The Company of Strangers
Robert Wilson

For Janeandin memory of my father

1922–1980

Author’s Note

Extract from ‘An Arundel Tomb’ from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! For the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Author’s Note

Epigraph

Book One Outlaws of the Mind

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

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Book Two The Secret Ministry of Frost

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Book Three The Walking Shadows

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise for The Company of Strangers

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Book One Outlaws of the Mind

Chapter 1

30th October 1940, London. Night 54 of the Blitz.

She was running, running as she had done before in her dreams, except this wasn’t a dream, even though with the flares dropping, as slowly as petals, and the yellow light, and the dark streets with the orange glow on the skyline it could easily be a dream, a horror dream.

She flinched at a tremendous explosion in a nearby street, staggered at the shudder in the ground, nearly ploughed into the paving stones face-first, legs kicking back wildly. She pushed up off a low wall at the front of a house and her feet were slapping against the pavement again. She ran faster as she saw the Auxiliary Fire Service outside the house. New hoses uncoiled from the engines and joined the spaghetti in the black glass street as they trained more water on the back of the house, which was no longer a house but half a house. The whole of one side blown away and the grand piano with two legs over the startling new precipice, its lid hanging open like a tongue lapping up the flames, which set off a terrible twanging as the fire plucked at the piano strings and snapped them, peeled them back.

She stood there with her hands over her ears to the unbearable sound of destruction. Her eyes and mouth were wide open as the back of the house collapsed into the neighbour’s garden, leaving the kitchen in full view and oddly intact. A hissing noise of escaping gas from the ruptured mains suddenly thumped into flame and burst across the street, pushing the firemen back. There was a figure lying in the kitchen, not moving and with clothes alight.

She jumped up on to the low wall at the side of the house and screamed into the blistering heat of the burning house.

‘Daddy! Daddy!’

A fireman grabbed her and hauled her roughly back, almost threw her at a warden, who tried to hold her but she wrenched herself free just as the piano, the piano that she’d been playing to him only two hours before, fell from its precipice with a loud crack and a discord that reached into her chest and squeezed her lungs. Now she saw all the sheet music going up in flames and he was lying on the floor at the foot of the wall of fire, which the AFS where hosing down so that it hissed and sputtered, but didn’t go out.

Another crack and this time the roof dropped, spitting whole window frames into the street like broken teeth, and crashed down on to the floor below, shedding great sledges of tiles which shattered on the pavement. There was a momentary pause, then the roof smashed through to the next floor and, like a giant candle snuff, suffocated the flaming music, crushed his supine body and dropped him amongst shafts of flaming timber into the bay window of the ground floor.

The warden lunged at her again, got a hold of her collar, and she wheeled round and bit his wrist so that he flinched back his hand. She’s a wild one, this black-haired, gypsy-looking girl, thought the warden, but he had to get her away, poor thing, get her away from her daddy burning in the bay window in front of her. He went for her again, got her in a bear hug, her legs flailing, lashing out and then she went limp as a rag doll, bent in the middle over his arms.

A woman, white-faced, ran up to the warden and said that the girl was her daughter, which confused him because he’d seen the man who she’d been calling Daddy and the warden knew that the man’s wife was dead in the kitchen.

‘She’s been calling for her daddy in the house there.’

‘That’s not her daddy,’ said the woman. ‘Her father’s dead. That’s her piano teacher.’

‘What’s she doing out here, anyway?’ he asked, getting official. ‘The All Clear hasn’t sounded…’

The girl wrestled away from her mother and ran down the side of another house and into the garden, lit by the still falling flares. She ran across the yellow lawn and threw herself into the bushes growing against the back wall. Her mother followed. Bombs were still falling, the ack-ack was still pumping away on the Common, the searchlights swarming over the black velvet sky. Her mother was screaming at her, roaring over the noise, screeching with fright, savagely begging her to come out.

The girl sat with her hands over her ears, eyes closed. Only two hours before he’d held her hands, told her she was as nervous as a cat, stroked each of her fingers, squared her shoulders to that same piano and she’d played for him, played like a dream for him, so that he’d told her afterwards he’d closed his eyes and left London and the war and found a green meadow in the sunshine, somewhere where the trees were flashing with red and gold in the autumn wind.

The first wave of bombers moved off. The ack-ack fell silent. All that was left in the cold autumn air was the roar of the conflagration and the hiss of water on burning wood. She crawled out of the bushes. Her mother grabbed her by the shoulders, shook her backwards and forwards. The girl was calm, but her face was set, her teeth gritted and her eyes black and unseeing.

‘You’re a stupid girl, Andrea. A stupid, stupid girl,’ said her mother.

The girl took in her mother’s white raving face in the dark and yellow garden, her face hard and determined.

‘I hate Germans,’ she said. ‘And I hate you.’

Her mother slapped her hard across the face.

Chapter 2

7th February 1942, Wolfsschanze, Hitler’s East Front HQ, Rastenburg, East Prussia.

The aircraft, a Heinkel III bomber refitted for passenger use, began its descent over the vast blackness of the pine forests of East Prussia. The low moan of its two engines brought with it the bleakness of the vast, snow-covered Russian steppes, the emptiness of the gutted, burnt-out railway station at Dnepropetrovsk and the endlessness of the frozen Pripet marshes between Kiev and the start of Polish pine.

The plane landed and taxied in a miasma of snow thrashed up into the darkness by its propellers. A coated figure, huddled against the icy blast, slipped into this chill world from a neat hole which had opened up in the belly of the aircraft. A car from the Führer’s personal pool waited just off the wing tip and the chauffeur, collar up to his hat, held the door open. Fifteen minutes later the guard at the gate of Restricted Area I admitted Albert Speer, architect, into the military compound of Hitler’s Rastenburg headquarters for the first time. Speer went straight to the officers’ canteen and ate a large meal with appropriate wolfishness, which would have reminded his fellow diners, if they’d had room for empathy, just how difficult it was to keep the latest far-flung corner of the Third Reich supplied.

Two captains, Karl Voss and Hans Weber, intelligence officers in their mid twenties attached to the Army Chief of Staff, General Zeitzler, had been standing outside stamping their feet and smoking cigarettes when Speer arrived.

‘Who’s that?’ asked Voss.

‘I knew you’d ask that.’

‘You don’t think that’s a normal question when somebody you don’t know walks past?’

‘You forgot the word “important”. When somebody important walks past.’

‘Piss off, Weber.’

‘I’ve seen you.’

‘What?’

‘Let’s get back,’ said Weber, chucking his cigarette.

‘No, tell me.’

‘Your problem, Voss…is that you’re too intelligent. Heidelberg University and your fucking physics degree, you’re…’

‘Too intelligent to be an intelligence officer?’

‘You’re new, you don’t understand yet – the thing about intelligence is that it doesn’t do to be too inquisitive.’

‘Where does this rubbish come from, Weber?’ asked Voss, incredulous.

‘I tell you one thing,’ he said, ‘I know what powerful people see when they look at you and me…and it’s not two individuals with lives and families and all the rest.’

‘What then?’

‘They see opportunities,’ he said, and barged Voss through the door.

They went back to work in the situation room, up the silent corridor towards Hitler’s apartment where the Führer was still entertaining the Armaments Minister, Fritz Todt, whose arrival had terminated the situation meeting of that afternoon. As the young captains resumed their seats the two older men were still just about talking. Food had been served to them earlier by an orderly grown accustomed to glacial silences, split only by the odd cracking of a wooden chair.

Voss and Weber worked, or rather Voss did. Weber’s head started toppling again almost as soon as they sat down in the airless room. Only the snap of his neck muscles jerked him awake and prevented him from flattening his face on the desk. Voss told him to go to bed. Weber’s eyes ground in their sockets.

‘Go on,’ said Voss. ‘This is nearly finished anyway.’

‘Those,’ said Weber, standing and pointing at four boxes of files, ‘have to go out on the first flight in the morning…to Berlin.’

‘You mean unless the Moscow flight is open by then.’

Weber grunted. ‘You’ll learn,’ he said. ‘Back to the monk’s cell for me. It’s going to be hard tomorrow. He’s always bad after Todt’s given his report.’

‘Why’s that?’ asked Voss, still keen, still capable of doing an all-nighter for the East Front.

‘The first place you lose a battle is up here,’ said Weber, leaning over Voss and tapping his head, ‘and Todt lost that one last June. He’s a good man and he’s a genius and that’s a bad combination for this war. Good night.’

Voss knew Fritz Todt, as everyone knew him, as the inventor of the autobahnen, but he was much more than that now. Not only was he running all arms and munitions production for the Third Reich, but he and his Organization Todt were the builders of the West Wall and the U-boat pens that would protect Europe from invasion. He was also in charge of building and repairing all roads and railways in the Occupied Territories. Todt was the greatest construction engineer in German history and this was the greatest programme of all time.

Voss surveyed the situation map. The front line stretched from Lake Onega, 500 kilometres south-west of Archangel on the White Sea, through Leningrad, the Moscow suburbs and down to Taganrog on the Sea of Azov, off the Black Sea. From Arctic to Caucasus was under German control.

‘And he thinks we’re losing this war?’ asked Voss out loud, shaking his head.

He worked for another hour or more and then went out for another cigarette and to wake himself up in the freezing air. On his way back he saw the good-looking man who’d arrived earlier, sitting on his own in the dining room and then, coming towards him outside the situation room, another figure, shuffling along with sagging shoulders as if they were under some penitential weight. The face was grey, soft and slack, falling away from its substructure. The eyes saw nothing beyond the immense calculation in his mind. Voss moved to avoid the man but at the last moment they seemed to veer into each other and their shoulders clashed. The man’s face was reanimated in shock and Voss recognized him now.

‘Forgive me, Herr Reichsminister.’

‘No, no, my fault,’ said Todt. ‘I wasn’t looking.’

‘Thinking too hard, sir,’ said Voss, dog-like.

Todt studied the slim, blond young man more carefully now.

‘Working late, Captain?’

‘Just finishing the orders, sir,’ said Voss, nodding at the open door of the situation room.

Todt lingered on the threshold of the room, his eyes roved the map and the flags of the armies and their divisions.

‘Nearly there, sir,’ said Voss.

‘Russia,’ said Todt, his eye swivelling on to Voss, ‘is a very large place.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Voss, after a long pause in which nothing more was forthcoming.

‘Maps of Russia should be room-sized,’ said Todt. ‘So that army generals have to walk to move their divisions, with the knowledge that each step they take is 500 kilometres of snow and ice, or rain and mud, and in the few months of the year when it’s neither of those things they should know that the steppe is shimmering in silent, brutal, dust-choked heat.’

Voss shut up, mesmerized by the thunderous roll of the older man’s voice. Todt backed out of the room. Voss wanted him to stay, to continue, but no questions came to mind other than the banal.

‘Are you on the first flight out tomorrow, sir?’

‘Yes, why?’

‘To Berlin?’

‘We’ll stop in Berlin on the way to Munich.’

‘These files need to go to Berlin.’

‘In that case they’d better be on my plane before seven thirty. Talk to the flight captain. Good night, er…Captain…’

‘Captain Voss, sir.’

‘Have you seen Speer, Captain Voss? I was told he’d arrived.’

‘There’s someone in the dining room. He arrived earlier.’

Todt moved away, shuffling again down the corridor. Before he turned left to the dining room he turned on Voss.

‘Don’t imagine for one second, Captain, that the Russians are doing nothing about…about your situation in there,’ he said, and disappeared.

No wonder the Führer was bad after Todt’s visits.

Another half-hour passed and Voss went to fetch coffee from the dining room. Speer and Todt sat on either side of a single glass of wine, which the older man sipped. The structural differences between the two men were marked. The one slumped with definite subsidence under the right foundation, the nineteenth century, Wilhelmine façade lined and cracked, the paint and masonry crumbling to scurf. The other cantilevered over at an impossible angle, his lines clean and defined, the modern Bauhaus front, dark, handsome, uncluttered and bright.

‘Captain Voss,’ said Todt, turning to him, ‘did you speak to the flight captain yet?’

‘No, sir.’

‘When you do, tell him that Herr Speer will be joining me. He came in from Dnepropetrovsk tonight.’

Voss drank his coffee and on the way back to his work he had the strange and uncomfortable sense of silent machinery at work, out of his sight and beyond his knowledge. He turned into the situation room, just as SS Colonel Bruno Weiss came out of Hitler’s apartment. Weiss was head of the SS company at Rastenburg in charge of Hitler’s security and the only thing Voss knew about him was that he didn’t like anybody except Hitler, and he had a particular dislike of intelligence officers.

‘What are you doing, Captain?’ he shouted down the corridor.

‘Just finishing these orders, sir.’

Weiss bore down on him and inspected the situation room, the scar running from his left eye to below his cheekbone livid against his pale skin.

‘What are these?’

‘Army Chief of Staff files, sir, to go back to Berlin on the Reichsminister Todt’s flight this morning. I’m about to inform the flight captain.’

Weiss nodded at the phone. Voss called the flight captain and booked Speer on to the plane as well. Weiss wrote things down in his notebook and went back to Hitler’s apartment. Minutes later he was back.

‘These files…when are they going?’ he asked.

‘They have to be at the airstrip by 07.30 hours this morning, sir.’

‘Answer the question fully, Captain.’

‘I will be taking them personally, leaving here at 07.15 hours, sir.’

‘Good,’ said Weiss. ‘I have some security files to go back to the Reichsführer’s office. They will be delivered here. I will inform the flight captain.’

Weiss left. An adjutant strode past. Minutes later he came back followed by Speer.

Voss, like Hitler (not an unconscious imitation), enjoyed working at night. He worked with the door open to hear the voices, see the men, to gain a sense of the magnetic flow – those drawn to and favoured by the Führer and those he rejected and disgraced. In the short time he’d been in Rastenburg, Voss had seen men striding down the centre of that corridor, medals, pips and epaulets flashing, to return fifteen minutes later hugging the wall, shunned even by the carpet strip in the middle. There were others, of course, who came back evangelized, something in their eyes higher than the stars, greater than love. These were the men who had ‘gone’, left the decrepit shell of their own bodies to walk an Elysium with other demigods, their ambitions fulfilled, their greatness confirmed.

Weber saw it differently, and said it with a cruder voice: ‘These guys, they’re all married with wives and families of lovely children and yet they go up there and take it up the arse every night. It’s a disgrace.’ Weber had accused Voss of it, too. Of sitting with his tongue out in the corridor, waiting for a tummy rub. It needled Voss only because it was true. In his first week, as Voss had laid maps down in a situation meeting while Zeitzler said his piece, the Führer had suddenly gripped Voss by the bicep and the touch had shot something fast and pure into his veins like morphine, strong, addictive but weakening, too.

The Wolfsschanze stilled into the early hours. Corridor traffic halted. Voss filed the orders and prepared the maps and positions for the morning conference, taking his time because he liked the feeling of working while the world was asleep. At 3.00 a.m. there was a flurry of activity from Hitler’s apartment and moments later Speer appeared at the door looking like a matinée idol. He asked Voss if he wouldn’t mind cancelling him from the Reichsminister’s flight in the morning, he was too tired after his earlier flight and his meeting with the Führer. Voss assured him of his efficiency in the matter and Speer stepped into the room. He stood over the map and brushed a hand in a great swathe over Russia, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands and France. He became conscious of Voss studying him and put his hand in his pocket. He nodded, said good night and reminded him to tell the flight captain. He didn’t want to be disturbed in the morning.

Voss made the call and went to bed for three hours. He got up just before 7.00 a.m., called a car and he and the chauffeur loaded the box files, along with a black metal trunk which had appeared in the situation room addressed in white paint through a stencil to the SS Personalhauptamt, 98–9 Wilmersdorferstrasse, Berlin-Charlottenburg. They drove to the airstrip where, to their surprise, they found Todt’s Heinkel charging down the runway. Voss could already feel the lash of Weiss’s fury. He went to the flight captain who told him they were just testing the plane under orders from Hitler’s adjutant. The plane circled twice and relanded. A sergeant with a manifest cleared the files on to the aircraft and they loaded them. Voss and the chauffeur drank a coffee in the canteen and ate bread and eggs. At 7.50 a.m. the Reichsminister’s car pulled alongside and Fritz Todt boarded the Heinkel alone.

