Norway. We sustained heavy losses in that campaign, and this time the British know we are coming. They will use their navy against the beachheads even if we are able to establish them. And that is a big if—’

‘I have said it before. The invasion front is too narrow,’ interrupted Halder, chief of the army general staff, who had been shifting from one foot to another with growing impatience as Raeder talked. An old-school Prussian officer, he spoke in a clipped, angry voice, jabbing his finger down on the part of the map that showed the south-east coast of England. ‘One hundred miles is not enough even with paratroops landing in support. We might just as well put Army Group A through a sausage machine.’

‘Yes, yes, I have heard this before,’ said Hitler, showing undisguised irritation as he stepped back from the table. ‘More men; more armour; more boats. But it is air supremacy that we need – and before the autumn gales make a Channel crossing impossible. You promised me this,’ he said, wheeling round to face Goering, who was standing on his right. ‘And yet the enemy is shooting down our planes every day, hunting down our bombers like dogs. Tell me the truth, Herr Reichsmarschall. No gloss; no varnish. Can you control the skies or not?’

Everyone turned to look at Goering. He was a natural focus of attention, as he was far and away the most distinctive figure in the room. His flamboyant uniform marked him out from everyone else, which was in fact just what he intended. Rumour had it that Goering changed his uniform five times a day, and his choice for this meeting was garish even by his usual standards. It was one of several bright white outfits that he’d designed for himself, replete with multicoloured crosses and decorations. Some of the larger medals he’d awarded to himself, and Heydrich knew from his army of spies that Goering’s appearance in this costume on cinema newsreels was an object of popular ridicule throughout the country, as no one could understand how he kept his uniforms so white when most of the population couldn’t get enough soap to keep their clothes even passably clean. Goering’s vanity was as boundless as his appetite, dwarfed only by his gargantuan self-belief.

‘It is only a matter of time,’ he said, standing with his arms akimbo, inflated with his own importance. ‘London is burning. The population is cowering in makeshift shelters … the docks are half-destroyed—’

‘To hell with the docks,’ Hitler interrupted angrily. ‘The skies are what matters. You heard my question. Can you break the English air force; can you destroy them like you promised?’

‘Yes. Operation Eagle is succeeding,’ said Goering, responding immediately in a quieter voice. His acute sensitivity to Hitler’s changing moods had stood him in good stead over the years, and he had gauged correctly that a measured assessment of the Luftwaffe’s capabilities, free of hyperbole, was what was now required. ‘It is a matter of simple mathematics,’ he said. ‘Our attacks on British factories and airfields have massively reduced their capacity to keep pace with the severe losses that they are continuing to sustain every day. They are running out of planes and they are running out of pilots. Any day now their fighter command will have to withdraw from southern England and our landings can begin. Their weakness is shown by the damage we have already been able to inflict on London. They would never have allowed it if they could have prevented it.’

Hitler stared balefully at Goering for a moment, as if trying to assess whether his subordinate’s confidence was an act put on for his master’s benefit, but Goering met the Führer’s gaze full on without dropping his eyes.

‘We shall see,’ said Hitler, taking off his glasses. ‘We shall soon see if your assessment is correct, Herr Reichsmarschall.’

It was a signal that the conference was over. One by one, the military commanders saluted Hitler and left the hall. Heydrich moved to follow them, but Hitler held up his hand.

‘Stay,’ he said. ‘There is something I need to talk to you about. We can go out on the terrace. The fresh air will do us good.’

It was one of the last days of summer. The green-and-white umbrella canopies moved gently in the slight breeze above the white chairs and tables, and the bright afternoon sun threw shadows across the wide terrace and glittered in the windows of the Berghof. Across the tops of the pine trees down in the valley, the snow-capped mountains of Austria reared up under a cloudless blue sky. Who would have guessed, thought Heydrich, that hidden not far away from where they were standing, a battery of smoke-generating machines stood ready to drown the Berghof in a blanket of thick white fog should it come under threat from enemy bombers.

The war seemed very far away in the silence. The sound of his and Hitler’s footsteps echoed on the flagstones as they walked over towards the parapet.

‘We can talk here,’ said Hitler, sitting down at one of the tables and motioning Heydrich to the chair opposite. Hitler sighed, stretching out his legs, and then rubbed his knuckles in his eyes. Perhaps gazing at the map during the briefing had given him eye strain, or perhaps it was something more profound. Whatever the cause, the Führer had certainly seemed out of sorts at the conference.

‘I don’t like it,’ said Hitler, shaking his head. He had his hands folded in his lap now, but he was gently clasping them together – a sure sign of inner turmoil. ‘This is not what I wanted. This is not the war we should be fighting.’

‘Against England?’

‘Yes,’ said Hitler, bringing his hands together suddenly and holding them tight. His bright blue eyes were blazing with the intensity of his feeling. ‘They are not our enemy, and yet they will not listen to reason. It’s that fool Churchill. He has possessed them with his talk of blood and sacrifice. Don’t they understand that we have no quarrel with them? They can keep their empire. I want them to. It’s a noble institution. I have told them that again and again, but they will not listen.’

Hitler had begun to shout, but now he stopped suddenly. It was as though an electric motor had been suddenly turned off, and Heydrich tensed, waiting for the power to resume. But Hitler continued after a moment in a quiet voice, visibly holding himself in check.

‘I don’t want this invasion. I am fully prepared to spend German blood to get this great country what it needs, but that is in the east,’ he said, pointing with his forefinger out towards the mountains facing them across the valley. ‘We must defeat Bolshevism and take the land west of the Urals for our people. That is our destiny, but to lose an army trying to conquer Brighton or Worthing or Eastbourne … that is intolerable.

‘Unerträglich!’ Hitler spat out the word. It seemed once more as if rage were going to get the better of him, but again he pulled himself back from the brink. ‘The war in the west is a means to an end,’ he said slowly, choosing his words carefully. ‘The object is to ensure that we are not stabbed in the back when we begin the war that matters, the one against Russia. And that must be soon, Reinhard … soon. We cannot wait much longer. Stalin is rearming; the Soviets are expanding – they are like ants; they come up out of the soil and multiply, and soon we will not be able to destroy them. Not if we wait.’

‘Yes,’ said Heydrich, inspired by the Führer’s vision. ‘As always, you are right.’

‘And so we need peace with the English, not war,’ Hitler went on after a moment. ‘But how do we achieve this? Not with an invasion. Not unless we have to, and even then I am reluctant. Raeder is an old woman, but he is right about the difficulties that we face with the crossing. You cannot rely on the weather. The Spanish tried 350 years ago and their ships were wrecked. Napoleon could not even make it across the Channel. Our landing craft are second-rate and we don’t have the naval superiority we need to protect them.’

‘But if we win in the air,’ said Heydrich, ‘perhaps that will make the difference. The Reichsmarschall said that it is only a matter of time—’

‘Time that we do not have,’ said Hitler, interrupting. ‘I will believe Goering when the English air force stops bombing Germany. For now we need to try something else. And that is where you come in, Reinhard.’

Heydrich came alert. He’d been absorbed by the discussion of grand strategy and had forgotten for a moment that the Führer had had him wait behind after the conference for a purpose.

‘What can I do?’ he asked eagerly.

Hitler held a finger to his lips in a warning gesture. A pretty serving girl wearing a Bavarian peasant dress had appeared behind Heydrich with a tray of peppermint tea. She set the cups on the table and curtsied to the Führer, who smiled affably in response.

‘Tell me about Agent D. Is he continuing to be reliable?’ asked Hitler, sipping from his cup. He seemed serene now, and there was no trace of the anger and frustration that had been in evidence before the tea arrived. It was as if he were introducing a subject of minor interest into the conversation.

‘Yes,’ said Heydrich without hesitation. ‘He is one of the best agents I have ever had. I trust him implicitly.’

‘Good. And his intelligence – is it useful?’

‘He is doing well. As agreed, he provides disinformation where it cannot be detected as false and true intelligence where it does not threaten our security and can be verified by the enemy. His masters in the British Secret Service are pleased with him – he has recently been promoted to a level where he is present at some MI6 strategy meetings, and his reports are read by their Joint Intelligence Committee. Soon, if we are patient, he should have access to the most top-secret information.’

‘Excellent,’ said Hitler, rubbing his hands. ‘As always, your work does you credit, Reinhard. You make the Abwehr look like circus clowns.’

Heydrich bowed his head, savouring the compliment. There was nothing he would have liked better than to further extend his Gestapo empire into the field of foreign intelligence, where he was currently forced to compete not only with the Abwehr, the traditional Secret Service headed by Admiral Canaris, but also with Ribbentrop’s equally second-rate Foreign Office outfit.

‘But I am afraid that we are going to have to be a little less patient,’ Hitler went on smoothly. ‘Agent D gives us an opportunity not just to make the British believe that we are serious about the invasion, but also to make them think that we can succeed. That is what is missing now. Churchill still thinks he can win. If he receives information that makes him stop believing that, then he will have to negotiate. He will have no choice. Do you understand me, Reinhard?’

‘Yes, of course. But if they find out that what D is telling them is untrue, then his cover will be blown. He is an important asset—’

‘And will remain so,’ said Hitler, holding up his hand to forestall further objection. ‘If D’s cover is blown, then Churchill won’t believe the information he’s being given and our scheme fails. No, we must exaggerate our strength on the sea and in the air, but not to the point where it strains credibility. It’s a delicate balance – a task requiring a sure hand. Can I rely on you, Reinhard? Can you do this for me?’

‘Yes. I am in your hands. You know that. But I will need authority to obtain details of our capability from the service chiefs and advice on the level to which it can be distorted without arousing suspicion.’

‘Here. This should be sufficient,’ said Hitler, taking a folded document from his pocket and handing it across the table. ‘Now, tell me about D’s source for his information. What do the British believe the source’s position is at present?’

‘On the general staff, attached to General Halder.’

‘I see,’ said Hitler, licking his lips meditatively. ‘Well, I think we are going to have to award him an increase in status if the British are going to believe that he’s able to provide D with information of the value that I have in mind. What do you suggest, Reinhard?’

‘Aide-de-camp?’

‘Yes, very good – that sounds just right,’ said Hitler, looking pleased. ‘Sufficient status to give him access to top-level military conferences like the one today, and to make it credible that he’s heard me speak of both my willingness to invade and my desire for peace. We can downgrade the source’s status later if it becomes too conspicuous for a fictional character,’ Hitler added with a smile.

‘All as you say – it will be done,’ said Heydrich, getting up from the table and putting on his SS cap, which he had held balanced on his knees during the conversation. He was about to salute, but Hitler forestalled him.

‘Remind me – what is your usual method for communicating with D?’ he asked.

‘We have a reliable contact in the Portuguese embassy in London. Information and reports are sent through the diplomatic bag to Lisbon and then brought on to Berlin from there, and the same in the other direction. It takes time, but it is safe and efficient.’

‘And radio?’

‘The codes we have work for short messages. But not for anything longer – D does not have an Enigma machine and so a report or a briefing instruction like this one wouldn’t be secure. There is a drop we can use that D knows about.’

‘A drop?’

‘Yes. On the coast of Norfolk, north-east of London. We have a sleeper agent there who will pick up documents that we drop from a plane. It works. I have used it before, but D would have to go there to collect.’

‘Very well. Use the drop. Time is of the essence. Everyone needs to understand that. If we wait too long, the weather will turn against us and Churchill will know we are not coming. So you must give this task top priority – put aside everything else that you are working on until the briefing document is ready for me to look at. And when it is, bring it here in person, and then, if I approve, you can send it.’

Hitler nodded and Heydrich raised his right arm in salute and turned away. At the top of the steps leading down to the road, he looked back at the Führer, who was now leaning back in his chair with his hat tipped down over his eyes and his legs stretched out in front of him. He looked like a holidaymaker, Heydrich thought, enjoying the last of the day’s sunshine with a cup of afternoon tea at his side. A neutral observer would have laughed at the suggestion that this was the most powerful man in Europe, who held the fate of nations balanced in the palm of his hand.

II

A flight of geese rose up in a sudden rush from the island in the lake, beat the air above the ruined bird-keeper’s cottage, and then soared into the London sky towards the white vapour trails of the fighter aircraft that had been engaged in aerial battles above the city for most of the day.

Seaforth stopped to look, but Thorn paid no attention, continuing his angry march down Birdcage Walk with his hands thrust deep inside his trouser pockets. Ever since he first came to London, Seaforth had loved St James’s Park, and he felt profoundly grateful that he now worked so close to it that he could come here almost every day, sit under the ancient horse-chestnut trees, and look up past the falling boughs of the weeping willows to where the buildings of Whitehall rose from out of the water like the palaces of a fairy kingdom. But today there was no time to dawdle. Churchill was waiting for them in his bunker, and Seaforth turned away from the view and walked quickly to catch up with his companion.

He felt intensely alive. In the morning and again in the afternoon, he’d left his desk and gone out and joined the crowds in the street outside, gazing up at the aerial dogfights going on above their heads – Hurricanes and Spitfires and Messerschmitts wheeling and twisting through crisscrossing vapour trails, searching for angles of attack. The noise had been tremendous – the roar of the machine guns mixed up with the exploding anti-aircraft shells; the underlying drone of the aeroplanes; the shrapnel falling like pattering rain on the ground; bombs exploding. Several times he’d watched transfixed as planes caught fire and tumbled from the sky, with black smoke pouring out behind them as they fell. A Dornier bomber had hit the ground a few streets away, exploding in a column of crimson-and-yellow flame, and Seaforth could still hear the people around him cheering, throwing their hats up into the air while the German crew burned. Some bombs had fallen close by – there was a rumour that Buckingham Palace had been hit – but Seaforth had been too absorbed in the battle to worry about his personal safety. He’d felt he was watching history unfold right above his head.

And then at the end of the day he had been caught up in the drama when the unexpected summons had come from the prime minister’s office and he and Thorn had set off together through the park. Now the day’s fighting seemed to be over – there was no more sign of the enemy, only a few British fighters patrolling overhead, although Seaforth knew that the bombers would almost certainly return after dark to rain down more terror on the city’s population. Seaforth wondered about the outcome of the day’s battle. He’d tried to talk to Thorn about it, but Thorn had shown no interest in conversation.

Seaforth didn’t like Thorn; he didn’t like him at all. He objected to the disdainful, upper-class voice in which Thorn spoke to him, treating him like a member of some inferior species. He rebelled against having to answer to a man for whom he had no respect. He tipped his felt hat back at a rakish angle and amused himself with trying to annoy Thorn into talking to him.

‘Is it true what they say, that Churchill receives visitors in his bath?’ he asked. ‘I hope he doesn’t do that with us. I think I’d find it hard to concentrate. Wouldn’t you?’

Thorn grunted and stopped to light a cigarette, cupping the lighted match in his hand to protect it from the wind.

‘You hear so many strange things,’ Seaforth went on, undaunted by his companion’s lack of response. ‘Like how he takes so many risks, going up on the roof of Downing Street to watch the bombs and the dogfights – as if he’s convinced that nothing will ever happen to him, like he’s got some kind of divine protection; a contract with the Almighty.’

‘Why are you so interested in where he goes?’ Thorn asked sharply.

‘I’m not. I’m just trying to make conversation,’ said Seaforth amicably.

‘Well, don’t.’

‘Whatever you say, old man,’ said Seaforth, shrugging. He whistled a few bars of a patriotic song and then went back on the attack, taking a perverse pleasure in Thorn’s growing irritation.

‘How many times have you seen the PM? Before now, I mean?’ he asked.

‘Two or three. I don’t know,’ said Thorn. ‘Does it matter?’

‘I’m just trying to get an idea of what to expect, that’s all. Where did you go – to Number 10 or this underground place?’

‘You ask too many damn questions,’ said Thorn, putting an end to the conversation. He took a long drag on his cigarette, inhaling the smoke deep into his lungs. He was trying not to think about Seaforth or the forthcoming interview with the Prime Minister, and the effort was making his head ache.

He was eaten up with a mass of competing thoughts and emotions, and he felt too tired to work out where genuine distrust of Seaforth ended and his own selfish resentment of the young upstart began. Churchill’s summons to the two of them had placed him in an impossible position. His inclusion was recognition that he was the one in charge of German intelligence, but Thorn knew perfectly well that it was Seaforth Churchill wanted to talk to. It was Seaforth’s report that the Prime Minister wanted to discuss; it was Seaforth’s high-value agent in Germany he was interested in. Thorn was no better than a redundant extra at their meeting.