The plane immediately taxied to the end of the runway, paused, throttled up and set off down the snow-scabbed airstrip towards the black trees and low grey cloud of another grainy military morning. It should still have been dark at this hour but the Führer insisted on keeping Berlin time at his Rastenburg headquarters.

As he left the canteen Voss was arrested by the rare sight of SS Colonel Weiss outside the Restricted Area I compound. He was in the control tower, looking green through the glass, his thick arms folded across his chest, his pale face lit by some unseen light below him.

The continuous roar of the plane’s engines changed tone and the wings tipped as it banked over the pine forest. This was unusual, too. The plane should have continued west, piercing the soft gut of the grey cloud to break through into the brilliant, uncomplicated sunshine above, instead of which it had rolled north and appeared to be coming back in to re-land.

The pilot straightened the wings of the plane and settled the aircraft into its descent. It was just reaching the beginning of the runway, no more than a hundred feet off the ground, when a spear of flame shot up from the fuselage behind the cockpit. Voss, already gaping, flinched as the roar of the explosion reached him. His driver ducked as the plane tilted and a wing clipped the ground, shearing away from the body of the plane, which thundered into the snow-covered ground and exploded with hideous violence, twice, a fraction of a second between each full fuel tank igniting.

Black smoke belched, funnelling out into the grey sky. Only the tailplane had survived the impact. Two fire engines stormed pointlessly out of their hangar, slewing on the icy ground. SS Colonel Weiss dropped his arms, jutted his chest, stretched his shoulders back and left the observation platform.

Voss grew into the iron-hard ground, his feet drawing up the numbing cold, transporting it through to the bones and organs of his body.

Chapter 3

8th February 1942, Wolfsschanze HQ, Rastenburg, East Prussia.

Voss was driven back to Restricted Area I in silence, the dead hand of a full inquiry already on his shoulder. He pieced together the ugly fragments of information in his brain and felt his mind recoil in disgust. He began to see, for the first time, how a man could shoot himself. Until then it had been a mystery to him, on hearing of someone’s suicide, how a man could bring himself to such a disastrous conclusion. He smoked hard until he was quite faint and prickling. He staggered up the path to the main building and realized on entering that the horrific news had preceded him by some minutes.

The dining room was full, but rather than being morbid with the news of the death of the most important and capable engineer in the German Reich, it was rife with the rumour of a successor. The monochrome mass of braid and band, oak leaf cluster and iron cross seethed like the bullring of the Bourse. Only one man was silent, head up, hair swept back, dark eyes shining under the thick straight eyebrows – Albert Speer. Voss blinked, sure as a camera shutter, and captured the image – a man on the brink of his destiny.

Voss took a coffee, fed himself into the knots of conversation and soon realized that anybody with anything to do with construction and transportation was in the room.

‘Speer will take the Atlantic Wall, the U-boat pens and the Occupied West. It’s already been talked about.’

‘What about the Ukraine? The Ukraine is more important now.’

‘You didn’t forget that we declared war on the United States before Christmas.’

‘No, I didn’t, and nor did Todt.’

Silence. Heads swung to Speer’s table. People were putting things to him and he was managing vague replies to their questions, but he wasn’t listening. He was coming to terms with a price. Appalled at the animal troughing around him, unwilling to accept anything that they attempted to confer on him, he was trying to justify to himself not only his presence there (for the first time and on such a tragic occasion), but something else whose nature he couldn’t quite grasp. He seemed to be coping with a strong, unpleasant smell which had reached his nostrils only.

‘He won’t give it all to him…the Führer wouldn’t do that. No experience.’

‘He’ll split Armaments and Munitions away from Construction.’

‘You wait…the Reichsmarschall will be here any moment. Then we’ll see…’

‘Where is Goering?’

‘At Romiten. Hunting.’

‘That’s only a hundred kilometres away…has anybody called him?’

‘Goering will take Armaments and Munitions into his Commission for the Four Year Plan. He’s in charge of the war economy. It fits.’

‘The only thing that fits, if you ask me, is that one’s face over there.’

‘What’s Speer doing here, anyway?’

‘He was stuck in Dnepropetrovsk. He flew in with Captain Nein last night.’

‘He fetched him?’ asked a voice, aghast.

‘No, no Captain Nein flew in there with SS General Sepp Dietrich and offered Speer a lift.’

‘Did Speer and the general…talk?’

There was silence at that probability and Voss moved across to some air force officers who were picking over the details of the crash.

‘He must have pulled the self-destruct handle.’

‘Who? The pilot?’

‘No, Todt…by accident.’

‘Did it have a self-destruct mechanism on board?’

‘No, it was a new plane. It hadn’t been fitted.’

‘What was he doing in a two-engined plane in the first place? The Führer has expressly forbidden…’

‘That’s what Todt was told yesterday. He was furious. The Führer waived it.’

‘That’s why they took the plane up for a practice spin.’

‘And you’re sure there was no self-destruct mechanism?’

‘Positive.’

‘There were three explosions…that’s what the flight sergeant said.’

‘Three?’

‘There must have been a self-destruct…’

‘There was none!’

Voss went to the decoding room to pick up any positional changes in the field. He took the decodes to the situation room. The corridor was silent. Hitler rarely moved before eleven o’clock, but on a day such as this? Surely. The apartment door stayed closed, the SS guards silent.

Weber was already working on supply positions in the Ukraine. He didn’t look up. Voss leafed the decodes.

‘SS Colonel Weiss was looking for you,’ said Weber.

‘Did he say what he wanted?’ asked Voss, bowels loosening.

‘Something about those boxes of files…’

‘Have you heard, Weber?’

‘About the plane crash, you mean?’

‘The Reichsminister Todt is dead.’

‘Were those files on board?’

‘Yes,’ said Voss, stunned by Weber’s insouciance.

‘Shit. Zeitzler’s going to be mad.’

‘Weber,’ said Voss, amazed, ‘Todt is dead.’

‘Todt ist tot. Todt ist tot. What can I say, other than it will brighten the Führer’s day not to have that doom merchant on his shoulder.’

‘For God’s sake, Weber.’

‘Look, Voss, Todt never agreed with the Russian campaign and when the Führer declared war on America, well…poof!’

‘Poof!?’

‘Todt was a very cautious man, unlike our Führer who is…what shall we say…?’

‘Bold.’

‘Yes, bold. That’s a good, strong adjective. Let’s leave it at that.’

‘What are you saying, Weber?’

‘Keep your head down and your ears out of that corridor. Do your job, don’t blabber, this is all that matters,’ he said, and drew a circle around himself. ‘You haven’t been here long enough to know what these people are capable of.’

‘They’re already talking about Speer. Goering taking over…’

‘I don’t want to know, Voss,’ said Weber, closing his hands over his ears. ‘And nor do you. You’ve got to start thinking about those files, how they got on that plane and why SS Colonel Weiss wants to talk to you, because if he wanted to talk to me after such a morning I’d have been in the toilet an hour ago. Start thinking about yourself, Voss, because here in Rastenburg you’re the only one who will.’

The mention of the toilet sent Voss out of the room at a brisk pace. He sat in one of the stalls, face in hands, and passed a loose, hot motion which, rather than emptying him, left his guts writhing.

Colonel Weiss caught up with him while he washed his hands. They talked to each other via the mirror, Weiss’s face disturbingly wrong in reflection.

‘Those files…’ started Weiss.

‘General Zeitzler’s files, you mean?’

‘Did you check them, Captain Voss…before you took them into your care?’

‘Took them into my care?’ Voss asked himself, chest wall shuddering at the impact of this implication.

‘Did you, Captain? Did you?’ persisted Weiss.

‘They weren’t mine to check, and even if they were I wouldn’t know why I would have to check a large amount of documentation irrelevant to me.’

‘So who filled those boxes?’

‘I didn’t see them filled.’

‘You didn’t?’ roared Weiss, throwing Voss into free-fall fear. ‘You put boxes on to a Reichsminister’s plane without…’

‘Maybe you should ask Captain Weber,’ said Voss, desperate, lashing out at anything to save himself.

‘Captain Weber,’ said Weiss, writing him down in his book of the damned.

‘I was doing him a favour putting the files on the plane in the first place, as I was for…’He coughed at a garrotting look from Weiss and changed tack. ‘Is this part of the official inquiry, sir?’

‘This is the preliminary investigation prior to the official inquiry which will be conducted by the air force, as it is technically an air force matter,’ said Weiss, and then more threatening, ‘but as you know, I’m in charge of all security matters in and around this compound…and I notice things, Captain Voss.’

Weiss had turned away from the mirror to look at him for real. Voss stepped back and his boot heel hit the wall but he managed to look Weiss straight in his terrible eye, hoping that his own stress, from the G-force steepness of the learning curve, was not distorting his face.

‘I have a copy of the manifest,’ said Weiss. ‘Perhaps you should read it through now.’

Weiss handed him the paper. It started with a list of personnel on the flight. Speer’s name had been added and then crossed out. Underneath was the cargo. Voss ran his eyes down the list, which was short and consisted of four boxes of files for the Army Chief of Staff, delivery Berlin, and several pieces of luggage going with Todt to Munich. There was no mention of a metal trunk for delivery to the SS Personalhauptamt in Berlin-Charlottenburg.

Voss had control of his panic now, the horizon firm in his head as he came up to the moment, or was it the line? Yes, it was something to be crossed, a line with no grey area, without no man’s land, the moral line, which once stepped over joined him to Weiss’s morality. He also knew that to mention the nonexistent trunk would be a lifechanging decision, one that could change his life into death. It nearly amused him, that and the strange clarity of those turbulent thoughts.

‘Now you understand,’ said Weiss, ‘why it’s necessary for me to do a little probing on the question of these files.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Voss. ‘You’re absolutely right, sir.’

‘Good, we have an understanding then?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Voss. ‘One thing…wasn’t there…?’

Weiss stiffened in his boots, the scar dragging down his eye seemed to pulsate.

‘…wasn’t there a self-destruct mechanism on the plane?’ finished Voss.

Weiss’s good eye widened and he nodded, confirming that and their new understanding into him. He left the toilets. Voss reverted to the sink and splashed his hot face over and over with cold water, not able to clean exactly, but able to revise and rework, justify and accommodate the necessity for the snap decision he’d been forced to make. He dried his face and looked at himself in the mirror and had one of his odd perceptions, that we never know what we look like to others, we only know our reflection and that now he knew he would be different and it might be all right because perhaps he would just look like one of them.

He went outside for a smoke and to pace out his new understanding, as if he was wearing different boots. Senior officers came and went with only one topic of conversation on their hungry lips and two names, Speer and Todt. But by the end of that cigarette Voss had made his first intelligence discovery in the field, because the officers still came and went and they still had those two names on their lips but this time they were shaking their heads and the words ‘self-destruct mechanism’ and the ‘incidence of failure’ had threaded their way amongst the names.

It comes out of here and goes in there, thought Voss. The inestimable power of the spoken word. The power of misinformation in a thunderstruck community.

Voss went back to work. No Weber. He replotted the latest movements from the decodes. Weber returned, took a seat, braced himself against the desk. Voss kept his head down, looked at Weber through the bone of his cranium.

‘At least I know you can listen now,’ said Weber. ‘You’ve passed the first Rastenburg test with an A and you don’t have to worry about me and those files. I didn’t fill them. I didn’t seal them. I didn’t even sign for them. Learn something from that, Voss. They’re saying now that somebody must have accidentally pulled the self-destruct handle in the plane. We’re all in the clear. Are you hearing me, Voss?’

‘I’m hearing you.’

Voss did hear him, but only through the reel of film in his head which was full of the black metal trunk with its white stencilled address. His hands lifting the trunk and taking it into the plane where he jams it between the seats so it won’t slide about – two of Zeitzler’s boxes of files on top and two on the seats by the trunk. Todt comes on to the plane, preceded by his luggage, impatient to be away from the scene of his disastrous politicking and up into the light of the sunshine and the clear air where everything is comprehensible. He straps himself into his seat, not next to the pilot but in the fuselage where he might be able to do some work. The hold darkens as the door closes. The pilot taxis to the end of the runway. The plane steadies itself, the wings rock and stabilize. The propellers thrash the icy air. The pressure kicks in behind the old man’s back and they surge down the runway flashing white, grey and black at the snow and ice patches on the strip. Then Todt sees the black trunk and some low animal instinct kicks in the paranoia and a terrible realization. He roars at the pilot to stop the plane but the pilot cannot stop. The velocity is already too great. He has to take off. The wheels defy gravity and Todt has a moment of weightlessness, a premonition of the lightness of being to follow. They bank in the steep curve, the trunk tight against the wall of the fuselage. Todt staring into the black Polish pine trees, or are they East Prussian pine trees now, Germanic Empire pine trees? Todt’s weight has come back to him and he’s in a panic now. He’s seen the trunk before. He’s seen it in his head and he knows what’s in it. He knew what would be in it the night before and he woke up with the knowledge this morning and it was further confirmed by the flight captain who told him that Speer would not be on the plane. What was Speer doing here anyway? Todt and Speer. Two men who knew their destiny and had no hesitation in obeying. The plane’s wings are still perpendicular to the ground. The black forest is still flashing past Todt’s care-worn eyes. The wings flatten. They’re going to make it after all. The pilot is hunched and roaring at the control tower. The altimeter winds its way down through three hundred to two hundred to one hundred and fifty and Todt is praying and the pilot is praying too, although he doesn’t know why and that is how they enter the biggest noise, the whitest light. Two men praying. One who didn’t like war enough and the other unlucky to be flying him.

And then silence. Not even the wind whistling through the shattered fuselage. Pure peace for the man who didn’t like war enough.

‘Everything all right in there, Voss?’

Voss looked up, dazed, Weber a blur in his eye.

‘There was something else…’

‘There was nothing else, Voss. Nothing that anybody wants to know. Nothing that I want to know. Those words stay in your head. In here we talk about military positions. All right?’

Voss went through the decodes. The black metal trunk slid into a dark recess, the murky horror corner of his mind, and soon the white stencilled address was barely readable.

At 1.00 p.m. Hitler sent an adjutant to bring in his first caller of the day. The adjutant returned with Speer in his wake. Fifteen minutes later the Reichsmarschall Goering appeared in the corridor smiling and resplendent in light blue, his smooth jowls, shiny perhaps from the patina of last night’s morphine sweat, juddered with each step. Half an hour later it was out. Speer had been appointed Todt’s successor in all his capacities and the Reichsmarschall Goering’s humour was reclassified as unstable.

Men from the Air Ministry sifted the wreckage for days and found nothing but seared metal and black dust. The black metal trunk with its white stencilling had ceased to exist. SS Colonel Weiss, under Hitler’s instructions, conducted an internal investigation into the airport personnel and ground crew. Voss was required to supply his initials to the manifest alongside the four box files – posterity for his perjury.

The ice began to thaw, tanks whose tracks had been welded to the steppes broke free and the war rolled on, even without the greatest construction engineer in German history.

Chapter 4

18th November 1942, Wolfsschanze HQ, Rastenburg, East Prussia.

Voss wanted to remove his eyeballs and swill them in saline, see the grit sink to the bottom. The bunker was silent with the Führer away at the Berghof in Obersalzberg. Voss’s work had been finished hours ago but he remained at the situation table, chin resting on his white, piled fists, staring into the map where a rough cratering existed at a point on the Volga river. Stalingrad had been poked and prodded, jabbed and reamed until it was a dirty, paperflaked hole. As Voss looked deeper into it he began to see the blackened, snow-covered city, the cadaverous apartment buildings, the gnarled and twisted beams of shelled factories, the poxed façades, the scree-filled streets littered with stiffened, deep-frozen bodies and, alongside it, growing to midnight black in the white landscape and becoming viscous with the cold, the Volga – the line of communication from the south to the north of Russia.

He was sitting in this position long after he could have gone to bed, contemplating the grey front line that was now stretched to the thinness of piano wire since the German Sixth Army had ballooned it over to Stalingrad, because of his brother. Julius Voss was a major in the 113th Infantry Division of the Sixth Army. This division was not one of those fighting like a pack of street dogs in the ruins of Stalingrad but was dug into the snow somewhere on the treeless steppe east of the point where the river Don had decided to turn south to the Sea of Azov.