They reached Horse Guards and climbed the steps to 2 Storey’s Gate. Thorn felt a renewed surge of irritation as he sensed Seaforth’s growing excitement. They showed their special day-passes to a blue-uniformed Royal Marine standing with a fixed bayonet at the entrance and went down the steep spiral staircase leading to the bunker. Through a great iron door and past several more sentries, they came to a corridor leading into the labyrinth. Seaforth blinked in the bright artificial light and greedily took in his surroundings – whitewashed brick walls and big red steel girders supporting the ceilings. It was like being inside the bowels of a ship, Seaforth thought. The air was stale, almost fetid, despite the continuous hum of the ubiquitous ventilation fans pumping in filtered air from outside, and there was an atmosphere of concentrated activity all around them. Through the open doors of the rooms that they passed, Seaforth saw secretaries typing and men talking animatedly into telephones – some in uniform, some in suits. People hurried by in both directions, and Seaforth was struck by the paleness of their faces, caused no doubt by a prolonged deprivation of light and fresh air. Tellingly, a notice on the wall described the day’s weather conditions, as if this were the only way the inhabitants of this God-forsaken underworld would ever know whether the sun was shining or rain was falling in the world above.

They stopped outside the open door of the Map Room. This was the nerve centre of the bunker, where information about the war was continually being received, collated, and distributed. Two parallel lines of desks ran down the centre of the room, divided from each other by a bank of different-coloured telephones – green, white, ivory, and red – the so-called beauty chorus. They didn’t ring but instead flashed continuously, answered by officers in uniform sitting at the desks. Over on a blackboard in the corner, the day’s ‘score’ was marked up in chalk – Luftwaffe on the left with fifty-three down and RAF on the right with twenty-two. It was a significant number of ‘kills’ but fewer than Seaforth had anticipated, judging from the mayhem he’d witnessed in the skies over London during the day.

Seaforth’s eyes watered. The thick fug of cigarette smoke blown about by the electric fans on the wall made him feel sick, but he swallowed the bile rising in his throat, determined to see everything and to try to understand everything he saw. No detail escaped his notice – the codebooks and documents littering the desks lit up by the green reading lamps; the map of the Atlantic on the far wall with different-coloured pins showing the up-to-date location of the convoys crossing to and from America; the stand of locked-up Lee-Enfield rifles just inside the entrance to the room.

‘What are you looking at?’ asked a hostile voice close to his ear. It was Thorn. Seaforth had been so absorbed in his observation of the Map Room that he had momentarily forgotten his companion. But Thorn had clearly not forgotten him. He was staring at Seaforth, his eyes alive with suspicion.

‘Everything,’ said Seaforth. ‘This is the heart of the operation. Of course I’m curious.’

‘Curiosity killed the cat,’ said Thorn acidly.

‘Mr Thorn, Mr Seaforth. If I could just see your passes?’ A man in a dark suit had appeared as if from nowhere. ‘Good. Thank you. If you’d like to come this way. The Prime Minister will see you now.’

They passed through an ante-room, turned to their left, and suddenly found themselves in the presence of Winston Churchill, dressed not in a bathrobe but in an expensive double-breasted pinstripe suit with a gold watch chain stretched across his capacious stomach. He was wearing his trademark polka-dot bow tie and a spotless white handkerchief folded into a precise triangle in his top pocket. It was the Churchill that was familiar from countless Pathé newsreels and photographs, except for the stovepipe hat, and that was hanging on a stand in the corner. Without the hat he seemed older – the wispy strands of hair on his head and the pudginess of his face made him seem more a vulnerable, careworn old man than the indomitable British bulldog of popular imagination.

He got up from behind his kneehole desk just as they came in, depositing a half-smoked Havana cigar in a large ashtray that contained the butts of two more.

‘Hello, Alec,’ he said, shaking Thorn’s hand. ‘Good of you to come – sorry about the short notice. And this must be the resourceful Mr Seaforth,’ he went on, fixing a look of penetrating enquiry on Thorn’s companion, who had hung back as they’d entered the room, as if overcome by an uncharacteristic shyness now that he was about to meet the most famous Englishman of his generation.

Eagerness and then timidity: Thorn was puzzled by the sudden change in Seaforth, who seemed momentarily reluctant to go forward and shake Churchill’s outstretched hand. And then, when he did so, Thorn could have sworn that Seaforth grimaced as if in revulsion at the physical contact. But Churchill didn’t seem to notice, and Thorn realized that it could well be the cigar smoke that was causing Seaforth discomfort. He was well aware how much Seaforth hated tobacco, and the sight of his subordinate’s nauseated expression had been the only redeeming feature for Thorn of Seaforth’s recent inclusion at strategy meetings in the smoke-filled conference room back at HQ.

‘I don’t need you, Thompson,’ said Churchill. For a moment, Thorn had no idea whom the Prime Minister was talking to, until he turned to his right and realized that another man was present in the room. It was Walter Thompson, Churchill’s personal bodyguard, sitting like a waxwork in the corner, tall and ramrod straight. Without a word, Thompson went out and closed the door behind him.

‘Drink?’ asked Churchill, crossing to a side table and mixing himself a generous whisky and soda. ‘By God, I need one. I hate being down here with the rest of the trogs, but Thompson and the rest of them insist on it when the bombing gets bad, so I don’t suppose I’ve got too much choice. I’d much prefer to have been up topside watching the battle. Seems like Goering’s thrown everything he’s got at us today, but the brass tell me we’ve weathered the storm so far, at least. You know, I don’t think I’ve been as proud of anyone as I’ve been of our pilots these last few weeks. Tested in the fiery furnace day after day, night after night, and each time they come out ready for action. Extraordinary!’

Churchill looked up, holding out the whisky bottle. Thorn accepted the offer, but Seaforth declined.

‘Not a teetotaller, are you?’ asked Churchill, eyeing Seaforth with a look of distrust.

‘No, sir,’ said Seaforth. ‘I just want to have all my wits about me, that’s all. I’m expecting some difficult questions.’

‘Are you now?’ said Churchill, raising his eyebrows quizzically as he resumed his seat and waved his visitors to chairs on the other side of the desk. ‘Well, it was certainly an interesting report you sent in,’ he observed, putting on his round-rimmed black reading glasses and examining a document that he’d extracted from a buff-coloured box perched precariously on the corner of the desk. ‘Lots of nuts-and-bolts information, which I like, but most of it saying how well prepared Herr Hitler is for his cross-Channel excursion, which I like rather less. We knew about the heavy build-up of artillery and troops in the Pas-de-Calais, of course, but the number of tanks they’ve converted to amphibious use is an unpleasant surprise, and we’d assumed up to now that most of their landing craft were going to be unpowered.’

‘They’ve installed BMW aircraft engines on the barges,’ said Seaforth. ‘They seem to work, apparently.’

‘So I see. Five hundred tanks converted to amphibious use,’ said Churchill, reading from the document. ‘It’s a large number if they can get them across, but that’ll depend on the weather, of course, and who’s in control of the air, and we seem to be holding our own in that department, at least for now, at any rate.’

‘There are the figures for Luftwaffe air production in the report as well – on the last page,’ said Seaforth, leaning forward, pointing with his finger.

‘Yes,’ said Churchill. ‘Again far higher than we expected. But to be taken with a pinch of salt, I think. Goering would be likely to exaggerate the numbers for his master’s benefit.’ He put down the report, looking at Seaforth over the tops of his glasses as if trying to get the measure of him. ‘Your agent’s report is basically a summary of what was discussed at the last Berghof conference, with a few opinions of his own thrown in for good measure. Is that a fair description, Mr Seaforth?’

‘He’s verified the facts where he can,’ said Seaforth.

‘But he’s an army man working for General Halder, who’s another army man,’ said Churchill. ‘He’s not going to have inside information about the Luftwaffe.’

‘He knows one hell of a lot for an ADC, and a recently promoted one at that,’ Thorn observed sourly. It was his first intervention in the conversation.

‘Too good to be true? Is that what you’re saying, Alec?’ asked Churchill, looking at Thorn with interest.

‘Too right I am. The source material was nothing like this before. Now it’s the Führer this, the Führer that. It’s like we’re sitting round a table with Hitler, listening to him tell us about his war aims.’

‘My agent didn’t have access before to Führer conferences,’ Seaforth said obdurately. ‘Now he does.’

‘Why’s he helping us?’ asked Churchill. ‘Tell me that.’

‘Because he hates Hitler,’ said Seaforth. ‘A lot of the general staff do. And he has Jewish relatives – he’s angry about what’s happening over there.’

‘How well do you know this agent of yours?’

‘I recruited him personally when I was in Berlin before the war. He felt the same way then – he loved his country but hated where it was going. I have complete confidence in him.’

‘As do his superiors, judging from his recent promotion,’ observed Churchill caustically. He was silent for a moment, scratching his chin, looking long and hard at the two intelligence officers as if he were about to make a wager and were considering which one of them to place his money on. ‘Betrayal is something I’ve always found hard to understand – even when it’s an act committed for the best of motives,’ he said finally. ‘It’s outside my field of expertise. But we certainly cannot afford to look a gift horse in the mouth, even if we do choose to regard the animal with some healthy scepticism. So, let us assume for a moment that what your agent says is true and that Hitler is ready and determined to come and pay us a visit once he’s got all his forces assembled—’

‘He thinks Hitler doesn’t want to,’ said Seaforth, interrupting.

‘Thinks!’ Thorn repeated scornfully.

‘Hitler said as much at the conference,’ said Seaforth, leaning forward eagerly. ‘He wants to negotiate—’

‘A generous peace based broadly on the status quo,’ said Churchill, finishing Seaforth’s sentence by quoting verbatim from the report. ‘And that may well be exactly what he does want,’ he observed equably, picking up his smouldering cigar and leaning back in his chair. ‘The Führer thinks he is very cunning, but at bottom the way his mind works is very simple. He’s a racist – he wants to fight Slavs, not Anglo-Saxons. But the point is it doesn’t matter what he wants. We cannot negotiate with the Nazis however many Messerschmitts and submersible tanks they may have lined up against us. Do you remember what I called them when I became Prime Minister four months ago – “a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime”?’ Churchill had the gift of an actor – his voice changed, becoming grave and solemn as he recited the line from his speech. But then he smiled, taking another draw on his cigar. ‘Grand words, I know, but the truth. We must defeat Hitler or die in the attempt. There is no hope for any of us otherwise. And so the strength of his invasion force and his wish for peace cannot change our course.’

Abruptly the Prime Minister got to his feet. Thorn nodded his approval of Churchill’s policy, but Seaforth looked as though he had more to say. He opened his mouth to speak, then changed his mind.

‘Thank you, gentlemen. Reports like this one are invaluable,’ said Churchill, tapping the document on his desk. ‘If you get more intelligence like this, I shall want to see you again straight away. Both of you, mind you – I like to hear both points of view. And you can call my private secretary to set up the appointment so we don’t have delays going through the Joint Intelligence Committee – he’ll give you the number outside. My predecessors made a serious mistake in my opinion keeping the Secret Service at arm’s length. It takes a war, I suppose, to inject some sense into government.

‘Goodbye, Alec. Goodbye, Mr Seaforth,’ he said affably, shaking their hands across the desk. ‘Seaforth – an interesting name and not one I’ve heard before,’ he said pensively. ‘Sounds a bit like Steerforth – the seducer of that poor girl in David Copperfield. Came to a bad end, as I recall. A great writer, Dickens, but inclined to be sentimental, which is something we can’t afford to be at present. The stakes are too high; much too high for that.’

III

Exactly the same people were present in the great hall of the Berghof as the week before; the same map of Europe was spread out across the table; and Reichsmarschall Goering was wearing the same brighter-than-white uniform with gold epaulettes and buttons and black Iron Cross medals dangling at his throat. He jabbed exultantly at the towns of south-east England with his fat forefinger and listed the damage that the Luftwaffe had inflicted upon them since the last conference. He seemed oblivious to the tight-lipped frigidity of the Führer, standing beside him.

Head of an air force and he can’t even fit inside an aeroplane. Heydrich smiled for a moment, his thin, pale lips wrinkling in contemptuous amusement at the thought of Goering trying to fit his great bulk inside the narrow cockpit of a Heinkel twin-engined bomber. Once upon a time, Goering had flown, of course – in the last war he had been a fighter ace, the last commander of von Richthofen’s Flying Circus after the Red Baron was killed in action in 1918. But now he was past it, over the hill; unfit for anything useful except to go back home to Carinhall, the ugly, tasteless mansion he’d built for himself in the Schorfheide forest north-east of Berlin and fill his belly full of rich French food while he feasted his bulbous eyes on the old master paintings he’d looted out of Paris when it fell.

Heydrich could fly. He hadn’t needed to. He could have stayed behind his desk in Berlin when the war broke out, issuing orders and decrees like other ministers. But instead he’d overcome his fears and learnt because he knew that flying would make him a god, turning in silver arcs through the clouds; insulated by silk and fur against the bitter, outlandish cold; pitting his wits and nerves against an unknown enemy until death took one or the other of them, plucking them from the skies forever. Earlier in the year, he’d flown sixty missions over Norway and France, watching as the panzer divisions below had thrust their shining black armour deep into the heartlands of the enemy, accomplishing in a few short weeks what the German army had failed to do in five years of fighting during the last war. And why? What had changed to make this possible? The answer was simple. It was the leadership of Adolf Hitler – his energy and power; his extraordinary intelligence and understanding; and yes, his will. He was the one who had made the difference. He had made the soldiers believe in themselves; he had carried them forward to victory.

And today the aura of power around the Führer was even more striking than usual. Everyone in the room was in uniform except Hitler, who was wearing a black double-breasted suit and a white shirt and tie, as if he were attending a funeral and not a military conference. The Führer was always meticulous in his dress, and Heydrich was sure that the suit had been a deliberate decision, meant to emphasize his displeasure at the current progress of the war. Heydrich’s report of Agent D’s short radio message concerning Churchill’s intransigence, which he’d sent to Hitler the previous day, had only increased the Führer’s angry gloom.

‘What does it gain us if we bomb all these towns? What does it matter if the population of London goes stark raving mad?’ Hitler broke out in a nervous, angry voice, gesturing with a dismissive wave at the map. ‘That fool Churchill will not give in. He doesn’t care if the bodies are piled ten high in the London streets. You’ve heard him speak. He wants this war. It’s what he always dreamed about. What does it matter that there’s no sense to it; that there’s no justice to it? England can have its empire, but Germany can have nothing. That is what he says. You can’t reason with a man like that. The only thing that would have made a difference is if you had given me air supremacy. And isn’t that what you promised me a week ago, Herr Reichsmarschall? Isn’t it?’

It was a rhetorical question thrown out while Hitler was pausing for breath, and Goering knew better than to respond. Heydrich was secretly impressed by the way Goering stood almost at attention and silently took all that the Führer had to throw at him. Hitler was giving full rein to his fury now. He was shouting and beads of sweat stood out on his pale forehead. In a characteristic gesture, he kept brushing the fringe of his falling brown hair back from off his face.

‘If we can’t control the skies, we can’t control the sea. An invasion is a waste of time. Any fool knows that. And so I’m to wait here doing nothing, listening to you telling me about incendiary bombs while Stalin builds more tanks. The Bolsheviks are the enemy, not the British. That is where the panzers must go, that is our destiny,’ Hitler shouted, jamming his finger down on the right side of the map, into the huge red mass of the Soviet Union. ‘I always knew this. I wrote it in my book fifteen years ago. Perhaps you should read it again, Herr Reichsmarschall – refresh your memory. My Struggle, I called it; Mein Kampf. I should have called it My Struggle to Be Heard.’

‘We will win,’ said Goering, injecting a note of certainty into his voice that Heydrich was sure he didn’t feel. ‘Just a little more time is all we need. And the RAF will be finished. They cannot withstand us; they are on their last legs.’

‘They are bombing Germany!’ Hitler screamed. ‘That is what they are doing. And you talk like it isn’t happening.’

Hitler took out his handkerchief and mopped his sweating brow. He held hard on to the side of the table, trying to control his breathing.

‘The invasion of England is cancelled, indefinitely postponed – call it what you like. You have all failed,’ he said, looking slowly around at his generals as if he were registering each face for subsequent review. ‘All of you,’ he repeated. His voice was soft but venomous, and the men closest to him instinctively took a step back. ‘Let it be the last time.’

Abruptly he turned and walked away from the table towards the side door by which he had come in. The conference was over.

Ten minutes later, Heydrich stood at the top of the entrance steps, watching the leaders of the Third Reich leave the Berghof one by one in their chauffeur-driven black Mercedes-Benz staff cars. In just the last few days summer had turned to autumn, and the canvas umbrellas over the outdoor tables flapped disconsolately in the light breeze that was blowing up from the valley below. It seemed to Heydrich far longer than a week since he had sat with Hitler on the stone terrace, drinking tea in the afternoon sunshine.