Julius Voss was his father’s son. A brilliant sportsman, he’d collected a silver in the epée at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. He rode a horse as if it was a part of him. On his first day’s hunting at the age of sixteen he’d tracked a deer for a whole day and shot it in the eye from 300 metres. He was a perfect and outstanding army officer, loved by his men and admired by his superiors. He was intelligent and, despite his life of brilliance, there wasn’t a shred of arrogance in the man. Karl thought about him a lot. He loved him. Julius had been his protector at school, sport not being one of Karl’s strengths and, having too many brains for everybody’s comfort, life could have been hell without a brother three years older and a golden boy, too. So Karl was taking his turn to watch over his brother.

The German position was not as strong as it might first appear. The Russians had trussed up ten divisions in and around the city in bloody and brutal street-to-street fighting since September and now, unless they could hammer home the death blow in the next month, it looked as if the rest of the German army would be condemned to spend another winter out in the open. More men would die and there would be little chance of the Sixth Army being reinforced until the spring. The situation was doomed to a four-month deep-frozen stalemate.

The door to the situation room crashed open, cannoned off the wall and slammed shut. It opened more slowly to reveal Weber standing in the frame.

‘That’s better,’ he said, trying to put some lick on to his lips, clearly drunk, steaming drunk, his forehead shining, his eyes bright, his skin blubber. ‘I knew I’d find you in here, boring the maps again.’

Weber swaggered into the room.

‘You can’t bore maps, Weber.’

‘You can. Look at them, poor bastards. Insensate with tedium. You don’t talk to them, Voss, that’s your problem.’

‘Piss off, Weber. You’re ten schnapps down the hole and not fit to talk to.’

‘And you? What are you doing? Is the brilliant, creative military mind of Captain Karl Voss going to solve the Stalingrad problem…tonight, or do we have to wait another twenty-four hours?’

‘I was just thinking…’

‘Don’t tell me. Let me guess. You were just thinking about what the Reichsminister Fritz Todt said to you before his plane crash…’

‘And why shouldn’t I?’

‘Because it’s morbid in a man of your age. You should be thinking about…about women…’ said Weber and, placing both hands on the table, he began some vigorous, graphic and improbable thrusting.

Voss looked away. Weber collapsed across the table. When Voss looked back, Weber’s face was right there, giving him the wife’s-eye view, head on the pillow, husband sweaty, lurid, tight, pink skin and wet-eyed.

‘You shouldn’t feel guilty just because Todt spoke to you,’ said Weber, licking his lips again, eyes closed now as if imagining a kiss coming to him.

‘That’s not why I feel guilty. I feel…’

‘Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know,’ said Weber, sitting up and shunning him with a hand. ‘Bore your maps, Voss. Go on. But I’ll tell you this,’ he came in close again, devil breath, ‘Paulus will take Stalingrad before Christmas and we’ll be in Persia by next spring, rolling in sherbet. The oil will be ours, and the grain. How long will Moscow last?’

‘The Romanians on the River Don front have reported huge troop concentrations in their north-west sector,’ said Voss, flat and heavy.

Weber sat up, dangled his legs and gave Voss the gab, gab, gab with his hand.

‘The fucking Romanians,’ he said. ‘Goulash for brains.’

‘That’s the Hungarians.’

‘What?’

‘Who eat goulash.’

‘What do Romanians eat?’

Voss shrugged.

‘Problem,’ said Weber. ‘We don’t know what the Romanian brain consists of, but if you ask me it’s yoghurt…no…it’s the whey from the top of the yoghurt.’

‘You’re boring me, Weber.’

‘Let’s have a drink.’

‘You’re stinking already.’

‘Come on,’ he said, grabbing Voss around the shoulders and barging him out of the door, their cheeks touching as they went through, horrid lovers.

Weber slashed the lights out. They put on their coats and went back to their quarters. Weber crashed about in his own room while Voss moved the chess game, which he was playing against his father by post, away from the bed. Weber appeared, triumphant, with schnapps. He crashed down on to the bed, hoicked a magazine out from under his buttocks.

‘What’s this?’

‘Die Naturwissenschafen.’

‘Fucking physics,’ said Weber, hurling the magazine. ‘You want to get into something…’

‘…physical, yes, I know, Weber. Give me the schnapps, I need to be braindead to continue.’

Weber handed over the bottle, bolstered his wet head with Voss’s pillow, whacking it into position with his stone cranium. Voss sipped the clear liquid which lit a trail down to his colon.

‘What’s physics going to do for me?’ burped Weber.

‘Win the war.’

‘Go on.’

‘Give us endless reusable energy.’

‘And?’

‘Explain life.’

‘I don’t want life explained, I just want to live it on my own terms.’

‘Nobody gets to do that, Weber…not even the Führer.’

‘Tell me how it’s going to win us the war.’

‘Perhaps you haven’t heard talk of the atom bomb.’

‘I heard Heisenberg nearly blew himself up with one in June.’

‘So you’ve heard of Heisenberg.’

‘Naturally,’ said Weber, brushing imaginary lint from his fly. ‘And the chemist Otto Hahn. You think I don’t stick my ear out in that corridor every now and again.’

‘I won’t bore you then.’

‘So what’s it all about? Atom bombs.’

‘Forget it, Weber.’

‘It goes in easier when I’m drunk.’

‘All right. You take some fissionable material…’

‘I’m lost.’

‘Remember Goethe.’

‘Goethe! Fuck. What did he say about “fissionable material”?’

‘He said: “What is the path? There is no path. On into the unknown.’”

‘Gloomy bastard,’ said Weber, snatching back the bottle. ‘Start again.’

‘There’s a certain type of material, a very rare material, which when brought together in a critical mass – shut up and listen – could create as many as eighty generations of fission – shut up, Weber, just let me get it out – before the phenomenal heat would blow the mass apart. That means…’

‘I’m glad you said that.’

‘…that, if you can imagine this, one fission releases two hundred million electron bolts of energy and that would double eighty times before the chain reaction would stop. What do you think that would produce, Weber?’

‘The biggest blast known to mankind. Is that what you’re saying?’

‘A whole city wiped out with one bomb.’

‘You said this fissionable material’s pretty rare.’

‘It comes from uranium.’

‘Aha!’ said Weber, sitting up. ‘Joachimstahl.’

‘What about it?’

‘Biggest uranium mine in Europe. And it’s in Czechoslo-vakia…which is ours,’ said Weber, cuddling the schnapps bottle.

‘There’s an even bigger one in the Belgian Congo.’

‘Aha! Which is ours, too, because…’

‘Yes, Weber, we know, but it’s still a very complicated chemical process to get the fissionable material out of the uranium. The stuff they’d found was called U 235 but they could only get traces and it decayed almost instantly. Then somebody called Weizsäcker began to think about what happened to all the excess neutrons released by the fission of U 235, some would be captured by U 238, which would then become U 239, which would then decay into a new element which he called Ekarhenium.’

‘Voss.’

‘Yes?’

‘You’re boring the shit out of me. Drink some more of this and try saying it all backwards. It might, you know, make more sense.’

‘I told you it was complicated,’ said Voss. ‘Anyway, they’ve found a way to make the “fissionable material” comparatively easily in an atomic pile, which uses graphite and some stuff called heavy water, which we used to be able to get from the Norsk Hydro plant in Norway – until the British sabotaged it.’

‘I remember something about that,’ said Weber. ‘So the British know we’re building this bomb.’

‘They know we have the science – it’s in all these magazines you’re throwing around my room – but do we have the capability? It’s a huge industrial undertaking, building an atomic pile is just the first step.’

‘How much of this Ekarhe—shit do you need to make a bomb?’

‘A kilo, maybe two.’

‘That’s not very much…to blow up an entire city.’

‘Blow up isn’t really the word, Weber,’ said Voss. ‘Vaporize is more like it.’

‘Give me that schnapps.’

‘It’s going to take years to build this thing.’

‘We’ll be rolling in sherbet by then.’

Weber finished the bottle and went to bed. Voss stayed up and read his mother’s part of the letter, which contained detailed descriptions of social occasions and was strangely comforting. His father, General Heinrich Voss, sitting out the war in enforced retirement, having made the mistake of voicing his opinions about the Commissar Order – where any Jews or partisans encountered in the Russian campaign were to be handed over to the SS for ‘treatment’ – would add an irascible note at the bottom and a chess move. This time his move was followed by the word ‘check’ and the line: ‘You don’t know it yet but I’ve got you on the run.’ Voss shook his head. He didn’t even have to think. He dragged the chair with the chessboard to him, made his father’s move and then his own, which he scribbled on to a note and put in an envelope to post in the morning.

At 10.00 a.m. 19th November the first conference of the day got underway with a discussion over an enlarged map of Stalingrad and its immediate vicinity. No attempt had been made to alter the map to show the true state of the city. All it indicated was neatly packaged sectors, red for Russian, grey for German, like peacetime postal districts.

At 10.30 a.m. the teleprinters shunted into life and the phones started ringing. General Zeitzler was called from the room, to return minutes later with the announcement that a Russian offensive had started at 05.20 a.m. He showed how a Russian tank force had broken through the Romanian sectors and was now heading south-east towards the river Don, and that activity had broken out along the whole front to hold German forces in their positions. A panzer corps had been sent to engage the advancing Russians. Everything was in hand. Voss made the necessary alterations to the map. They went back to the Stalingrad situation leaving Zeitzler fingering the small flag of the panzer corps and rasping a hand over his sandpaper chin.

By lunchtime the next day news reached Rastenburg of a second large Russian offensive starting south of Stalingrad, with such huge numbers of tanks and infantry it was inconceivable that they’d had no intelligence.

The Stalingrad map was rolled and stacked.

It was clear that full encirclement of the Sixth Army was the Russian intention. Voss felt sick and empty as Zeitzler dragged him and his inexhaustible memory around wherever he went. Voss stood over Zeitzler’s telephone conversations to the Führer, vomiting information which the Army Chief of Staff would use in a desperate bid to impress on Hitler the dire circumstances and the need to allow the Sixth Army to retreat. The Führer paced the great hall of the Berghof swearing at Slavs and hammering tables into submission.

Sunday, 22nd November was Totensonntag, the day of remembrance for the dead, and after a subdued service they heard that the two Russian forces were about to meet and that encirclement was a foregone conclusion. The Führer left the Berghof for Leipzig to fly on to Rastenburg.

As Voss began the monumental task of drafting orders for the phased withdrawal of the Sixth Army the Führer stopped his train en route to Leipzig and called Zeitzler expressly to forbid any retreat.

Zeitzler sent Voss back to his room and, to take his mind off the disaster, Voss pored over the chess game. In doing so he suddenly saw his error, or rather, he perceived his father’s strength of position. He searched for the letter he’d scribbled days ago and found that one of the orderlies had posted it for him. He took out another sheet of paper and wrote one word on it. Resigned.

The Führer arrived in Rastenburg on 23rd November and after the initial shock of the Russian success nerves steadied. In the days and weeks that followed the disaster, Voss witnessed the transformation of the Rastenburg HQ. It ceased to be a military installation and became instead the stuff of legend. Men would arrive, tear off their cloaks and capes and perform miracles in front of their glassyeyed leader. Vast and powerfully armoured divisions, miraculously supplied, would appear and drive up from the south to relieve the stricken army. When, as in some bizarre game of three-card monte, this force failed to materialize, another maestro would whisk away a silken sheet and show fleets of aircraft supplying and resupplying until, brought back up to full strength, the Sixth Army would take Stalingrad, break the Russian encirclement and assume their position in Germanic legend. Everything became possible. Rastenburg became a circus where the greatest illusionists of the time came to perform.

At this stage, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, a sickness settled itself in Voss’s gut. The news of men dying of starvation and cold, and the back to back shows from prestidigitators from all the forces, sealed off his stomach. His blue eyes sunk back into his head, his uniform hung off his ribs. He sipped water or schnapps and smoked upwards of fifty cigarettes a day.

In mid December an attempt was made to relieve the army from the south. The Russians stalled the attack and proceeded to smash the Italian army and decimate the air transport fleet. Still the Führer refused permission for the Sixth Army to retreat; his eyes seared the situation maps demanding deliverance.

Voss listened, first to the quality of the silence in the situation conferences, which were black, crushing and hideous, and then to the boot-licking apostles of the High Command who would pledge the impossible for one look of love from the Führer. He asked for a transfer to the front. Zeitzler refused him and, perhaps after seeing the bones appearing through the skin of Voss’s face, went on Stalingrad rations himself. They became known as ‘the cadavers’.

There had been no improvement in the German Sixth Army’s position by the beginning of January 1943 and Voss, pale with his facial skin drawn tightly over his skull, found himself on his bed in his room smoking and sipping some of Weber’s violent schnapps. He had two letters in front of him on the seat of a chair where he used to keep the chess games he played with his father. There’d been no chess since his resignation back in November. The two letters, both short, one from his father and the other from his brother, had presented him with a problem whose only solution involved calling on SS Colonel Bruno Weiss.

The Kessel, Stalingrad

1st January 1943

Dear Karl,

You know better than anyone our situation out here. I can only thank you for trying to send us the sausages and ham for Christmas but it was a lost cause. They probably never got off the airstrip. Real meat has not been seen for weeks. Krebs and Stahlschuss came up with some shreds of dried mule so that we managed to have some kind of celebration for the New Year. It wasn’t as good as Christmas which, whatever happens to me now, will have been one of the greatest military experiences of my short career. It’s difficult to believe in this unbearable environment that men can find (I’ve thought about this a long time to try to find the right word) such sweetness in themselves. They gave each other things which were their last and most important possessions and if they had nothing they made something from bits of metal or carved bone retrieved from the steppe. It was remarkable to find the human spirit so undaunted. Glaser has tried to have me taken to the hospital again (I’m yellow, and the legs are still badly swollen so that I can’t move about) but I’ve refused. I never want to see that vision of hell again. I won’t tell you. You must have heard by now.

I listen to the men and there’s been a change in their mood now. Before the New Year they would say that the Führer will rescue them. Now, if they still think that, they don’t say it. We are resigned to our fate and you might be surprised to hear that we are cheerful because, and I know this will sound absurd in the circumstances, we are free.

I think of you and am always your brother,

Julius

Karl read this letter over and over. His brother had never been one for the examination of the soul and his discovery of the nobility of man in these desperate circumstances was a revelation. Karl was sickened by the thought of playing on Weiss’s side of the fence to get what he wanted.

Berlin

2nd January 1943

Dear Karl,

We have had another letter from Julius. His are not censored like some of the junior officers’. Your mother cannot read them even though he makes light of the terrible things around him. He seems so inured to the desperate circumstances that he doesn’t see that what he considers normal is, to people in Berlin, unimaginable horror. I do not ask this of you lightly. I only ask this of you because I saw some of this pointlessness in the Great War. It goes against every military instinct I have but I would like you to do everything you can to get your brother out of that place. I know it is forbidden. I know it is impossible but I must ask this of you on behalf of your mother and for myself.

Your father

Voss lay back on the bed, his boots up on the metal bar at his feet, the two letters on his chest resting against his protruding ribs. He lit another cigarette from the one he’d been smoking. He knew that if anything happened to Julius it could potentially destroy his family. Since his father had been ‘retired’, he’d invested all his hopes and aspirations in his first-born son. He thought it possible that his father might be able to bear Julius’s death in glorious victory but not, definitely not, in miserable defeat.

Voss swung his feet off the bed and slapped a sheet of paper on to the chair. He would have preferred to ask this favour of General Zeitzler but knew that he could not possibly grant him the request. SS Colonel Weiss was the only man with whom he had any leverage, if that was a word he could use when it came to the SS.

He began writing in his horrible, cramped scrawl, handwriting that had developed because his brain always worked faster than his fingers. He balled his first attempt and tried again. He screwed that one up, too. He didn’t know what he wanted for his brother. He wanted to save him, of course, but on what terms? Julius, his state of mind heightened to rare acuity, would not be easily duped.

Rastenburg

5th January 1943

Dear Julius,

The officer who will give you this letter will be able to get you out of your predicament, fly you out of the Kessel and eventually into hospital back in Berlin. You have a stark and terrible decision to make. If you stay, our mother and, you know this to be true, more especially our father will be heartbroken. You, his eldest son, have always been his lodestone, the one to whom he is naturally drawn, from whom he derives his energy and now, since his retirement, in who he has invested all his hope. He would be a broken man without you in his life.