Looking down the steps, Heydrich remembered the Führer standing where he was now, waiting to greet the straight-backed British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in the week before the Munich Conference in 1938. Chamberlain had watery eyes and a wispy moustache, and he’d wanted peace in our time. Heydrich remembered afterwards the way Hitler had scornfully described how the Englishman’s hands had trembled when he used the word war. And Chamberlain hadn’t been alone. Lord Halifax, England’s foreign minister then and now, had also wanted to find a peaceful solution to ‘Germany’s legitimate demands’, as he’d called them. Hitler was right – it was Churchill who had changed the rules of the game. The fat man was in love with the sound of his own voice, filling the radio waves with his hatred of Germany and his talk of blood, toil, sweat, and tears. The false briefing paper exaggerating Germany’s preparedness for the invasion of England on which Heydrich had lavished so much time and care had made no difference. D had reported that Churchill wouldn’t back down – the old fool had meant exactly what he’d said in his rabble-rousing speech to the British Parliament back in June: ‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall never surrender.’ Fine words, but meaningless when the British Army had left all its heavy weapons on the beach at Dunkirk and their Home Guard was armed with spades and pitchforks. Without Churchill things might be different: sense might prevail. And D’s radio message had contained an idea for how Churchill might be removed from the equation – only a possibility, but certainly one worth exploring. A new door seemed to be opening just as an old one was closing.

Heydrich hadn’t mentioned D’s idea in the report that he’d sent to Hitler by courier the day before. It required a face-to-face conversation; it was too sensitive to be put in writing, and besides, Heydrich wanted to ensure it remained a secret between him and the Führer. He hesitated as he slowly buttoned his greatcoat and adjusted the peak of his SS cap over his brow. On the face of it, now was a perfect opportunity to see the Führer alone. He’d watched all the generals leave. But Hitler might not be receptive to new ideas in his present angry mood – an unscheduled intrusion might only infuriate him more. Yet Heydrich had a solution to offer to the very problem that was causing the Führer’s ill humour.

He ran the tip of his tongue round the edges of his lips as he weighed the odds, and then, making up his mind, he turned on his heel and re-entered the house. The great hall was empty, so he went on into the pine-panelled dining room and practically collided with the Führer’s valet, Heinz Linge.

‘Please tell the Führer that I wish to see him,’ said Heydrich. He was nervous and made it sound like an order rather than a request.

‘But the Führer is resting, Herr General,’ said Linge, who was under instructions to take orders from no one except his master. ‘The conference has ended. Everyone has left.’

‘Tell the Führer that that is why I am here,’ said Heydrich, standing his ground. ‘Because of what was discussed at the conference. I have something important to tell him. I need to see him urgently.’

‘Something that can’t wait. But something that couldn’t be said before in front of your colleagues. You intrigue me, Reinhard.’ Hitler had appeared silently behind his valet in the doorway, standing with his hands behind his back, but Heydrich was reassured to see that the Führer was smiling and appeared to have entirely shaken off his earlier irritation. He’d changed into a simple white military jacket, the same colour as Goering’s but otherwise entirely unlike the Reichsmarschall’s ridiculously flamboyant uniform.

‘Come, let us go out,’ he said. ‘We can walk together and enjoy the view down over the valley, and you can tell me what it is that is so urgent.’

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

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

CHAPTER 1

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.

The sound of running feet on the landing above her head recalled her to her surroundings. Her father had been pushed – he had been murdered. The man who’d done it was in her father’s flat. Now, in this instant.

She wanted to go up the stairs, but she couldn’t. Her feet wouldn’t move. People were coming up from the basement, saying things to her to which she could not respond. Someone was holding her; someone was going to call the police. And from far away, as if coming to her through water, she heard the sound of the all clear. The bombers weren’t coming to Battersea tonight, but then they didn’t need to. Somebody had already done their work for them, at least as far as Albert Morrison was concerned.

CHAPTER 2

Not that he had any intention of admitting it, but Detective Chief Inspector John Quaid was on the whole rather enjoying the war. Perhaps he suffered from a lack of imagination, but it never seemed to have occurred to him that a bomb might actually land on him. Death was something that happened to other people – his role was to find out who was responsible. And ever since the bombing had started, he’d been busier than ever. The country might be coming together, uniting behind their defiant Prime Minister, but out of sight behind their blackout curtains the good citizens of London had been attacking each other in far greater numbers than ever before. For the criminal classes, the Blitz was a golden opportunity that might never come again. Glass shattering sounded the same if it was caused by a hurled brick or a bomb blast, and the noise of the anti-aircraft guns blotted out the sounds of illegal entry. Quaid had even had one case where a murderer had tried to pretend that his victim was a bomb casualty.

Tens of thousands of people were homeless, and the capital’s infrastructure had been torn apart. The demands on the police had mushroomed in a few short weeks and there wasn’t time now for days of plodding detective work, digging into witnesses’ accounts, trawling for clues. Instead cases had to be solved in a day or two or not at all. Policemen had to rely on their instincts, and Quaid had never had any trouble doing that; he liked to act quickly, to paint with a broad brush. His results were getting better all the time, and with a fair wind he’d make superintendent in another year or two. Not bad for a boy from the backstreets of Sheffield whose widowed mother had taken in washing from the local brothel to make ends meet after her husband died.

He breathed a sigh of satisfaction and slid his broad buttocks as far back as he could into the expensively upholstered driver’s seat of his big black Wolseley police car, holding the steering wheel tight in his leather-gloved hands with his forearms fully extended as he imagined himself for a moment a latter-day Malcolm Campbell racing his Blue Bird round the Brooklands Grand Prix track out in Surrey. Closed down now, Quaid remembered with a touch of sadness, thinking back to the summer afternoons he’d spent behind the crash barriers before the war, choking on the dust from the race cars as they chased one another around the hairpin bends. Some Nazi bastard had dropped a bomb on the place – just for the hell of it, probably. Nowhere seemed immune these days. They’d even had a go at Buckingham Palace a few days before – wrecked the royal chapel, so it said in the newspapers.

Quaid turned past Parliament and accelerated down Millbank, enjoying the heavy power of the purring engine under the dome of the sparkling bonnet and relishing the rush of the wind against the side of his face through the open window and the emptiness of the road ahead. Fewer cars were out in the evenings these days. Too many accidents in the blackout, he supposed, and not that many drivers had the petrol now that rationing was starting to bite.

He glanced over at Trave, sitting wrapped up in his thoughts in the seat beside him. He was a queer fish, this new assistant of his, Quaid thought. He was built like a boxer, with a square jaw and muscled arms, yet he was always reading poetry books in the canteen, looking as if he were a hundred miles away. As far as Quaid was concerned, Trave thought a damn sight too much for his own good, and it was a constant source of irritation the way he always had to have his own take on their cases. There was a dogged, stubborn look that got into the young man’s eyes when he didn’t agree with the line of an investigation, and sometimes his questioning of Quaid’s decisions was almost mutinous. He didn’t seem to understand that there was such a thing as a chain of command in the police force just as much as in the Army, and there’d been times when Quaid had seriously considered throwing the book at him. But then once or twice when the chips were down, the boy had more than stepped up to the plate – like the other week when they’d been called to a burglary in a jeweller’s shop in Mayfair and Trave had chased the perpetrator up the street and wrestled him to the ground, holding him down until Quaid arrived with the handcuffs. Quaid grinned, remembering how the two of them had had to get down on their hands and knees afterwards, searching for the rubies and emeralds that had rolled away into the dirty gutter.

This call sounded a lot less exciting – an old man fallen down the stairs in Battersea, the daughter saying he’d been pushed. Still, you never knew until you got there. Maybe the daughter would be pretty; maybe the old man had money under the mattress. The one sure thing was that whatever the case involved, he’d have it solved by the end of the week. That much he’d guarantee.

An old lady with a bent back, dressed entirely in widow’s weeds, answered the door almost as soon as they’d first knocked, but she didn’t step aside when Quaid showed her his warrant card. Instead she leant forward, warning them to tread carefully because the dead man or what was left of him was lying on the ground only a few feet behind where she was standing.

Inside the hallway, both policemen felt the bile rising in their throats. The corpse was a God-awful mess, but of course that was only to be expected when a man fell sixty feet down a stairwell. He was never going to be a pretty sight after that experience.

The fact that the only immediate light came from one weak bulb in a pale green art deco wall fixture on the side wall of the hallway made the crime scene seem even more macabre. Several people – other neighbours, obviously – were milling about at the back near where some stairs went down into the basement, and up above, a wide curving staircase with a thick mahogany banister wound its way up into murky shadows, broken only by a faint light visible near the top.

Suddenly a woman came out into the hall from a doorway on the right, swaying from side to side. She was wearing a knee-length brown woollen coat, as if she had just come in from outside, and a rose-patterned scarf had fallen back from her light brown hair to hang loosely around her shoulders. Her face was white with shock and her eyes were swollen from crying. She was one hell of a mess, but she was also pretty; Quaid had been right about that.