If you leave, your men will not despise you but you will despise yourself. You will bear the guilt of the survivor, the guilt of the chosen one. This is possibly, and only you can answer this question, reparable damage. Whatever happens in our father’s mind will not be.

I cannot believe I am having to deliver the burden of this choice to you in your desperate circumstances. In earlier attempts I tried to dress it up nicely, a temptation for Julius, but it refused to be pretty. It is an ugly choice. For my part, all I can say is that, whatever you decide, you are always my brother and I have never felt that there’s any better man living.

Karl

Voss buttoned his tunic, put on his coat and went out under the icicle fringes of his hut into the frozen air. His boots rang on the hard, snow-packed ground. He entered Restricted Area I and went straight to the Security Command post from where he knew SS Colonel Weiss would be running his brutal régime. The other soldiers looked at him as he entered. Nobody came willingly into the Security Command post. Nobody ever wanted to talk to SS Colonel Weiss. He was shown straight in. Weiss sat behind his desk in a state of livid surprise, his white skin even whiter against the deep black of his uniform, his crimson stepped scar from his eye to cheek redder. Voss’s nerve ricocheted around his stomach looking for a way out.

‘What can I do for you, Captain Voss?’

‘A personal matter, sir.’

‘Personal?’ Weiss asked himself; he didn’t normally deal with the personal.

‘I believe we reached a very special understanding between each other last February and that is why I have come to you with this personal matter.’

‘Sit,’ said Weiss, as if he was a dog. ‘You look ill, Captain.’

‘Lost my appetite, sir,’ said Voss, lowering himself into a chair on shaky thighs. ‘You know…the situation with the Sixth Army…is traumatic for everybody.’

‘The Führer will resolve the problem. We will win the day, Captain. You will see,’ said Weiss, giving him a wary look, already at work on the subtext of the words.

‘My brother is in the Kessel, sir. He is extremely sick.’

‘Haven’t his men taken him to the hospital for treatment?’

‘They have, but his condition did not respond to the treatment they have available in the field hospital there. He asked to be taken back to his division. I believe his condition is only treatable outside the Kessel.’

Weiss said nothing. The fingers he ran over his scarred cheek had well-cared for nails, glossy, packed with protein but tinged blue from underneath.

‘Where are you quartered, Captain?’ asked Weiss after a long pause.

It caught him off guard. He wasn’t sure where he was quartered any more. Numbers tinkered in his brain.

‘Area III, C4,’ he said.

‘Ah yes, you’re next to Captain Weber,’ said Weiss, so quickly that it was clear that his question hadn’t been necessary.

The chair back cut into Voss’s newly exposed ribs. You didn’t build up any credit in Weiss’s world, you always had to pay.

‘Captain Weber is not a careful individual, is he, Captain Voss?’

‘In what respect, sir?’

‘Drunken, loose-tongued, curious.’

‘Curious?’

‘Inquisitive,’ said Weiss. ‘And I notice you don’t disagree with my first two observations.’

‘Forgive me for saying so, sir, but in my opinion Weber is the least inquisitive man I know, very concentrated on his task,’ said Voss. ‘And as for drinking…who doesn’t?’

‘Loose-tongued?’ asked Weiss.

‘Who’s there to be loose-tongued with?’

‘Have you been with Captain Weber on any of his trips to town?’

Voss blinked. He didn’t know anything about Weber’s trips to town.

Weiss played the edge of his desk one-handed, a tremolo finished with a rapped flourish.

‘He has a very sensitive position right in the heart of the matter,’ said Weiss. ‘What do you two talk about when you’re drinking together?’

Voss shouldn’t have been shocked, but he was, at Weiss’s apparent omniscience. A squirt of adrenalin slithered through his veins, panic tightened his neck glands.

‘Nothing of importance.’

‘Tell me.’

‘He’s asked me to explain things to him.’

‘Like what? Chess?’

‘He hates chess.’

‘Then what?’

‘Physics. He knew I went to Heidelberg before I was called up.’

‘Physics?’ repeated Weiss, eyes glazing.

Voss thought he sensed a nonchalance that made him think that this was perhaps dangerous ground, mine-sown.

‘The evenings are long here in Rastenburg,’ said Voss to cover himself. ‘He teases me. He says I should be thinking of things more physical. You know, women.’

‘Women,’ said Weiss, laughing with so little mirth it became something else.

‘He’s more frustrated than he is inquisitive,’ said Voss, aware that Weiss wasn’t listening any more.

‘So you would like to get your brother out of the Kessel,’ said Weiss, opting for an alarming change of direction which left Voss thinking he’d said things he hadn’t. ‘Yes, in view of our earlier understanding I think that could be arranged. Do you have his details?’

Voss handed over his letter, wondering if the tiny morsel about Weber he’d offered was as good as a whole carcass to Weiss’s paranoia.

‘Rest assured,’ said Weiss, ‘we will get him out. I look forward to continuing our special understanding, Captain Voss.’

Voss heard nothing more from Weiss and he didn’t put himself in the man’s way. He wrote a note to his father saying that he’d put the process of getting Julius away from Stalingrad in motion, he was waiting for news and it might take a little time because of the shambolic state inside the Kessel. He avoided Weber and began to play against himself at chess without, curiously, ever being able to win.

A week later there was a conference in the situation room with all the senior officers in the Wolfsschanze present. It was a meeting that would change Karl Voss. A captain had flown in from the front and Voss had heard that he had been primed to deliver a speech on the real situation on the ground. Voss slipped into the meeting in time to hear the captain deliver his vision of horror. Lice-ridden men living off water and shreds of horse meat, others jaundiced with their limbs swollen to twice the size, hundreds of men a day dying of starvation in the brutal cold, the wounded at the airstrip left out in the open, their blood congealed to ice, the dead stacked on the impenetrable ground. The Führer took it, shoulders rounded, lids weighed down.

And then the moment.

The captain moved on to a complete rundown of the decimated fighting strength of every unit within the Kessel and without. Hitler nodded. Slowly he turned to the map and squeezed his chin. As the Führer’s slightly shaking hand moved out from his side the captain faltered. Hitler stood a flag up which had fallen over and began to talk about an SS panzer division, which was three weeks from the action. The captain’s words still came out as he’d no doubt rehearsed again and again, but they had no meaning. It was as if all the conjunctions and prepositions had been stripped out, all the verbs had become their opposites, all nouns incomprehensible.

Silence, as the captain’s boot squeak retreated. Hitler surveyed all his officers, his eyes beseeching, the terrible violence of red on the map below him flooding his face. Field Marshal Keitel, face trembling with emotion, stepped forward with a thunderous crack from his boot heel and roared over the deadly silence:

‘Mein Führer, we will hold Stalingrad.’

At breakfast the next day Voss ate properly for the first time in weeks. Afterwards, as he headed to the situation room, he was called to the Security Command post. He sat down in Weiss’s hard chair. Weiss leaned over and gave him an envelope. It contained his own letter to Julius unopened and with it a note.

The Kessel

12th January 1943

Dear Captain Voss,

An officer arrived today saying that he had come to pick up your brother. It is my sad duty to inform you that Major Julius Voss died on 10th January. We are his men and we would like you to know that he left this life with the same courage with which he endured it. His thoughts were never for himself but only ever for the men under his command…

Voss couldn’t read on. He put the note and letter back in their envelope, saluted SS Colonel Weiss and went back to the main building where he found the toilets and emptied his first solid breakfast in weeks into the bowl.

The news that afternoon, of the final assault on the abandoned Sixth Army, reached Voss from a strange distance, like words penetrating a sick child’s mind. Did it happen or not?

There was nothing to be done and he finished work early. The sense of doom in the situation room was unbearable. The generals crowded the maps as if coffin-side at a vigil. He went back to his quarters and knocked on Weber’s door. A strange person answered it. Voss asked after Weber. The man didn’t know him. He went to the next door, found another captain sitting on his bed smoking.

‘Where’s Weber?’ he asked.

The captain turned his mouth down, shook his head.

‘Security breach or something. He was taken away yesterday. I don’t know, don’t ask. Not in this…climate, anyway. If you know what I mean,’ said the captain, and Voss didn’t move, stared at him so that the man felt the need to say more. ‘Something about…well, it’s only rumour…don’t hold with it myself. You wouldn’t if you knew Weber.’

Voss still said nothing and the captain was sufficiently uncomfortable to get off his chair and come to the door.

‘I know Weber,’ said Voss, with the certainty of someone who was about to be proven wrong.

‘They found him in bed with a butcher’s delivery boy in town.’

Voss went to his room and wrote to his mother and father. It was a letter which left him exhausted, drained of everything so that his arms hung hopeless and unliftable at his sides. He went to bed early and slept, waking twice in the night to find tears on his face. In the morning he was woken up by an orderly and told to report to General Zeitzler’s office.

Zeitzler sat him down and didn’t stand behind his desk but leaned against the front of it. He looked avuncular, not his usual military self. He gave Voss permission to smoke.

‘I have some bad news,’ he said, his fingers pattering his thigh. ‘Your father died last night…’

Voss fixed his eyes on Zeitzler’s left epaulette. The only words to reach him were ‘compassionate leave’. By lunchtime he found himself in the half-dead light, standing away from the edge of the dark pine trees alongside the railway track, a grey sack of clothes on one side and a small brown suitcase on the other. The Berlin train left at 1.00 p.m. and although he was heading into his mother’s grief he could only feel that this was a new beginning and that greater possibilities existed away from this place, this hidden kingdom – the Wolfsschanze.

Chapter 5

17th January 1943, Voss family home, Berlin-Schlachtensee.

‘No, no, they sent somebody to see us,’ said Frau Voss. ‘They sent Colonel Linge, you remember him, an old friend of your father’s, retired, a good man, not too stiff like the rest of them, he has something, a sensitivity, he’s not a man that assumes everybody’s the same as himself, he can differentiate, a rare trait in military circles. Of course, as soon as your father saw him he knew what it was about. But you see…’ She blinked but the tears fattened too quickly and rolled down her cheeks before she could get the clutched, lace-edged handkerchief to her face.

Karl Voss leaned over and took his mother’s free hand, a hand that he remembered differently, not so bony, frail and blue-veined. How fast grief sucks out the marrow – some days off food, three nights without sleep, the mind spiralling its dark gyre, in and out, but always around and around the same terrible, hard point. It was a force more destructive than a ravaging illness where the body’s instinct is to fight. Grief provides all the symptoms but no fight. There’s nothing to fight for. It’s already gone. Stripped of purpose the mind turns on the body and reduces it. He squeezed her hand, trying to inject some of his youth into her, his sense of a future.

‘It was wrong,’ she said, careful not to say ‘he’. ‘He shouldn’t have placed so much hope in your letter. I didn’t to start with, but he infected me with his…Having him around the house all the time, he worked on me until we became these two candles in the window, waiting.’

She blew her nose, took a deep, trembling breath.

‘Still, Colonel Linge came. They went into his study. They talked for quite some time and then your father showed the colonel to the door. He came in here to see me and he was calm. He told me that Julius had died and all the wonderful things that Colonel Linge had said about him. And then he went back to his study and locked himself in. I was worried but not so worried, although now I see what his calmness was. His mind was made up. After some hours sitting alone here I went to bed, knocking on his door on the way. He told me to go up, he’d join me, which he did, hours later, maybe two or three o’clock in the morning. He slept, or maybe he didn’t, at least he lay on his side and didn’t move. He was up before I was awake. In the kitchen he said he was going to see Dr Schulz. I spoke to Dr Schulz afterwards and he did go to see him. He asked him for something to keep him calm and Dr Schulz, he’s very good, he gave him some herbal teas, took his blood pressure, which was high but to be expected. Dr Schulz even asked him, “You’re not thinking of doing anything stupid, are you, General?” and your father replied “What? Me? No, no, why do you think I’m here?” and he left. He drove to the Havel, into Wannsee and out again, parked the car, walked along the waterfront and shot himself.’

No tears this time. She just sat back and breathed evenly, looking at nothing beyond the short horizon of her own thoughts which were: he didn’t do it in his study, nor in the car, always a considerate man. He went out on the cold, hard ground and pointed the gun at the offending organ, his heart, not his head, and fired off two bullets into it. He froze out there. He was set solid by the time he was found, no walkers at this time of year, and short, bitter afternoons. She’d gone a little crazy that night he didn’t come home. She woke up in the morning to find all the gardening tools laid out in the kitchen. What had she been thinking? She came to, her son’s pulse thudding into her.

‘On his desk are the letters he wrote,’ she said. ‘There’s one there for you. Read it and we’ll talk again. And put some coal on the fire. I know it’s valuable but I’m just too cold today…you know how it gets into the marrow some days.’

Karl threw some pieces on the fire, put his hands in there for a second until the heat nipped them. He went to his father’s study, his boots loud on the wooden floor of the corridor the way his father’s were, so that Julius and he could hear them from the top of the house. Louder as he got heavier with the years.

He found the letter and sat in a leather armchair by the window, which still offered dim, late afternoon light.

Berlin-Schlachtensee

14th January 1943

Dear Karl,

This action I have taken is as a result of my unique perception of a series of events in my life. It has nothing to do with you. I know you did everything possible to get Julius out and it was typical of him to make light of the seriousness of his physical condition so that none of us could have known how close to death he was. Your mother, too, is blameless in this. She has given of her strength constantly and in the last two years I have been an even more difficult man to live with than I was before.

I have been overwhelmed by despair, not just because of the sudden termination of my career, but also because of my helplessness in the face of what I fear will be the direst consequences for Germany as a result of our aggression and the extent of our aggression over the past three years.

Don’t misunderstand me. I, as you know, approved of Hitler in those early years. He returned to the nation the belief in ourselves which we had lost in that first terrible war. I encouraged Julius into the Party as well as the army. I, like everybody else, was inspired. But the Commissar Order, which I vehemently opposed, was for a very important reason. Certain things have happened and will continue to happen in Germany and the rest of Europe while the National Socialists are in power. You have heard of these things. They are truly terrible. Too terrible, in so many ways, to believe. My stand against the Commissar Order was an attempt to prevent the army from acquiescing to these other, darker, politically motivated and utterly dishonourable actions. I failed and paid the penalty, a small one compared to the eternal damnation of the German Army for conspiring in these appalling deeds. If we lose this war, and it is possible, given the extent to which we have stretched ourselves over so many fronts, that the defeat of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad is the beginning, then our army officers will face the same retribution as the brutes and thugs in the SS. We have all been tarred by obeying the Commissar Order.

This was the beginning of my despair and my removal from the battlefield compounded it in helplessness. When this abandonment of principle was combined with the leadership’s utter failure to respond to the predicament of a far-flung army I realized that we were lost, that fundamental military logic no longer applied, that more than honour had been handed over with the acquiescence to the Commissar Order. Our generals have been emasculated, we will be run by the Corporal from now on. That this abysmal state of affairs should have resulted in the death of my first-born son was more than I could bear. I am no longer young. The future looks bleak amidst the wasteland of my shattered beliefs. Everything I stood for, believed in and cherished has fallen.

Two more things. At my funeral there will be a man called Major Manfred Giesler. He is an officer with the Abwehr. You will either talk to him if you believe in what I have said in the early part of this letter or you will not. That is your decision.

My body will be cremated and I would like you to scatter my ashes on a grave in the Wannsee church cemetery belonging to Rosemarie Hausser 1888–1905.

I wish you a happy and successful life and hope that you will once again be able to pursue your aptitude in physics in more peaceful times.

Your ever loving father

PS It is absolutely imperative that this letter be destroyed after you have read it. Failure to do so could result in danger for yourself, your mother and Major Giesler. If my predictions as to the course of this war prove to be correct you will see that letters containing such sentiments will carry heavy consequences.

Voss reread the letter and burnt it in the grate, watching the slow, greenish flames consume and blacken the paper. He sat by the window again in a state of shock at this, his first intimate sight of the workings of his father’s mind. He gathered himself for a few moments; the conflicting emotions needed to be reined in before he went to speak to his mother. Anger and grief didn’t seem to be able to sit in the same room for very long.

He went back to his mother who still sat in the same position, the light poorer but her scalp visible under her grey hair, which he’d never seen before.

‘So,’ she said before he had sat down, ‘he told you about the girl.’

‘He told me he wants his ashes cast on her grave.’ His mother nodded, and looked over her shoulder as if she’d heard something outside. The light caught her face, no sadness, only acceptance.