Instinctively guessing that the woman was the dead man’s daughter, Trave stepped quickly forward, blocking her view of the corpse, but she was looking up, not down, as if searching for something or someone in the shadows at the top of the stairs.

‘Someone pushed him. I couldn’t see who it was – it was too dark,’ she blurted out. ‘But I saw my father. He was struggling up there, shouting “no”, swaying backwards and forwards in the air, trying to stay upright, trying not to fall, and then – then he fell.’ Her voice came in gasps, words expelled between deep gulping breaths until she’d finished telling them what had happened, whereupon her eyes travelled down to the crimson carpet at her feet in imitation of her father’s descent, and she fell forward herself in a dead faint.

Trave had seen it coming – he leant forward and caught her in his arms.

‘Take her back in my flat,’ said the old lady, pointing to the open door through which the dead man’s daughter had appeared a moment before. ‘I told her to stay still, but she wouldn’t listen. It’s the shock – makes you do stupid things. I remember when my husband died. Put her there,’ she instructed Trave from the doorway once they were inside, pointing to a sofa across from the fireplace. ‘She’ll be all right. I’ll look after her.’

‘Did you see what happened?’ Quaid asked a little impatiently. He didn’t want to admit it to himself, but he felt a little envious of the way Trave had been able to step forward and catch the woman as she fell and then carry her away as if she weighed no more than a feather in his arms. For a moment, it made Quaid wish he were young again – not that he had ever had such an instinctive sense of timing as his assistant so clearly possessed.

‘No, I didn’t,’ said the old lady. ‘The caretaker’s nice. He lets us use his place down in the basement as a shelter when there are raids, and so I went down there when the siren sounded with the rest of the people who live here. Not Mr Morrison – he didn’t like it down there for some reason, except when his daughter forced him,’ she said, making the sign of the cross as she gestured with averted eyes towards the corpse. ‘And then a few minutes later we heard Ava screaming the house down. It was just when the all clear sounded, and it was like the two of them, her and the siren, were competing with each other, if you know what I mean—’

She broke off, realizing the inappropriateness of her comment, although it was obvious that she hadn’t meant to sound heartless. She seemed to be a kind woman.

‘Which is his flat?’ asked Quaid, pointing to the corpse.

‘Second floor on the left,’ said the old lady, pointing up into the shadowy darkness above their heads to where an upper landing was half-lit by some invisible light. ‘I don’t think anyone’s been up or down the stairs since I came up from the basement or I’d have heard them, but there’s a fire escape at the back. Whoever pushed him could have got away down that, I suppose.’

Quaid and Trave exchanged a look and took out their guns. Fire escape or no fire escape, there was no point taking any chances. The police had been issued firearms in the first year of the war, but neither the inspector nor his assistant had had occasion to use them yet. Quaid went first, with Trave just behind, both of them shining their torches up into the darkness. The stairs creaked under their shoes, but otherwise there was no sound.

Two flights up, the two policemen became more aware of the line of light above their heads, and when they turned the corner, they saw that it was a shaft coming through a half-open door on the other side of the next landing. Moving forward, their hearts hammering against their chests, they felt a current of cold air coming towards them.

Signalling to Trave to get ready, Quaid flattened himself against the wall behind the door and gently pushed it open, and Trave found himself looking down the length of an empty corridor lit by a single overhead light to where a metal curtain rail had been pulled down onto the carpet and a second door stood wide open to the night air. Quickly he ran to the end and then came to an abrupt halt. Outside, snaking down to the ground below his feet, a black iron fire escape clung to the back of the building like some parasitic creature missing its head and tail.

Trave shone his torch down into the shadows but saw nothing except the outline of a row of squat municipal dustbins behind a railing near the bottom of the ladder that looked for a moment like a line of men at a bar. Everything was silent – the killer was long gone. That much was obvious.

‘What can you see?’ asked Quaid, coming up behind Trave as he was examining the outside of the door frame.

‘Whoever it is got out this way—’

‘I know that.’

‘But I don’t think this is how he got in,’ said Trave, finishing his sentence.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘There are no signs of forcible entry, and the key’s in the door,’ said Trave, pointing. ‘And I don’t think the killer put it there.’

‘Why not?’

‘I just don’t see him going round the flat looking for it when he knew someone had seen him. He’d have been too desperate to get away.’

‘Maybe he knew where to look,’ said Quaid. ‘He certainly knew where to find the fire escape.’

‘Yes, but I don’t think that means he’s been here before,’ said Trave. ‘Most of these Victorian apartment blocks have fire escapes like this at the back.’

‘Well, aren’t you the expert?’ said Quaid sarcastically. And then apologized immediately when he saw how Trave recoiled, obviously offended. He hadn’t had Trave working for him that long, but there’d already been several cases where his assistant had noticed something that seemed minor at the time but turned out afterwards to be important. Quaid was an arrogant man, but he was clever enough to realize that two sets of eyes were better than one. After all, what did it matter who saw what, provided Quaid got the credit for solving the case afterwards. ‘Come on, William, have a sense of humour,’ he said, clapping Trave on the back. ‘I expect you’re right. Our dead friend probably had the door locked – unless he was too busy with his books and got absent-minded, which is always a possibility. Have you seen how many he’s got? The flat’s stuffed to the rafters with them. Come and take a look.’

Trave followed Quaid back down the corridor to the living room. The inspector was right. Books were everywhere, lined up horizontal and vertical on overloaded shelves or piled in precarious leaning towers on tables and chairs. From a side table over by the window, Trave picked up a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in the original German that had been heavily annotated in blue ink; lying underneath it was a copy of The Communist Manifesto, this time in translation.

There were papers too, all covered with the same distinctive spidery handwriting, and yellowing articles cut out of newspapers. There didn’t seem to be any surface in the flat that wasn’t covered in some way.

‘Christ, he’s got more books than the bloody public library,’ said Quaid, whistling through his teeth. ‘You’d need a compass to find your way round here.’

‘No, I think that he knew where everything was. Or almost everything,’ Trave said meditatively. It was almost as if he were speaking to himself.

‘So you think there’s method in the madness, eh, William?’ Quaid observed, eyeing his assistant with interest and glancing back round the jam-packed room.

‘I had an uncle who lost one of his legs in the last war,’ said Trave. ‘He didn’t do anything except read.’

‘Like you,’ said Quaid with a smile.

‘Worse. His house was just like this, and yet when he wanted to show me something in one of his books, he could lay his hands on it in a minute.’

‘Well, good for him,’ said Quaid. ‘But why did you say “almost everything”? What was that about?’

‘I’m not sure. Maybe it’s nothing. It’s just these papers on the floor here, they’re different somehow,’ said Trave, pointing to a small heap of documents near his feet that were lying on the carpet in the space between the desk and the fireplace.

‘In what way different?’

‘They look like they’ve been thrown there, maybe from off the desk. They’re not stacked up like the other papers.’

‘Yes, maybe you’re right,’ said Quaid, looking down. ‘Good work, William. You’ll make a decent detective yet. Okay, leave everything where it is for now. We need to get back downstairs. We can bring the daughter up here when she’s back on her feet – see what she says; see if anything’s missing. You can carry her if you like,’ he added with a grin as he went out of the door.

Trave shook his head and gave a weary smile. He’d already picked up on his boss’s irritation at the way he’d helped the bereaved woman downstairs, but what was he supposed to do – leave her to faint on top of her father’s corpse?

Carefully he replaced Mein Kampf on the table where he’d found it and looked curiously around the room one last time before he followed his boss down the stairs. Strange, he thought, how all the books seemed to be about different kinds of politics. Reference books, language primers, treatises – but as far as he could see, there wasn’t one novel in the whole damn place. But then fact, of course, could be a great deal stranger than fiction.

Downstairs, Trave went to check on the dead man’s daughter and was pleased to see that she’d recovered her senses while he’d been away. She was sitting up on the sofa where he had laid her before he went upstairs, sipping from a glass of brandy that the old lady must have given her. There was even some colour in her pale cheeks.

Reassured, Trave returned to the hall, where Quaid was standing by the remains of the woman’s father.

‘There’s no point waiting for a doctor,’ said Quaid, sounding typically decisive. ‘We know he’s dead and we know what killed him, so we’d better get on with finding out who did it.’

Trave knew in the immediate sense that ‘we’ meant him. It was his job, not Quaid’s, to handle the dead and go through their possessions. So he took out his evidence gloves, pulled them carefully over his hands, and began methodically to go through the dead man’s pockets, doing his best to keep his eyes averted from the mess of shattered bone and blood that had once been a human face.

‘What’ve you got there?’ asked Quaid, watching at the side.

‘A wallet,’ said Trave, holding up a battered leather notecase that he’d extracted from inside the dead man’s jacket. He took out his torch to shine a brighter light on the contents. ‘There’s an ID card in the name of Albert Morrison, aged sixty-eight; address 7 Gloucester Mansions, Prince of Wales Drive, SW11,’ he went on. ‘Plus three pounds ten shillings in banknotes, a ration card, and two ticket stubs. Oh, and a piece of paper – same inside pocket, but not in the wallet, folded into four. There’s a bit of blood on it, but you can read what it says: “Provide detailed written report. What are the chances of success? C.” And there’s a name written underneath with a question mark – Hayrich or Hayrick, maybe.’

‘Never heard of him,’ said Quaid.

‘I think it’s all the same handwriting – same as on the papers upstairs,’ said Trave, peering closely, ‘but the name’s a bit of a scrawl, like it’s been written in a hurry, sometime after the sentence, I’d say.’

‘All right, bag it. Is there anything else?’

‘A few coins in the right trouser pocket; a couple of keys on a ring. That’s it.’

‘Okay. Let’s go talk to the daughter, see if she knows something. There’s no point standing around doing nothing, waiting for the death wagon to get here.’

‘Are we still taking her upstairs?’ asked Trave.

‘Yes, why not?’

‘I just don’t want her to see her father again, that’s all. I don’t think she can take much more.’

‘Fine,’ said Quaid impatiently. ‘Get a sheet or something. The old woman must have one spare.’

Left on his own in the hall, Quaid scratched his head absent-mindedly as he looked down at the smashed-up corpse that had less than an hour before been a sixty-year-old man called Albert Morrison. The sight didn’t upset him. In the last three months he’d seen far worse – soldiers at bomb sites picking up bits of arms and legs and putting them in potato sacks as if they were working in a harvest field; blast victims fused into the walls of their homes; even once a severed head staring down at him from an oak tree that had been stripped of all its leaves by a land mine explosion.

No, the dead man was a puzzle. That was all. And solving the puzzle shouldn’t be too difficult once all the clues were assembled. For now, Quaid had to be content with speculation. What had happened upstairs? he wondered. Had the old man come home and surprised a burglar, who’d pushed him down the stairs? The answer to that was almost certainly no – Quaid thought Trave was most likely right that the killer hadn’t come in through the fire escape door, and from what he’d been able to see when he was upstairs, there were no signs of forced entry on the entrance door to the flat. And given that the front door of the building appeared unscathed as well, the likely explanation was that someone had let the killer in. All the tenants in the building would have to be questioned, obviously, but Quaid’s intuition told him that it was Morrison who had opened the door. Perhaps the killer had followed Morrison home or perhaps he had been waiting at the door. Either way, he had targeted the old man. Why? To steal from him? The daughter would be able to tell them if anything significant was missing, but as far as Quaid had been able to see from a cursory inspection, there hadn’t been any items of obvious great value in the flat – a lorryload of boring academic books, certainly, but in Quaid’s experience people didn’t get killed for their books. So if it wasn’t to steal, why had the killer come? Perhaps to talk about some matter of mutual interest. According to statistics, most murderers knew their victims, and Quaid had a great deal of faith in statistics. Perhaps the professor and his guest had got into an argument and the argument had got out of hand. Throwing your victim over the banister was certainly an unlikely method for premeditated murder. So much could go wrong in a struggle even with a weak opponent – one false move and the would-be murderer could easily end up falling down the stairs himself.

The professor! Quaid realized that he’d already unconsciously given the victim a nickname. It was a habit he’d developed with all his cases, and then afterwards when they were solved, the names became a filing system in his mind – useful in its way. The sailor for the man who’d drowned under Lambeth Bridge, held down under the water by his brother’s boat hook; the nun for the pious lady in Clerkenwell murdered for her savings by the drug-addicted lodger who lived in her attic; the prime minister for the man who looked like an oversize version of Churchill, dispatched by his wife with a bread knife one evening because she couldn’t stand to listen to him barking orders at her any more. And now the professor – killed by one of his students, perhaps, or an academic rival.

A loud knocking at the front door recalled the inspector from his reverie. Trave had still not returned, so Quaid walked over to the door and opened it, and then had to step back quickly as an overweight man in a green tweed suit almost fell past him into the hall, coming to a halt in front of the still-uncovered dead man on the floor. The newcomer was red in the face and breathing heavily, but it was hard to say whether that was from the shock of what he was now seeing or from the haste of his arrival.

‘Oh, God,’ he said, stepping back. ‘That’s Albert.’

‘How do you know?’ asked Quaid, sounding surprised. ‘His face is smashed beyond recognition.’

‘Because of his clothes. What the hell has happened here?’

‘And who might you be, if you don’t mind me asking?’ asked Quaid, ignoring the newcomer’s question.

‘Dr Brive, Bertram Brive – I’m his son-in-law.’

‘And what brings you here, Doctor? Nobody’s called for medical assistance as far as I know.’

‘I was worried about my wife. I called home when I heard the siren and she didn’t answer, so naturally I assumed she was over here.’

‘Where were you?’

‘At work. My surgery’s near here – in Battersea High Street. Why are you asking me all these questions?’

‘Because I’m a police officer investigating a murder. It’s my job to ask them.’

‘A murder! Why do you say that?’ asked Brive. He sounded panicked suddenly, and his hands had begun to shake.

‘Your father-in-law was pushed. It was your wife who saw it happen, as a matter of fact.’

‘Did she see who did it?’

‘No, more’s the pity. It was too dark, apparently, but we’ll find the person responsible. You can count on that.’ The urgency with which Brive had asked his last question hadn’t escaped Quaid’s attention.

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Brive, sounding anything but glad. ‘Where’s my wife? Is she still here?’

‘Yes, in there,’ said Quaid, pointing to the open door of the ground-floor flat through which Trave was just now emerging with a sheet to cover up the corpse. ‘We were just going to ask her to go upstairs and see if anything’s missing. Perhaps you’d like to come too.’ It was framed as an invitation, but Quaid made it sound more like an order.

But it evidently wasn’t one that the doctor was reluctant to obey. Instead of going to find his wife, he started up the stairs until Quaid barked at him to stop. Trave went back to fetch the dead man’s daughter.

Brive took a step towards his wife when she came out into the hall, then stopped abruptly, reacting to the way she seemed instinctively to draw back away from him.

‘Ava,’ he said, clasping his hands in front of his chest as if he were about to make a speech. ‘I’m very sorry about what’s happened here. Do you have any idea who might have done this terrible thing?’

Ava shook her head, staring mutely at her husband with a half-sullen, half-defiant expression that Quaid couldn’t quite decipher, but he was even more struck by the stilted, almost formal way the doctor spoke to his wife. He would have liked to see more of the interaction or lack of it between them, but Brive turned away and began to go up the stairs.

CHAPTER 3

Quaid followed the doctor up the stairs, with Trave and Ava bringing up the rear. Brive climbed quickly, taking the stairs two at a time, and when the two policemen arrived in Albert Morrison’s book-lined sitting room a minute later, they found the doctor on his hands and knees, picking up the papers that were strewn across the floor – the same heap of documents that Trave had drawn Quaid’s attention to earlier.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Quaid demanded, taking hold of Brive’s arm with one hand and removing the papers that the doctor was holding with the other.

‘What do you think? I’m clearing up the mess,’ said Brive, pulling away.

‘No, you’re bloody well not. You’re interfering with the evidence. That’s what you’re doing. And if you carry on, I’ll put you in handcuffs. Do you hear me?’

Brive didn’t answer but instead turned away with a surly expression on his face, nursing his arm as his wife came past him into the room. Quaid kept his eyes on Brive, noting how he kept shifting from one foot to the other, unable to keep still, and how he couldn’t stop nervously rubbing his hands together all the time, as if he were unconsciously trying to wash away the evidence of some recent transgression, while his eyes kept darting back towards the documents on the floor as if he were considering another move in their direction.

Quaid prided himself on being able to tell if a man was lying or hiding something from him, and this medicine man with the funny foreign-sounding name was doing both. Quaid was sure of it. From the moment he’d clapped eyes on him, the inspector had taken an instant dislike to the victim’s son-in-law. He distrusted the fussy triple knot in Brive’s navy-blue bow tie, and it worried him that half of what the doctor said just didn’t add up. Brive said he’d come over because he was concerned about his wife’s safety during the air raid, but then he’d shown no interest in going to her side when he’d discovered that she’d been a witness to her father’s murder. Instead his priority had been to get up the stairs and start interfering with the evidence. And then there was the way that Brive had shown up at the crime scene minutes after the police, even though by his own admission no one had telephoned him or asked for his assistance. He said he was looking for his wife, but why had he been so certain that she was going to be at her father’s?