‘She was somebody he knew, an army officer’s daughter. He fell in love with her and she died. I think he knew her for all of one week.’

‘One week?’ said Voss. ‘He told you this?’ ‘He told me about the girl, he was a totally honourable man, your father, incapable even of omission. His sister filled in the details.’ ‘But you’re his wife and…I can’t do this.’ ‘You can, Karl. You will. If it’s his wish, it’s mine too. Just think of it as your father being in love with the idea, or rather an ideal, that was not complicated or tarnished by the grind of everyday life. That is the purest form of love you can find. Perfection,’ she said, shrugging. ‘I can think of no better thing after what your father went through, than for him to rest with his ideal. To him it was a vision of peace that he failed to attain in life.’

The funeral took place three days later. There were few people, most of his father’s friends were at one front or another. Frau Voss invited the few back to her house for some tea. Major Giesler was one who accepted. At the house Karl asked for a private word with him and they went into his father’s study.

Voss began to tell him the contents of his father’s letter. Giesler stopped him, went to the phone, followed the line to the wall and removed the pin from the socket. He sat back down in the leather chair by the window. Voss told him of his willingness to talk. Giesler said nothing. He had his hands clasped and was chewing on a knuckle, one of the few hairless regions of his body. He was very dark and his thick black eyebrows joined over his nose. He had a large, full-lipped, sensual mouth and his cheeks, razored that morning, already needed to be reshaved.

‘I would understand,’ said Voss, ‘if you needed to make some inquiries about me before we talk.’

‘We’ve already made our inquiries,’ said Giesler.

Voss thought for a moment.

‘In Rastenburg?’

‘We know, for instance, how you felt about the…the death of the Reichsminister Todt,’ said Giesler, ‘and your…disappointment with the way in which good soldiers died needlessly at Stalingrad and, of course, you have an impeccable pedigree.’

Voss frowned, replayed some reels in his mind.

‘Weber?’

Giesler opened his hands, reclasped them.

‘Weber disappeared,’ said Voss. ‘What happened to him?’

‘We didn’t know he was a homosexual. There are some things that even the deepest of inquiries will not unearth.’

‘But where is he?’

‘He is in very serious trouble, which he brought on himself,’ said Giesler. ‘He behaved recklessly in a climate where scapegoats were eagerly sought.’

‘He must have been under pressure…’

‘Drinking is one thing.’

‘How do you know I’m not homosexual?’

Giesler looked at him long and hard, that sensual mouth becoming unnerving.

‘Weber,’ he said after some time, as if perhaps that source hadn’t been as reliable as he’d have liked.

‘Well, he should know, although I’m not sure how. Women were not abundant in Rastenburg and those that were available…’ he drifted off, disheartened by the turn the conversation had taken; this dip into the ignoble was not what he’d had in mind. This was supposed to be a courageous act and here they were parting the dirt.

Giesler had his answer. He didn’t need to pursue this discussion further. He gave Voss an address of a villa in Gatow with a meeting time for the next day and stood. They shook hands and Giesler hung on, which at first Voss thought was another sexuality test but, no, it was a sincerity hold, a brotherhood clasp.

‘Weber won’t talk,’ he said. ‘It’s possible he will survive, although he will never get back into Rastenburg. But it is something for you to think about before you come to Gatow tomorrow. It’s not easy to be an enemy of the State – not, I hasten to add, an enemy of the nation, but this State. It is dangerous and lonely work. You will be lying to your colleagues every day for perhaps years. You will have no friends because friends are dangerous. Your work will require a mental fortitude, not intelligence necessarily, but strength and it is something you may feel you do not have. If you do not come to Gatow tomorrow nobody will think any the less of you. We will go our separate ways, praying for Germany.’

Voss slept badly that night in a torment over his part in Weber’s arrest. At four in the morning, the death and debt hour, he found his mind crowded with thoughts of his father and mother, Julius and Weber, and it was then that he had a sudden perception of the power of words, of the business of communication. Once words are said nothing is the same. His father didn’t have to tell his mother about Rosemarie Hausser, but he did. It must have established an unrecoverable distance, instilled a lifelong sense of disappointment in his mother with a short line, some words and a name. In his own crucial conversation with Weiss, which he had not been prepared for, he realized that it was not physics that had alerted him but the words ‘physical’ and ‘women’. It had been a confirmation. It made him think that in talking to people you never know what they know, you never know what they think, and innocuous words can take on huge importance. He stopped writhing in his bed – he hadn’t served up Weber, he’d just handed Weiss the spoons.

He went to Gatow the following afternoon, nervous as if it was a visit to the doctor, who might find a mild symptom the precursor of something deadly. He was met by a housekeeper who took him to a book-lined room at the back of the house. She gave him real coffee and a homemade biscuit. Giesler came in with a large man of military rectitude but who was dressed in a blue double-breasted suit. He was bald with a brown, clipped fringe of hair at the back and sides. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles. Voss was introduced but the man’s name was never given.

They talked about his work at Heidelberg University and recent developments in physics. The man was knowledgeable, not expert, but he understood. The words ‘fissionable material’, ‘critical mass’, ‘chain reaction’ and ‘atomic pile’ were not mysterious concepts.

The conversation switched from physics to the Russians. Voss expressed his fear of them:

‘They have no reason to be forgiving after what we have done to them. We have broken a pact, invaded their country, and brutalized the population. After the defeat we have suffered at Stalingrad it is possible that they will have the confidence to drive us back. If they succeed I believe they will not stop until they reach Berlin. They will punish us.’

‘So you would see it as advantageous that we negotiate a separate peace with the Allies?’

‘Imperative, unless we want to see Germany or a part of Germany in the Soviet Union. Perhaps we can even persuade the Allies that we are not the real enemy in this war and that…’

The man held up his hand.

‘One step at a time,’ said the man firmly. ‘First we will work on your transfer away from Rastenburg. You will need some training, too. The Abwehr headquarters along with the Army High Command has moved south to Zossen and we now live for our sins in a concrete citadel out there called Maibach II. You will spend some months with us. The work you will be doing is very different – gathering information, running agents in the field – it’s not the military intelligence that you know. After that we will send you to Paris and from there we will try to position you in Lisbon.’

‘Lisbon?’

‘It’s the only place in Europe now where we can talk easily with the Allies.’

Voss lived with his mother while he completed his training in Zossen. She looked after him as if he was at school again and it was a comfort for both of them. It was a wrench when he was transferred to France in June.

He spent eight months in the Abwehr’s French headquarters at 82 Avenue Foch in Paris and, furnished with his new perception of the power of words, saw the horrific consequences for others who hadn’t yet come to the same understanding.

French and British men and women were arrested, sent to concentration camps, tortured and executed for what was, more than half the time, a totally imaginary situation. Both the Abwehr and the SD/Gestapo, who operated from next door, were playing what became known as radio games. Voss never worked out whether it was merely Allied stupidity or German infiltration into their intelligence operations at a very high level which enabled these deadly games to be played. Once an Allied radio operator was captured and his codename and signal extracted an Abwehr operator would continue broadcasting to London. Later when there were two security signals required, the Allies would reply simply reminding the operator that he’d forgotten his second signal but to continue. The baffled and angry radio operators soon supplied the second security signal to the Germans. Following these fictitious Abwehr broadcasts more agents and supplies would be flown into some misty French field and a reception from the Occupying force. These new agents’ codenames were then used to build fictitious networks operated by the Abwehr and Gestapo, dispersing vast quantities of misinformation to the Allies. Meetings convened by operational Allied agents were frequently attended by Abwehr men using captured agents’ codenames.

Occasionally Voss would stage arrests in the street to maintain verisimilitude.

Most intelligence activity was mirage and artifice. Very little was real. Intelligence, he discovered, was built on the foundations of the imagination and, in the case of the radio games, a blind belief in the veracity of technology. It was a terrifying concept, as terrifying as if the basic principles of physics or maths were completely wrong and whole academic disciplines had been built on falsehood and thus all discoveries were intrinsically wrong, all achievements bogus.

Voss also learned never to fall in love in this world. Lovers betrayed each other easily. Torture, the Gestapo’s preferred method, was unnecessary. Just the insinuation of a lover’s infidelity to a prisoner was as powerful as any of their appalling applications. The emotional betrayal played such devious and teasing tricks on the mind. Jealousy was inevitable in the loneliness of a cell. The darkness, with only the infected mind for company, created powerful images that at first disheartened and later so enraged and ravaged the prisoners that they would grasp at a new strength and in their vindictiveness bring down not just the lover, but all the connections as well.

This did not mean that Voss was celibate in his time in Paris – that was impossible and there was something to prove to Giesler too – but he kept his distance. A French-woman called Françoise Larache taught him a different and darker lesson about love in the intelligence game.

They met when using the same bar. He would take a coffee in the mornings and find her watching him. He would stop off in the evening for a glass of something and she was often there at a table, smoking her strong cigarettes. They exchanged words and began to share a table, where he would watch her red lips connect with the thick tip of her cigarette, and her fingers pick off the flakes of tobacco from her pointed tongue. One night they went for a meal and back to his apartment where they made love. She was energetic and inventive, doing things on their first night which surprised him.

They became regulars of each other’s company in bed, and as Françoise was quick to demand, out of bed as well. She pushed him to do things which were at first exciting and then became increasingly more reckless. She liked to make love on the balcony with people passing in the street below. She would lean back over the rail, her arms around his neck, and then suddenly let go so that he nearly lost her over the edge. They would have sex in doorways and on landings while people ate their dinner and table-talked. She would even cry out and the talk would stop inside. Voss would have to close his hand over her mouth. The greater the chance of being discovered, the more excited Françoise became.

Then one day in the autumn with the dried leaves rustling over the balcony, her mischievous eye, the one that glinted when she looked up at him from under her eyebrow, became darker, as if he was seeing deeper in and what was there was more sinister, taboo.

It started with a request that he spank her for being a naughty girl. Voss felt stupid with a grown woman over his knees and she had to encourage him to be serious and to be more severe. It didn’t seem to be fun any more. He still lusted after her, but for Françoise the sex was being driven by something else. He became reluctant to play her games, she angry. They had furious arguments, monumental rows with flying objects, which would end in brutal love-making where each thrust into her seemed to be a payment back. He found himself reeling out of his apartment into the docility of occupied Paris, unable to believe what he’d participated in the night before, only knowing that it was powerful, intense and degrading.

Françoise’s goading became worse. There was no fun now. She said terrible, unforgivable things and, although he could see what she was doing, he was a part of it too. There was no stepping back. She was forcing him to slap her, and not just a hysteria-breaking slap, a punishing slap. She wanted to be hit hard. She drove her face at him. The words came out slicing the air, lacerating, stabbing, each one honed to cut deep to the bone. They grappled and wrestled each other to the floor. She sunk her nails into his neck. He wrenched himself free and found his fist cocked back to his shoulder. He swayed, dizzy at what this had come to. Her face was suddenly soft, her eyes dreamy. This was what she wanted. He stood up, straightened his clothes. All lust gone. Her face hardened. He gave her his hand, she took it and he pulled her to her feet. She spat in his face. He pulled her to the door, grabbing her coat and handbag on the way, and threw her out of the apartment.

He made discreet inquiries. She was an informer, a collaborator. She delivered her countrymen, neatly trussed, to the Gestapo. The SD man Voss spoke to tapped the side of his head, shook it.

He saw her once more before he left Paris, walking in a snow-covered street on the arm of a huge, black-coated SS sergeant. Voss hid in a doorway as they went past. She was holding snow to the side of her face.

In mid January 1944 Voss was called to a meeting at the Hotel Lutecia. It was at night and the room in which the meeting was being held was dark. Only a small lamp lit one corner. The man he was meeting sat in front of the light, he had no face, only the silhouette of hair combed back, maybe grey or white. His voice was old. A voice that spoke as if under pressure, as if the chest was tight with phlegm.

‘There are going to be some changes,’ he said. ‘It seems our friend Kaltenbrunner at the Reich’s Main Security Office is going to get his way and bring the Abwehr under the direct control of the SD. God knows, they’ve been trying long enough. It is something we are going to have to live with. We want to be sure that you are in position with the right information for negotiation with the Allies before it happens. I understand you have been following the activities of a French communist intellectual, Olivier Mesnel, here in Paris.’

‘We are in the process of disentangling his network. We haven’t found out yet how his information is reaching Moscow or how his orders come in.’

‘He has now applied for a visa to go to Spain.’

‘He is ultimately heading for Lisbon,’ said Voss. ‘We were lucky enough to intercept the courier sent by the Portuguese communists asking him to go there.’

‘Do you have any idea why he is required in Lisbon?’

‘No, and I don’t think Mesnel does either.’

‘You will take this opportunity to follow him to Lisbon and to install yourself as the military attaché and security officer in the German Legation. When these changes come through, which could be next month, you will find yourself directly answerable to SS Colonel Reinhardt Wolters. He is not one of us, needless to say, but you must make him your friend. Sutherland and Rose are running the Lisbon station of the British Secret Intelligence Service, you will be talking to them directly, procedure is in the brief. There are some documents here which you should look at and memorize before you go and a letter which contains important information on microdot. You will use this information to open negotiations with the British. You must show them that we can be trusted, that our intentions are honourable and that the reverse is true of the Russians.’

‘I’m not sure how the latter will be possible. I understand there is no Soviet legation in Lisbon.’

‘That’s true. Salazar won’t allow them in. No atheists on Catholic Portuguese soil – which reminds me, we must make sure the Portuguese don’t deny him a visa.’

The man seemed to laugh for no particular reason, or perhaps it was a wheeze that became a cough. He lit a cigarette.

‘It is possible that Olivier Mesnel will lead you somewhere. He must be going to Lisbon for a purpose which I don’t think, given his political beliefs, will be to take a ship to the United States.’

‘At the Casablanca Conference it was decided that our surrender would have to be unconditional. We will have to offer something extraordinary for the British and the Americans to even consider breaking with the Russians.’

A long silence. Smoke rising from the chair drifted towards the lamp behind.

‘Believe me, the Americans will be looking for any reason they can to cut themselves away from Stalin at the first opportunity, especially after the Russians have invaded Europe. At the Teheran Conference Stalin said that up to a hundred thousand German officers would have to be executed and he would need four million German slaves – that was his word – to rebuild Russia. This kind of talk is unacceptable to men of humanity such as Churchill and Roosevelt. If we can provide a catalyst…’ he paused, struggled in his chair as if suddenly cramped, ‘…the Führer’s death, I think, would be sufficient.’

Voss shivered even though it was warm in the room. The water he was easing himself into now felt deep and cold.

‘Is that a planned action?’

‘One of many,’ said the man, as tired as if he’d planned them all. Voss wanted to get away from contemplating the enormity of the statement.

‘I’ve lost track of the development of our atomic programme. That could be important to the Allies. They’ve seen that we have the potential…can we put their minds at rest?’

‘It’s all in the documents.’

‘How much time have we got?’

‘We hope to make progress…like all things, in the spring, but by the end of the summer at the latest we must have results. The Russians have retaken Zhitomir and have crossed the Polish border – they’re no more than a thousand kilometres from Berlin. We are being bombed to rubble by the Allies. The city is a ruin, the arms and munitions factories working at barely fifty per cent. The air force can’t reach the new Russian arms factories on the other side of the Urals. The bear gets stronger and the eagle weaker and more short-sighted.’

There didn’t seem to be any need of more questions after that and Voss was gestured towards the table where three fat files awaited him. He sat down and reached for the lamp. A hand landed on his shoulder and squeezed it in the same way that his father’s used to – reassuring, giving strength.

‘You are very important to us,’ said the voice. ‘You understand what is written in these files better than anybody, but we have chosen you for other reasons too. I can only ask you, please, when you are in Lisbon, do not make the same mistake you made with Mademoiselle Larache. This is too important. This is about the survival of a nation.’

The hand released him. The man and his pressurized voice left the room. Voss worked until 6.00 a.m. going through the files on the atomic programme and the V1 and V2 rocket programmes.

On 20th January 1944 Olivier Mesnel was issued with an exit visa to travel to Spain. On the 22nd January Voss boarded the same night train as Mesnel, which left the Gare de Lyon heading south to Lyon and Perpignan, crossing the border at Port Bou and then on to Barcelona and Madrid. Mesnel rarely left his compartment. In Madrid the Frenchman stayed in a cheap pension for two nights and then took another train to Lisbon on the night of 25th January.

They arrived in Santa Apolónia station in Lisbon late the following afternoon. It was raining and Mesnel in his oversized coat and hat walked at funereal pace from the station to the massive square of the Terreiro do Paço, which Voss was surprised to see sandbagged and guarded in a neutral country. He followed the Frenchman through the Baixa and up the Avenida da Liberdade to the Praça Marquês de Pombal where Mesnel, dragging his feet, seemingly weak with hunger, entered a small pensão on the Rua Braancamp. Voss was relieved to take a taxi to the German Legation on the Rua do Pau de Bandeira in Lapa, a smart quarter on the outskirts of the city. SS Colonel Reinhardt Wolters had been expecting him two days earlier but welcomed him all the same.

On 13th February the Chief of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris, was escorted out of the Maibach II complex by officers sent from the Reich’s Main Security Office by Kaltenbrunner. He was taken to the house within the grounds where he packed and was then driven to his own home in Schlachtensee. On 18th February the Abwehr was dissolved and brought under Kaltenbrunner’s direct control. The rain was clattering against the windows of the German Legation in Lapa when Wolters came into Voss’s office to deliver the good news. As the SS man left the room, Voss was overwhelmed by a sense of loneliness, a man out on a limb at the westernmost tip of Europe with only the enemy to talk to.

Chapter 6

10th July 1944, Orlando Road, Clapham, London.

Andrea Aspinall collapsed on her bed in her room with the windows open, just back from another trip to the air-raid shelter – the doodlebugs a menace, flying over at all times of day, not like the good old predictable nights of endless bombing raids in the Blitz. Sometimes she toyed with the idea of not going to the shelter – listen for the low drone of the diesel-powered rocket, wait for its engine to cut out, take pot luck under its silent falling, test her boredom threshold.

She went to sit on the window ledge, her room at the top, old servants’ quarters. She looked over the back garden through the lime trees to Macaulay Road, four houses along, direct hit from a doodlebug, not much left, blackened beams, piled rubble but nobody home at the time. She caught sight of herself, only her head in the bottom corner of the mirror on the dressing table across the room. Long black hair, dark, nearly olive skin, twenty-year-old brown eyes wanting to be older.

She opened a packet of Woodbines, rested the filterless cigarette on her lower lip, let it stick. She struck a match on the outside wall, warm brick. Her hand came into the frame, she turned her face and accepted the light. She flicked her head back, unstuck the cigarette, let out a long stream of smoke and came back to herself in the mirror with her tongue on her top lip – being sophisticated. She shook her head at herself, looked out of the window – still a silly girl playing romantic games in the mirror. Not a spy.

She’d spent most of her life at the Sacred Heart Convent in Devizes where she’d been sent at seven years old when her great aunt had died and there’d been no one to look after her while her mother worked. That was why the piano teacher and his wife, who’d been bombed in their home during the Blitz, had been so important to her, they’d become family, looking after her through school holidays. The piano teacher was her father. She’d never known her own, the one who’d died of cholera before she was born.

They knew about discipline and religion at the Sacred Heart and not much else, but it hadn’t prevented her from getting a place at St Anne’s, Oxford to read maths. She’d done nearly two years of her degree when her tutor invited her to a party at St John’s. At the party a large quantity of drink was served and consumed by dons, undergraduates and other people not directly associated with the university. These people floated around the room and occasionally moored themselves to some young person or other and engaged them in short intense conversations about politics and history. She went to more parties like this and met a man who took a particular interest in her, who was called simply – Rawlinson.

Rawlinson was very tall. He wore a three-piece suit, charcoal grey, a starched collar attached with studs to his shirt and a school tie which, if she’d known more, would have said Wellington and the military. He was in his fifties with all his hair, which was black on top, grey at the sides and combed through with tonic. He had only one leg and his prosthesis was stiff so that when he walked that leg swung in a semi-circle and he had to support himself with a duckhead-topped cane. She felt lucky because, while his conversation was the usual penetrative stuff, he participated with the charm of an uncle who shouldn’t really take a fancy to his niece but couldn’t help it.

‘Tell me something,’ he said. ‘Mathematics. Has anybody ever asked you why mathematics? Interesting.’

Andrea, a little drunk, shrugged. Unprepared for the question, her brain ticked. She spoke with her mind elsewhere.

‘You can get things to work out, I suppose,’ she said, feeling instantly stupid, embarrassed.

‘Not always, I shouldn’t think,’ said Rawlinson, surprising her, taking it seriously, taking her seriously even.

‘No, not always, but when you do it’s…well…there’s a beauty to it, an inconceivable simplicity. As Godfrey Hardy said, “Beauty is the test. There’s no place in this world for ugly mathematics.’”

‘Beauty?’ said Rawlinson, baffled. ‘Not something I remember from maths class. Fiendish is more the word. Show me beauty…beauty that I can understand.’

‘The number six,’ she said, ‘has three divisors – one, two and three – which if added together come to…six. Isn’t that perfect? And, seen in that same light, isn’t Pythagoras’s theorem beautiful too? So simple. The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the other two sides squared. True for all right-angled triangles ever created. What seems terribly complicated can be resolved into equations…formulae which go towards completing the…well, at least part of the puzzle.’

He tapped his cheek with a long finger.

‘The puzzle?’

‘How things work,’ she said, hysteria mounting as the banality took root.

‘And people,’ he said; question or agreement, she wasn’t sure.

‘People?’

‘How do people fit into the equation?’

‘There are infinite possibilities in maths. Every number is a complex number. It can be real or imaginary, and real numbers can be rational or irrational. Rational like integers or fractions, irrational like algebra or transcendental numbers.’

‘Transcendental?’

‘Real, but non-algebraic.’

‘I see.’

‘Like π.’

‘What are you saying, Miss Aspinall?’

‘I’m talking to you in the simplest way possible, at the most basic end of mathematics, and already there are things you don’t fully understand. It’s a secret language. Only very few people know it and can speak it.’

‘That still doesn’t explain how people fit into your world.’

‘I was just showing you that numbers can be complicated in the same way that people can be. And something else…I’m a person, too, with all the normal human needs. I don’t always speak in algorithms.’

‘Numbers are more stable than people, I’d have thought. More predictable.’

‘I haven’t come across an emotional number…yet,’ she said, her hands feeling huge at her sides, flapping like albatross’s wings, ‘which is why, I suppose, it’s possible to get things to work out…every so often.’

‘Are solutions important to you?’

Andrea studied him for a moment, the question carrying interview weight. His eyes didn’t flinch from hers. She lost the match.

‘I do like to solve problems. That’s the reward. But it’s not always possible and working towards something can be just as satisfying,’ she said, not believing it, but thinking it might please him.

After this string of parties her tutor sent her over to Oriel to talk to someone about ‘matters pertaining to the war effort’. He sent her to a doctor who gave her a half-hour medical examination. She didn’t hear anything for a week until she was called back to Oriel and found herself signing the Official Secrets Act, so, it seemed, that they could give her a course in typing and shorthand. She thought she was headed for a code-cracking centre, where she’d heard lots of other maths graduates had been sent, but they gave her some additional training instead. Dead-letter drops, invisible ink, using miniature cameras, following people, talking to people while pretending to be someone else to find out what they knew – role-playing, they called it. The minuscule arts of deception. They also taught her how to fire a gun, ride a motorbike and drive a car.

They sent her home at the beginning of July to wait for an assignment. A week later she was contacted by Rawlinson, who told her he was going to come to tea to meet her mother. It was important to establish normality at home, her mother had to be given something official about what her daughter would be doing but not, of course, the reality.

‘Andrea!’

Her mother shouted up the stairs from the hall. She dabbed the coal of the cigarette out on the wall, put the butt back in the packet.

‘Andrea!’

‘Coming, Mother,’ she said, ripping open the door.

She looked down the stairs to her mother’s moon-white, but not so luminous, face at the curve of the bannisters.

‘Mr Rawlinson’s here,’ she said in a stage whisper.

‘I didn’t hear him arrive.’

‘Well, he’s here,’ she said. ‘Shoes.’

She went barefoot back to the bedroom, put on her mother’s horrible shoes, laced them up. She sniffed the air, still smoky, still behaving like Mother’s little girl. Definitely not a spy.

‘She’s very young, you know…’ She overheard her mother in the drawing room. ‘I mean, she’s nineteen, no twenty, but she doesn’t act it. She went to a convent…’

‘The Sacred Heart in Devizes,’ said Rawlinson. ‘Good school.’

‘And out of London.’

‘Away from the bombing.’

‘It wasn’t the bombing, Mr Rawlinson,’ her mother said, without saying what it had been.

Andrea braced herself for the tedium of her mother behaving properly in front of strangers.

‘Not the bombing…?’ said Rawlinson, feigning mild surprise.

‘The influences,’ said Mrs Aspinall.

Andrea rattled her heels on the tiles to announce herself, to stop her mother talking about ‘goings on’ in the air-raid shelters. She shook hands with Rawlinson.

Her mother’s bra creaked as she poured the tea. What rigging for such a tight little ship, thought Andrea, feeling Rawlinson’s bright, nearly saucy eyes on her neck, which heated up. Teacups rattled, raised and refitted on to saucers.

‘You speak German,’ he said to Andrea.

‘Frisch weht der Wind / Der heimat zu, / Mein Irisch kind / Wo weilest du?’ said Andrea.

‘Don’t show off, dear,’ said her mother.

‘And Portuguese,’ said Andrea.

‘She taught herself, you know,’ said Audrey Aspinall, interrupting. ‘Pass Mr Rawlinson some cake, dear.’

Andrea had been sitting on her hands and now found that the ribbing of her dress was printed on the back of them as she passed the cake. Why did her mother always do this to her?

‘You have secretarial skills,’ said Rawlinson, lifting the cake.

‘She just did a course, didn’t you, dear?’

Andrea didn’t contribute. Her mother’s porcelain face, still beautiful at thirty-eight years old but unyielding, turned hard on her. Andrea hadn’t told her mother anything about what had gone on at Oxford other than what they’d told her to say.

‘It’s my job to find suitable staff for our embassies and high commissions. My department is very small and when we find someone with a foreign language we tend to snap them up. I have a position for your daughter, Mrs Aspinall…abroad.’

‘I’d like to go abroad,’ said Andrea.

‘How would you know?’ said her mother. ‘That’s the thing about young people today, Mr Rawlinson, they think they know everything without having done anything but, of course, they don’t think. They don’t think and they don’t listen.’

‘We’re relying on youth in this war, Mrs Aspinall,’ said Rawlinson, ‘because they don’t know fear. Eighteen-year-olds can do a hundred bombing missions, get shot down, make their way through enemy territory and be up in the air again within a week. The reason they can do that is precisely that they don’t think, you see. The danger’s in the thinking.’

‘I’m not sure about abroad…’ said Mrs Aspinall.

‘Why don’t you come to my office tomorrow,’ said Rawlinson to Andrea. ‘We’ll test your skills. Eleven o’clock suit you?’

‘I don’t know where you’d send her. Not south. She can’t stand the heat.’

This was a lie, worse than a lie because the opposite was the case. Andrea, inside her dark skin, under her starling glossy hair, glared at her mother’s translucency, at the blue blood inching its way under the alabaster skin. Mrs Aspinall had a Victorian’s attitude to sun. It never touched her skin. In summer she wore marble, in winter the snow would pile on her head as on a statue’s in the square.

‘Lisbon, Mrs Aspinall, we have an opening in Lisbon which would suit your daughter’s skills and intelligence.’

‘Lisbon? But there must be something she can do in London.’

Rawlinson got to his feet, hauling his stiff leg up after him, shooting Andrea a conspiratorial look.

They followed him into the hall. Mrs Aspinall fitted him into his light coat, gave him his hat, smoothed the shoulders of his coat. Andrea blinked at that small, intimate action. It shocked her, confused her.

‘You’re going to be hot out there, Mr Rawlinson.’

‘Thank you so much for tea, Mrs Aspinall,’ he said, and tipped his hat before going down to the gate and out into the sun-baked street.

‘Well, you won’t want to go to Lisbon, will you?’ said Mrs Aspinall, closing the door.

‘Why not?’

‘It’s as good as Africa down there…Arabs,’ she added as an afterthought, making it exotic.

‘I suppose it’s because I speak Portuguese,’ said Andrea. ‘Why do you never let me say…’

‘Don’t start on that. I’m not doing battle with you on that score,’ she said, heading back into the living room.

‘Why shouldn’t I talk about my father?’

‘He’s dead, you never knew him,’ she said, throwing her tea dregs into the pot plant, pouring herself another cup. ‘I hardly did, either.’

‘That’s no reason.’

‘It’s just not done, Andrea. That’s all.’

Something wriggled in Andrea’s mind, something irrational like the first half of an equation, some algebra with too many unknowns. She was thinking about her mother smoothing Rawlinson’s shoulders. Intimacy and what brought that intimacy. Rawlinson’s leg. And why dead Portuguese fathers can’t be mentioned.

Talking to her mother was just like algebra. Maths without the numbers. Words which meant something else. A question arrived in Andrea’s head. One prompted by an image. It was a question which couldn’t be asked. She could think it and if she looked at her mother and thought it, she’d shudder, which she did.

‘I don’t know how you can be cold in this heat.’

‘Not cold, Mother. Just a thought.’

In the morning her mother produced one of her suits for Andrea to wear. A dark blue pencil skirt, short jacket, cream blouse, and a hat that perched rather than sat. Her nails were inspected and passed. After breakfast her mother told her to clean her teeth and left for work firing a volley of instructions up the stairs about what to do and, more important, what not to do.

Andrea took a bus to St James’s Park and spent a few minutes on a bench before walking down Queen Anne’s Gate to number 54 Broadway. She went to the second floor, her feet already hurting in the borrowed shoes, and the suit, built for her mother’s slightly smaller frame, was pinching her under the armpits, which were damp in the heat. A woman told her to wait on a hard, leather-seated wooden chair. Sun streamed through the lazy dust motes.

She was shown into Rawlinson’s office. He sat with his leg coming through the footwell to her side of his desk. Tea appeared and two biscuits. The secretary retired.

‘Biscuit?’ he asked.

She took the offered biscuit. The dry half detached itself from the sodden half.

‘So,’ said Rawlinson, pulling himself up straight in his chair, the air clear as after a storm. ‘Nice to have you on board. There’s just one question I have outstanding here. Your father.’

‘My father?’

‘You never include your father’s details on any of your forms.’

‘My mother says it’s not relevant. He died before I was born. He had no influence and nor did his family. I…’

‘How did he die?’

‘They were in India. There was a cholera outbreak. He died, as did my mother’s parents. She came back to England and lived with her aunt. I was born here at St George’s.’

‘In 1924,’ he said. ‘You see, I was interested in the Portuguese business. Why does Miss Aspinall speak Portuguese? And I found out that your father was Portuguese.’

‘My grandparents were missionaries in the south of India. There were a lot of Portuguese down there from their colony, Goa. She met…’

‘Your mother never took his name…’ said Rawlinson, and steadied himself to pronounce Joaquim Reis Leitão.

‘Leitão means “suckling pig”,’ she explained.

‘Does it?’ he said. ‘I see why she never took his name. Not something you’d want to have to explain every day of the week…suckling pig.’

He sipped his tea. Andrea chased a piece of dry biscuit around her mouth.

‘You’ve led a cloistered life,’ said Rawlinson.

‘That’s what my mother says.’

‘The Sacred Heart. Then Oxford. Very sheltered.’

‘I spent time here during the Blitz as well,’ said Andrea. ‘That was a sheltered life, too.’

Rawlinson took some moments to find the joke and grunted, reluctant to be amused.

‘So you’ll be all right in Lisbon,’ said Rawlinson, launching himself out of the chair, cracking his leg a stunning blow on the desk.

‘You’ll be working as a secretary for a Shell Oil executive called Meredith Cardew,’ said Rawlinson, speaking to the sky. ‘Rather a fortuitous vacancy. Last girl married a local. The husband doesn’t like her working. She’s pregnant. There’s been some accommodation arranged for you, which I will not attempt to explain but it is the crucial element of your assignment. How’s your physics?’

‘School Certificate standard.’