It was a damned shame that the dead man’s daughter hadn’t got a look at the man who’d pushed her father – too dark, apparently, like everything else in the damned blackout.

‘You say your father was saying “no”. Is that all? Did you hear anything else?’ Quaid asked, turning to the dead man’s daughter. Ava, she was called – a pretty woman with a pretty name. God knows how she’d ended up married to this creepy doctor, Quaid thought, shaking his head.

‘He said: “No; no, I won’t. No, I tell you.” I could tell he was frightened – he kept saying “No”. And there was someone else saying something, but his voice was soft. I couldn’t hear any of the words.’

‘His – so it was a man?’

‘I don’t know. I assume so,’ she said, turning away. He could see that she’d started crying again. Perhaps he shouldn’t have started out with asking her about the murder, but where the hell else was he supposed to start?

‘Okay,’ he said, frowning. ‘I understand. Let me ask you this: Do you normally come over here when there’s a raid?’

‘Sometimes,’ she said in a barely audible voice. ‘It depends.’

‘On what?’

She opened her mouth to speak, but the words didn’t come. Instead she bit her lip and looked away, out of the window towards the wandering beam of a lone searchlight still operating out of the park opposite, despite the sounding of the all clear. The woman was in a bad way. That much was obvious. Quaid felt sorry for her. Her husband, standing morosely over by the door with a sullen look on his face, wasn’t giving her any support at all. The only person who was trying to help was the old lady from downstairs, who’d followed them up the stairs with a cup of tea, which now sat untouched on the low table beside Ava’s chair.

The kind thing would have been to allow the poor woman to go home and sleep, but Quaid resisted the temptation to let her go. He needed to get her version of events while it was still fresh in her mind.

‘Look, have some of this tea,’ he said in a kindly, fatherly voice, picking up the cup and wrapping the woman’s shaking hand around the handle. ‘It’ll make you feel better.’

‘We don’t drink tea. We never have,’ said Bertram, talking over Quaid’s shoulder.

Quaid couldn’t believe what he was hearing; he almost dropped the cup. Everyone drank tea. It’s what British people did to get them through the horrors – make it, distribute it, drink it. It was downright unpatriotic not to like it.

But Bertram’s intervention seemed to revitalize his wife in a way that nothing else could. She glanced over at him and then, as if making a conscious decision, began to drink the tea. Quaid made a mental note – there was no way these two lovebirds were happily married.

‘I come in the mornings to make my dad his lunch, and then, when I go, I leave him his supper – on a tray,’ said Ava, putting down the cup with a shaking hand. She spoke slowly, and there was a faint lilting cadence in her voice that Quaid couldn’t place at first, but then he realized that it was the remnants of an Irish accent. Which was where she must have got her bright green eyes from as well, he thought to himself. ‘And to begin with, I didn’t come back when the raids started because I thought he’d be sensible and go down in the basement with the neighbours. But then Mrs Graves – the woman you met, she was here a minute ago – she told me he was staying up here, refusing to come down. Like he’d got a death wish or something …’

‘There’s no need to exaggerate, my dear,’ Bertram said primly.

‘Please let the lady answer the questions,’ said Quaid, shooting him a venomous look.

‘He’s obstinate and pig-headed, always thinks he knows best,’ Ava went on. It was as if she were unaware of the interruption, and Quaid noticed her continued use of the present tense in relation to her father, as if some part of her were still in denial that he was dead. ‘I asked him to come and stay with us, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Oh no, he’s got to be here with his stupid books.’

Ava’s resentment was obvious as she gazed up at the overflowing shelves on all sides. It couldn’t have been easy being her father’s daughter, Quaid thought. Not that being married to Dr Bertram Brive looked much fun, either, for that matter.

‘So you started to come over here to see if he was all right?’ asked the inspector, prompting her to continue.

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘A few days ago.’

‘And did he go down to the shelter?’

‘Yes. But I knew that he wouldn’t have done without me being here.’

‘And your husband – has he been over here before in the evenings, like tonight?’

‘No.’

‘Even when there have been air raids?’

Ava shook her head.

‘I fail to see the relevance,’ said Bertram, whose face had turned an even brighter shade of red than before, although whether from anger or anxiety it was difficult to say. He was going to say more, but a cry from his wife silenced him.

‘All he had to do was go downstairs—’ She broke off again, covering her face with her hands as if in a vain effort to recall her words – ‘go downstairs’ – because instead her father had taken a quicker way down, falling through the air like one of Hitler’s bombs, landing with that unforgettable crunching thud at her feet. She shut her eyes, trying to block out the vision of his tangled broken body. But it did no good – it was imprinted on her mind’s eye forever by the shock.

‘I should never have let him go out without me,’ she said.

‘Out?’ repeated Quaid, surprised. It was the first he’d heard about the dead man having gone anywhere that day.

‘Yes, he insisted. It was after we came back from the park. I take him there after lunch most days. He likes to go and look at the ack-ack guns, “inspect the damage” he calls it, and poke his walking stick in people’s vegetable patches. They’ve got the whole west side divided up into allotments now,’ she added irrelevantly. ‘Digging for victory. I remember him making a joke about that, turning over some measly potato with his foot. Laughing in that way he has with his lip curling up, and now, now—’ She broke off again, looking absently over towards the fireplace, where a walnut-cased clock ticked away on the oak mantelpiece, impervious to the death of its owner two floors below.

The same glassy-eyed look had come over Ava’s eyes that had been there earlier, and this time Quaid glanced impatiently over at his assistant standing in the corner. Trave hadn’t said anything since they’d got upstairs, but now, as if accepting a cue, he went over and squatted beside the grieving woman.

‘Look, I know this is hard,’ he said, putting his hand over hers for a moment as he looked into her eyes, speaking slowly, quietly. ‘People dying – it’s not supposed to be this way, is it? Bombing makes no sense. But this is different. Somebody killed your father for a reason, pushed him over the balustrade out there. We can’t pretend it didn’t happen. You saw it. And maybe you can help us find out who did that to him. If you tell us everything you know. Can you do that, Ava? Can you?’

Ava looked down at the long-limbed young man in his ill-fitting suit and nodded. She was surprised by him, touched at the way he’d chosen instinctively to make himself lower than her, treating her as if she were in command of the situation. And he made her feel calm for some reason. Mrs Graves had told her that he was the one who’d caught her from falling when they were downstairs, and then there was the way his pale blue eyes looked into hers with a natural sympathy, as if he instinctively understood how she felt.

Not like Bertram. Behind Trave’s shoulder, Ava’s husband shifted his weight from one foot to the other, making no effort to conceal his mounting irritation.

‘I’m not happy with this, Inspector,’ he said, turning to Quaid. ‘Your boy’s badgering my wife. Can’t you see what she’s been through? In my professional opinion—’

‘I don’t need your professional opinion,’ said Quaid, cutting him off. ‘If I want it, I’ll ask for it. Carry on, Mrs Brive,’ he added, turning to Ava. ‘Tell us what happened today.’

‘He was fine this morning,’ she said, keeping her eyes on the younger policeman as she spoke even though she was answering the older one’s question. ‘I got here about half past one and made him his lunch just like I always do. He read The Times and did the crossword, and then, like I said, we went over to the park, and he was in a good mood – a really good mood for him. It was when we came back here that the trouble started.’

‘Trouble?’ repeated Quaid.

‘Yes, there was a note …’

‘What kind of note?’

‘Just a folded-over piece of paper. I didn’t get to read it. Someone had called while we were out and left it with Mrs Graves downstairs. She brought it to him up here, and he read it a couple of times. He seemed agitated, walking up and down, and then he went over to his desk and he was looking at papers, even a couple of books, acting like I wasn’t there, like he usually does. I went into the kitchen and I’d just started to wash up the lunch things when he called me, shouted, rather, telling me I had to phone him a taxi, that he needed one straight away—’

‘Why didn’t he call one himself?’ asked Quaid, interrupting.

‘Because he could ask me to do it,’ said Ava. Again Quaid picked up on the anger in the woman’s voice and thought, not for the first time, how strange it was the way the newly bereaved could feel so many contradictory emotions all at the same time. Part of Ava was obviously still struggling with her constant irritation at the unreasonable demands of her living father, while another part of her was trying to absorb the reality of his death; trying to come to terms with the impossible experience of seeing him smashed to pieces on the floor at her feet.

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