‘That’ll have to do. You’ll be doing some translating work. German scientific journals into English for the Americans, so you’ll have your work cut out, what with being Cardew’s secretary and all. Sutherland and Rose are running the Lisbon station. They’ll make contact with you via Cardew. A car will pick you up on Saturday morning and take you to RAF Northolt where you’ll be given your documents for travelling to Lisbon. You’ll be met at the airport by an agent called James – Jim – Wallis who works for an import/export company down at the docks. He will take you to Cardew’s house in Carcavelos, just outside Lisbon. Everything you need to know at this stage is in a file which Miss Bridges will give you and which you will read here and remember.’

He turned his back to the sun. His face, backlit by the window, blackened. He held out his hand.

‘Welcome to the Company,’ he said.

‘The Company?’

‘What we call ourselves to each other.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘You’ll do very well,’ he said.

Miss Bridges sat her in a small room off her office with the file. It wasn’t a long file. The changes that had been wrought in her life were small but significant. She would now be known as Anne Ashworth. Her parents lived on Clapham Northside. Her father, Graham Ashworth, was an accountant, and her mother, Margaret Ashworth, was a housewife. Their lives to date had nearly been too boring to read. She digested the material, closed the file and left.

She crossed St James’s Park and The Mall and walked up St James’s Street to Ryder Street where she knew her mother worked in a government office. She stood on the other side of St James’s to the entrance to Ryder Street and waited. At lunchtime the streets began to fill with people looking for something to eat. Men dived into pubs, women into teahouses. Her mother’s white face appeared in the entrance to 7 Ryder Street and walked down to St James’s. Andrea tracked her from across the street, into the park. Before the lake she took a right and chose a bench with a view of Duck Island and Horse Guards Road.

Rawlinson’s distinctive gait was impossible to miss. He came from the other end of the park and joined her mother on the bench. They sat and looked at the ducks. Rawlinson’s hand rested on the duckhead-topped cane. After some minutes he held her hand; Andrea saw the join just below the two slats of wood at the back of the bench. A roaming dog paused to sniff at their feet and moved on. Her mother turned to look at the side of Rawlinson’s face and spoke something into his ear, only inches away. They stayed there for half an hour and then walked together, but unconnected, towards the bridge across the middle of the lake where they parted.

Andrea killed time in a reference library just off Leicester Square until the late afternoon. Rawlinson was punctual about leaving work. Andrea watched him swing his boom down towards Petty France and into St James’s Park tube station. She followed him to a terraced house in Flood Street in Chelsea. A woman met him at the door, kissed him and took his hat. The door closed and through the lead-glass panes Andrea saw the coat coming off his back. The same coat that her mother had smoothed on to his shoulders the previous afternoon. Rawlinson’s blurred outline appeared in the frame of the sittingroom window and collapsed out of sight into a chair. The woman arrived in the window, looked out through the net curtains directly into Andrea’s stunned face and then up and down the street as if she was expecting someone.

Andrea walked back down to Sloane Square and caught a bus to Clapham Common, her feet in an uproar from the hard leather of her mother’s shoes. She was furious at the years spent watching her mother laying the bricks to the austere edifice of her own hypocrisy. She limped home, dragged her tortured feet up the wooden stairs and collapsed face-down on the bed.

The next morning at breakfast her mother appeared in the doorway tightly bound in a burgundy silk dressing gown. Andrea felt her contemplating six or seven lines of attack before putting the kettle on – the English solution to personal confrontation.

‘I got the job,’ said Andrea.

‘I know.’

‘How?’

‘Mr Rawlinson’s secretary called me at the office,’ she said, ‘which was very considerate, I thought.’

Andrea searched her mother’s back for clues. The scapulae shifted under the silk.

‘Do you like Mr Rawlinson?’ asked Andrea.

‘He seems very pleasant.’

‘Do you think you could like him…more?’

‘More?’ she said, rounding on her daughter. ‘What do you mean by “more”?’

‘You know,’ she said, shrugging.

‘Goodness me, I’ve only met him once. He’s probably married.’

‘That would be a shame, wouldn’t it?’ said Andrea. ‘Anyway, I’ll be out of here by the weekend.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I’ll clear my room out. You could take a lodger.’

‘A lodger,’ said Mrs Aspinall, aghast.

‘Why not? They pay money. You could use a few pounds extra, couldn’t you?’

Mrs Aspinall sat down opposite her daughter, who had a forearm either side of her plate, hands poised on the table top like spiders.

‘What happened to you yesterday afternoon?’

‘Nothing. After Rawlinson, I went to the library.’

‘You’re going away. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. I’m staying here. I’ll be on my own. Don’t you think I’ll be lonely? Have you thought about that?’

‘That depends if you’re alone.’

Her mother blinked. Andrea decided that the line was her parting shot. She looked back from the bottom of the stairs, her mother was still in the same position, the kettle whistling madly in her ear.

Andrea got straight down to packing her few clothes and books. Her mother thundered up the stairs. Half a minute of antagonistic silence opened up as she hovered outside the bedroom door. She moved off. Water ran in the bathroom.

Fifteen minutes later Mrs Aspinall came into Andrea’s empty room with only the case in the middle of the floor. All vestiges of her daughter already gone.

‘You’ve packed,’ she said. ‘I thought you weren’t leaving until Saturday.’

‘I wanted to be organized.’

Her mother’s face was indecipherable, too much going on at once for any emotion to make itself plain.

The complicated world of adults.

Chapter 7

Saturday, 15th July 1944, Lisbon Airport.

Andrea landed in Lisbon at three in the afternoon, the adrenalin from her first flight still live in her veins. The heat slammed into her at the door of the aircraft along with the smell of hot metal, tar and vaporized aviation fuel. She took out the white-rimmed sunglasses her mother had given her to protect her eyes and took her first steps on foreign soil as Anne Ashworth.

The sun slapped down on the wide-open spaces of the airfield. The landscape beyond wavered in the rising heat. The trunks of palm trees snaked up to their frayed heads. The flat ground at their feet shone mirror bright. Nobody was moving out there, not even a bird, in the torrid afternoon.

The new airport, barely eighteen months old, had straight, hard, fascistic lines, its main building dominated by the control tower affright with antennae. Armed police moved around the halls inside looking at everyone, who in turn looked at no one, sank into themselves, tried to disappear. Andrea’s dark face in the white sunglasses stood out and the customs officer selected her with two beckoning fingers and a cigarette trailing smoke.

He watched her with dark, long-lashed eyes as she opened her case, his lips invisible under a heavy moustache. Other passengers passed through with cursory glances over their luggage. The customs officer dismantled her packing, shook out her underwear, leafed through her books. He lit another cigarette, felt around the lining of the case, glancing up at her so that she stared off around the empty hall, bored. His eyes were rarely on the job but more frequently on her hips, or drilling into her bust. She twitched a nervous smile at him. His smile back showed black and brown rotten teeth, lichen-fringed. She flinched. His sad eyes hardened and he left the counter. She repacked the case.

The one man in the arrivals hall left no doubt as to his nationality. Blond hair combed back in straight rails, faint pencil moustache crayoned in, tweed jacket even in this heat, school tie. All that was missing was a lanyard with a pea whistle attached for bringing boys up short of the line.

‘Wallis,’ he said. ‘Jim.’

‘Ashworth,’ she replied. ‘Anne.’

‘Good show,’ he said, taking her case. ‘You were a long time in there.’

‘I was being shown some local colour.’

‘I see,’ he said, not sure what she meant, but still keen whatever. ‘I’m running you out to Cardew’s house in Carcavelos. They did tell you, didn’t they?’

‘You sound as if they might not have done.’

‘Communication’s abysmal in this outfit,’ he said.

He threw her case into the boot of a black Citroën and got in behind the wheel. He offered her a cigarette.

‘Três Vintes, they’re called. Not bad. Not a patch on Woodies though.’

They lit up and Wallis drove at high speed straight into the heart of Lisbon, which at this hour and in the heat was silent. He hung an elbow out of the window, sneaked a look at her legs.

‘First time abroad?’ he asked.

She nodded.

‘What do you think?’

‘I thought it would be…older.’

‘This is all the new building here. Salazar, he’s the chap in charge, he made so much money out of us…and Jerry – you know, what with the wolfram, sardines and the like – he’s building a new city, new motorways, a stadium, all this residential stuff – bairros, they call them here – all brand new. There’s even talk of stringing a bridge across the Tagus. You’ll see, though…when we get into the centre. You’ll see.’

The Citroën’s tyres squealed around a mule-drawn cart with eight people in it. The wooden wheels rattled over the cobbles. Dogs attached to the axle with string trotted in the shade, tongues lolling in the heat. The broad, dark faces of the women stared down without seeing.

‘We’ll take the scenic route,’ said Wallis. ‘The hills of Lisbon.’

Anne, as she now thought of herself permanently, leaned into him as they rounded the Praça de Saldanha, their faces suddenly close together, his with more than professional interest in them, giving her some girlish satisfaction. They shot down the hill into Estefânia, rounded the fountain and crossed high above another street on to Avenida Almirante Reis. Wallis built up speed down the long straight avenue. Overhead cables appeared, the tyres stuttered over the tramlines embedded in the cobbles. The ramparts of the Castelo São Jorge high above them were vague in the heat haze, the dark stone pines crowding a shoulder. They came into an area which looked as if it had suffered recent bomb damage and even the buildings still standing looked decrepit and crumbling, with grasses growing out of the walls and roofs, and the plaster façades scabbed and blistered.

‘This is the Mouraria, which they’re demolishing, cleaning the area up a bit. On the other side of the hill is the Alfama, best place to live in Lisbon when the Moors were here but they moved out in the Middle Ages. Scared of earthquakes. And, you know, that quarter was one of the few places that survived the big one in 1755. I tell you, it’s like a medina in there, not too sanitary – and I should know, I was in Casablanca until last year.’

‘What were you doing there?’

‘Cooking things up in the kasbah.’

They came into a square whose centre was dominated by a massive wrought-iron covered market. Police, mounted and on foot, patrolled the area. The road was scattered with cobblestones torn up and thrown from the now pockmarked pavements. A Manteigaria on the corner had been half destroyed, no glass left in any of the doors and windows, and two women inside, sweeping up debris. The shop’s awning was ripped but still showed the words carnes fumadas.

‘Praça da Figueira. There was a riot here this morning. The Manteigaria was selling chouriços filled with sawdust. The rationing’s bad enough without that, what with Salazar selling everything to Jerry. The locals got angry. The communists sent in a few provocateurs, the Guarda showed up on horseback. Heads got broken. There’s two wars going on here in Lisbon. Us versus Jerry and the Estado Novo versus the Communists.’

‘Estado Novo?’

‘Salazar’s New State. The régime. Not much different to the bastards we’re fighting. Secret police – Gestapo trained – called the PVDE. The city’s infested with bufos – informers. The prisons…well, you don’t want to go to a Portuguese prison. They even used to have a concentration camp out on the Cape Verde Islands. Tarrefal. The frigideira, they called it…the frying pan. This is the Baixa, the business end of town. Completely rebuilt by the Marquês de Pombal after the earthquake. He was another hard man. The Portuguese seem to need them every few hundred years.’

‘Need what?’

‘Bastards.’

They rounded a square with a high column in the centre and went up a slip road off the corner. Wallis accelerated up the steep hill. A metal walkway crossed the street high above the buildings, connected to a lift.

‘Elevador do Carmo, built by Raoul Mesnier. Gets you from the Baixa to the Chiado without breaking a sweat.’

They turned right, first gear up the hill. The difference of it all pouring into Anne. More policemen in khaki, guns in leather holsters. Peaked box caps. Shops with black glass and gold lettering. Jerónimo Martims’ Chá e café. Chocolates. Broad pavements with black and white geometric patterns. Another turn. Another steep hill. Past a tram, groaning and screeching downhill. Dark impassive faces at the windows. Wallis pointed across her. The Baixa opened out below in squares of red-tiled roof. The castle still hazy, but now at the same level as them across the valley.

‘Best view in Lisbon,’ said Wallis. ‘I’ll show you the embassy then I’ll take you out to the seaside.’

They drove around Largo do Rato and the Jardim da Estrela and turned left in front of a massive twin-towered, domed cathedral.

‘Basílica da Estrela,’ said Wallis. ‘Built by Maria I at the end of the eighteenth century. She said she’d build a cathedral if she gave birth to a son, which she did. They started building it and the boy died two years before it was completed. Smallpox. Poor lad. But that’s Lisbon for you.’

‘That’s Lisbon?’

‘A sad place…suits those of melancholic disposition. Are you?’

‘Melancholic? No. And you…Mr Wallis?’

‘Jim. Call me Jim.’

‘You don’t seem to be that way inclined, Jim.’

‘Me? No. No time for it. What’s there to be sad about? It’s only war. Let’s go and see the enemy.’

He cut round the back of the basilica, up a short incline and then down into Lapa. They rolled quietly into a small square where a large mansion stood behind wrought-iron gates and high railings. A swastika flag hung from a flagpole above the door. Two limp phoenix palms stood in the garden. A flame of purple bougainvillea climbed above a window. The blue of the Tagus was visible over the rooftops. For once Wallis didn’t say a word. The car dropped down a short hill, turned left and after a hundred yards Wallis nodded up the hill to where the Union Jack hung from a long pink building halfway up.

‘We’re practically neighbours,’ he said. ‘I won’t drive you up there. There’re always bufos hanging around outside looking for new faces, ready to report anything to the Germans.’

They went down the hill and came out at the Santos docks. Wallis turned right, heading west along the banks of the Tagus and out beyond the mouth of the estuary. The road hugged the coastline, the railway tracks alongside.

At Carcavelos, just by a large, brown, ancient fort they turned away from the sea and went through the centre of town and out the other side where they pulled up in front of a large, sombre house standing on its own behind a high wall. Two mature stone pines in the garden cast dark shadows over the windows. Wallis honked the horn and a gardener appeared from the shrubbery to open the gate.

‘This is Cardew’s house,’ said Wallis, ‘your boss at Shell, but your other bosses will see you first – Sutherland and Rose.’

Wallis lifted out her luggage, rang the door bell, got back in the car and reversed out. A maid came to the door, took her case inside and led her down the hall to a shuttered room where two men sat, one smoking a pipe, the other a cigarette. The maid closed the door. The two men stood. One tall and slim with brown hair swept back, introduced himself as Richard Rose. The other, shorter, with thick, black, undulating hair just said: ‘Sutherland’. Both were in shirtsleeves, the room stuffy even with the french windows half-open on to the lawn.

Sutherland stared at Anne from under dark eyebrows. He had blackberry smudges at the corners of his blue eyes. His skin was white and pasty. He pointed to a chair with the stem of his pipe.

‘Wallis took his time,’ he said.

‘I think he gave me the introductory tour, sir.’

He worked on his pipe for a moment. His lips were oddly bluish, kissing off the pipe stem. He was a still man, no expression around his eyes or mouth and little movement in his body. A lizard, thought Anne.

‘You’re what they call morena,’ said Rose. ‘Dark. Dusky.’

‘As opposed to loira,’ she said. ‘Blonde. Dizzy.’

Rose didn’t like it, too cheeky on her first day perhaps. Sutherland smiled so fast and with such little breadth that all she saw was a brown column on the left side of his front teeth – discoloured from smoking.

‘I didn’t think your ability to speak Portuguese was part of your cover,’ said Sutherland, his voice coming from somewhere down his throat, his lips parting to say the words but not moving.

‘Sorry, sir.’

‘This place…Lisbon,’ he clarified, ‘is…perhaps Wallis told you, a very dangerous city for the careless. You might think that the worst is over, now that we’ve landed in Normandy, but there are still some very critical situations, life and death situations, for men at sea and in the air. The idea of our intelligence operation here is to make those situations safer, not to exacerbate them with thoughtlessness.’

‘Of course, sir,’ said Anne, thinking – pompous.

‘Information is at a premium. There’s an active market on all sides. Nobody is innocent. Everyone is either buying or selling. From maids and waiters to ministers and businessmen. The overall climate is quieter. A lot of the refugees have been shipped out now, so the rumour circuit is tighter and there’s less misinformation. We have won the economic war. Salazar no longer fears a Nazi invasion and he’s closed the wolfram mines. We’re doing our best to make sure that they don’t get their hands on any other useful products. As a result we see things more clearly but, although there are fewer players on the pitch, and less complications, it has become a much more subtle affair because now, Miss Ashworth, we are in the endgame. Do you play chess?’

She nodded, mesmerized by the intensity of his passionless face, her own blood zipping around her body faster now that she was close to the current, the live wire. All her training seemed like so much theory. In less than an hour a new world had been peeled open – not just the place, Lisbon, but also an immediate sense of the power of the clandestine. The privilege of knowing things that nobody else knew. Smoke trailed from the pipe held just off Sutherland’s face, curled through the sparse sunlight coming through the cracks of the shutters and disappeared up to the high ceiling.

‘Part of your mission is a social one. There are no lines drawn here. Who is who? Who plays for whom? There are powerful people, rich people, people who’ve made a great deal of money out of this war, out of us and the Germans. We know who some of them are, but we want to know all of them. Your ability to speak Portuguese, or rather understand it, is important in this respect and, equally, that nobody should know of this facility. The same applies to your German. You will only use that in the office for translating these journals.’

‘What specifically is it from these journals that the Americans are interested in?’

Sutherland beckoned Rose into the conversation, who gave a historical rundown of German nuclear capability from their first successful fission experiments back in 1938 through to Weizsäcker’s discovery of Ekarhenium, the vital new element that could make the bomb. As Rose spoke, Sutherland watched the young woman. He didn’t listen because he didn’t understand any of it and he could see that she was struggling too.

‘On 19th September 1939 Hitler made a speech in Danzig in which he threatened to employ a weapon against which there would be no defence,’ said Rose. ‘The Americans are convinced that he meant an atomic bomb.’

‘You shouldn’t worry about understanding any of this perfectly. There are probably only a handful of scientists in the world who do,’ said Sutherland. ‘The important thing is for you to understand the significance of this endgame that we’re all involved in.’

‘Why would the Germans tell you all this in a physics journal and published papers? Shouldn’t this be top secret?’

Sutherland ignored the question.

‘The fact is that the Allies have their own bomb programme. We have our own Ekarhenium, the 94th element, which for reasons of secrecy we refer to as “49”.’

Brilliant, thought Anne, to switch the numbers round like that.

‘In March 1941 Fritz Reiche, a German physicist on the run from the Nazis, passed through Lisbon on the way to the United States,’ Rose continued. ‘He was met by the Jewish Refugee Organization here and before they put him on a ship to New York we had a meeting in which he warned us that a bomb programme did exist in Germany. We now know that they’re building an atomic pile for the creation of Ekarhenium somewhere in Berlin. We also know that Heisenberg went to see Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist, and that they had an argument about whether atomic warfare was the right way for physics to be going. A rift developed between the two men over the Germans’ active bomb programme. Heisenberg also sketched out, in rough, the makings of an atomic pile. Since then Bohr has left Denmark and gone over to the Americans. You’ve been in London since June?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So you know about the doodlebugs…the V1 rocket bombs?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘We believe that these are the prototype rockets for launching an atomic bomb on London.’

It felt suddenly cold in the room despite the grinding heat outside. Anne rubbed her arms. Sutherland sucked on his pipe, which bubbled like a tubercular lung in the stem.

‘Your day job in Cardew’s office will be to microfilm the two German physics journals Zeitschrift für Physik and Die Naturwissenschafen and provide Sutherland and me with typed translations of any articles which pertain to atomic physics,’ said Rose. ‘More important than that is the accommodation we’ve managed to arrange for you in Estoril. Cardew has been working up a good social relationship with a fellow called Patrick Wilshere. He’s a wealthy businessman in his mid fifties, with contacts and companies in the Portuguese colonies, mainly Angola. He is also Irish, a Catholic and not a lover of Great Britain. We have intelligence that he was selling wolfram, from his Portuguese wife’s family’s mining concessions in the north, exclusively to the Germans, as well as cork and olive oil from family estates in the Alentejo. He has offered Cardew a room in his considerable house for a lodger. He specified a female lodger.’

Sutherland looked to see the effect of this on his new agent. Her blood now felt as thin and cold as ether.

‘What is expected of me?’ she asked, clipping each word off.

‘To listen.’

‘You just said that he specified a female lodger.’

‘He prefers female company,’ said Rose, as if it was something he himself couldn’t understand.

‘What about his wife? Doesn’t his wife live in the same house?’

‘I understand that the relationship with his wife has…broken down somewhat.’

Anne began to breathe deep, slow breaths. Her thighs were sticking together under the cotton of her dress. Sweat seemed to be pricking out all over. Sutherland shifted in his chair. His first bodily movement.

‘Cardew thinks she’s suffered some kind of breakdown,’ he said.

‘You mean she’s mad, too?’ asked Anne, the scenario burgeoning in her mind.

‘Not howling at the moon, exactly,’ said Rose. ‘More nerves, we think.’

‘What’s her name?’ she asked.

‘Mafalda. She’s very well connected. Excellent family. Hugely wealthy. The spread they’ve got in Estoril…magnificent. Small palace. Own grounds. Marvellous,’ said Sutherland, selling it hard.

‘Do you mind if I smoke, sir?’ she asked.

Sutherland broke out of his chair and offered her a cigarette from a silver box on the table. He lit it with a weighty Georgian silver lighter with a green baize bottom. Anne drew in heavily, saw Sutherland brightening in her vision.

‘Tell me more about Wilshere,’ she said, and as an afterthought, ‘please, sir.’

‘He’s a drinking man. Likes to…’

‘Does that mean he’s a drunk?’

‘He likes a drink,’ said Rose. ‘You do too, from the accounts of the Oxford do’s. Quite a strong head on you, they said.’

‘That’s different from being a drunk.’

‘Well, while we’re about it, he’s a gambler as well,’ said Sutherland. ‘The casino’s practically at the bottom of their garden. Do you…?’

‘I’ve never had that sort of liquidity.’

‘But you probably know something about probability, what with your maths…’

‘It’s not a particular interest of mine.’

‘What is?’ asked Rose.

‘Numbers.’

‘Ah, pure maths,’ he said, as if he might know something. ‘What drew you to that?’

‘A sense of completeness,’ she said, hoping that would do the trick.

‘A sense or the illusion?’ asked Rose.

‘We might be talking about a lot of abstractions but what links them, the logic, is very real, very strict and irrefutable.’

‘I’m a crossword man myself,’ said Rose. ‘I like to see into people’s minds. How they work.’

Anne smoked some more.

‘Crosswords have their own kind of completeness, too,’ she said, ‘if you’re any good at them.’

Things were digging into her. Her bra felt tight. Her waistband knotty. She wasn’t getting on with these two men and she didn’t know how it had happened. Maybe that first exchange and the last one really had been too cheeky. Perhaps they’d seen one thing, imagined and extended their idea of her and she’d revealed something completely different. Was she this difficult?

‘The thing about intelligence is that the picture is always incomplete. We deal in fragments. You, in the field, even more so. You might not always know what you’re doing, you might not always appreciate the importance of what you hear. There are no solutions and, even if there were, you wouldn’t have known the question in the first place. You listen and report,’ said Sutherland.

‘Something else for you to listen for in the Wilshere household, apart from people’s names, has some relevance to the endgame we were talking about earlier,’ said Rose. ‘To make the doodlebugs, or any rocket for that matter, the Germans need precision tools. To make those tools requires precision cutting instruments. They need diamonds. Industrial diamonds. Those diamonds are finding their way in here on ships from Central Africa. We have tried searching those ships when they put in at our ports, like Freetown in Sierra Leone, but a handful of diamonds is not so easy to find on a 7,000-ton ship. We think, but we have no proof, that Wilshere is bringing in diamonds from Angola and getting them into the German Legation, where they are sent by diplomatic bag to Berlin. We don’t know how he does it or how he gets paid for doing it. So anything you hear about diamonds and payment for them in the Wilshere household must be communicated, via Cardew, to us at once.’

‘How do you want me to do that?’

‘Wallis will look after that. You’ll see him and arrange things with him.’

He glanced at his watch.

‘Cardew had better take you up to the house now. It’s getting late. I’ve told him to brief you on Wilshere and his wife, but I’ve also instructed him to exclude certain details which, for the safety of your cover, it would be better for you to find out yourself. I don’t want you going in there knowing too much about the situation and not reacting correctly to…developments. You’re supposed to be a secretary. First time abroad and all that. I want you to be curious about everything and everybody.’

‘That doesn’t sound as if it’s going to be too difficult, sir.’

Sutherland grimaced. The brown column of teeth appeared again and shut down just as fast. He went to the door and called for Cardew.

Chapter 8

Saturday, 15th July 1944, Estoril, near Lisbon.

Meredith Cardew drove Anne west past empty beaches. The sun was still high and the air crammed with heat, the sea in a flat calm, the Atlantic Ocean just licking at the sand. She didn’t speak, still overwhelmed by that first meeting with Rose and Sutherland. Across the estuary Cardew pointed out the beaches of Caparica and further into the haze, discernible only as a smudge, the headland of Cabo Espichel. He was trying to loosen her up.

The saltine air that came through the windows brought back weekends by the sea before the war with her mother fully clothed and scarfed against the sun and wind, while her own young body went hazelnut brown in a day. It was easy to love this place, she thought, after London with its bombed-out, blackened houses, the drab grey streets piled with rubble. Here, by the sea, under the big sky, the palms and the bougainvillea flashing past, it should be easy to forget five years of destruction.

Cardew drove one-handed, clawing tobacco into his pipe with the other. He even managed to get the pipe going without sending them off down the rocks and into the sea. He was mid thirties, with thinning, reddish blond hair which had been razor cut up the back. He was tall, very long legs, and slim with a long nose and a facile smile working on the corners of his mouth. His baggy trousers flapped as his knees seemed to be conducting an unseen orchestra; the turn-ups were halfway up his shins, which were covered by thick beige socks. He wore heavy brogues on his feet.

What were the winter clothes like?

He smoked the pipe blowing stage kisses. His right arm had suffered a severe burn up to the elbow. The skin was shiny and patterned like sea fossils in rock.

‘Boiling water,’ he said, catching her looking, ‘when I was a child.’

‘Sorry,’ she said, flustered at being caught out.

‘Did Sutherland and Rose fill you in?’

‘As much as they were prepared to. They said they’d purposely left some gaps.’

‘Ye-e-e-s,’ said Cardew, a frown of uncertainty rippling down his forehead. ‘Did Rose say anything about Mafalda?’

‘He said she was having a breakdown of some sort, not “howling at the moon”, as he put it, just nerves.’

‘I don’t know what it is. Something to do with her husband perhaps, but it might just be a genetic thing. A bit of inbreeding back down the line. These big Portuguese families are known for it. Marrying each other’s first cousins and the like and before you know it…I mean, look at the Portuguese royal family. A set of March hares if ever I saw one.’

‘Isn’t that all over now? The royal family?’

‘Thirty-six years ago. Terrible business. The king and his son came up to Lisbon from the country, from Vila Viçosa in fact, not far from where Mafalda’s family comes from, near the border. They arrived in Lisbon, trundling through the streets, both assassinated in their carriage. End of the monarchy. Well, it took a couple more years to fizzle out, but that was the effective end: 1908. Still, she might just be depressed or something. Whatever, she’s not right, which is probably why Wilshere’s looking for some company.’

‘Female company, so I understand.’

Cardew shifted in his seat and looked as wary as a grouse on the Glorious Twelfth.

‘Bit of a rum one, old Wilshere. He’s broken the mould. Not your average chap.’

‘Does he have children?’

‘Only sons, who are away. No daughters. Probably why he wants female company. And here I am with four, for God’s sake,’ he said, a little gloomy. ‘Sporting legacy gone…although the eldest one’s school long-jump champion.’

‘All is not lost, Mr Cardew.’

He brightened, bounced the end of his pipe by clenching his jaw.

‘I think you’ll like Wilshere,’ said Cardew. ‘And I know he’ll like you. You’ve got that determined look about you. He likes girls with a bit of spunk. He didn’t like Marjorie.’

‘Marjorie?’

‘My former secretary. The one who married a Portuguese and is now pregnant. The husband won’t let her work, says she’s got to lie down. Poor girl’s got six months to go. Still, that’s why you’re here. Wilshere didn’t take to her, anyway. She was a bit too English for his taste and he upset her. Yes, he can be a bit like that. If he takes to you, you’re all right. If not he’s…he’s a difficult bugger.’

‘He likes you.’

‘Yes…in his way.’

‘Aren’t you a bit too English as well?’

‘Sorry, old girl. I’m a Scot, both sides. Talk like a Sassenach but I’m a Scot through and through. Like Wilshere, in fact, he’s Irish down to his heels but talks with a silver spoon in his mouth.’

‘Or a hot potato…if he’s Irish,’ said Anne.

Cardew roared, not that he found it so funny. He was just the type who liked to laugh.

‘What else is there to know about Patrick Wilshere?’ she asked.

‘He can be a charmer…’

‘As well as a drinker and a gambler.’

‘He rides, too. Do you ride?’

‘No.’

‘It’s nice up there on the Serra de Sintra on horseback,’ said Cardew. ‘Sutherland told me you had a top-class brain. Maths. Languages. That sort of thing.’

‘It didn’t leave much time for anything else. I’m just not sporty, Mr Cardew. Sorry. I’m not much of a team person, I suppose. It’s probably something to do with being an only child and…’

She pulled up short of saying ‘and not having a father’. She had a father now, of course. Graham Ashworth. Accountant. She looked out of the window and ordered her mind. They passed large villas set in their own, almost tropical gardens.

‘There’re crowned heads of Europe sitting out the war in Estoril,’ said Cardew. ‘That’s the kind of place it is.’

He turned off the main road at the Estoril railway station and drove into a square lined with hotels and cafés surrounding some gardens with palm trees and beds of roses, which gradually sloped up to a modern building at the top.

They passed the Hotel Palácio which Cardew told her was ‘ours’ and next door the Hotel Parque which was ‘theirs’. They went round the back of the modern building at the top which proved to be the casino, and Cardew pointed out a narrow, overgrown passage and a gate in the hedgerow further up, which was the back way into the Wilsheres’ garden. They climbed higher, right to the top of the hill, past gardens enclosed by privilege, hugging the towering phoenix palms and spiked fans of the Washingtonians, while the brash purple lights of bougainvillea tried to escape over the wall. Anne straightened her sunglasses on her nose, rested an elbow on the car window ledge, wished she had a cigarette going, which she thought would be the final detail of a leading actress’s style, coming into her Riviera home.

‘You didn’t say whether you liked Wilshere,’ said Anne, catching sight of herself in the wing mirror.

Cardew stared intently at the windscreen as if the entrails of squashed insects might lead him somewhere. They pulled up at an ornate gateway, walls curving up and scrolling against solid stone posts, each of which sported a giant carved pineapple on top. A tiled panel bore the words Quinta da Águia and the wrought-iron gates an elaborate QA design.

‘Here’s an insight into the man,’ said Cardew. ‘This place used to be called Quinta do Cisne, Swan House, if you like. He’s renamed it Eagle House. His little joke, I think.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘He does business with the Americans and the Germans. Both countries use the eagle as their national symbol.’

‘Maybe he’s just being a gentleman.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Making everybody feel comfortable…unless they’re Marjorie,’ she said.

The driveway was cobbled all the way up to the house, white with black geometric patterns, just as she’d seen on the Lisbon pavements. It was lined with pink oleanders, very mature, almost trees. They came out of the oleanders into a square in front of the house which had a fountain in the middle, water spouting from a dolphin’s mouth. Lawn sloped away to distant hedges, a stepped, cobbled path ran down one side towards the bottom of the garden and the back gateway to possible financial ruin. The view reached to the hotels and palms of Estoril’s main square, the railway station and the ocean beyond.

The house itself was vast and box-like, not an accumulation of extensions, not something organic that had grown with the owner’s mind or fortune, but a house that had been planned, finished and never again added to. Its ugliness was disguised by the leafy frills of an ancient wisteria whose tributaries reached the eaves of the terracotta tiled roof. They walked to the pillared porch, Anne fretting about her case left in the car.

The door was opened by a grotesquely bent old man, his head at right angles to his body and turned sideways so that he could look Cardew in the eye. He wore a black tailed jacket and striped trousers. He was backed up by a small, wide woman also dressed in black with a white apron and cap. Cardew’s Portuguese came out like an order for buttered scones but it was intelligible enough for the old man, who produced a length of cane from the back of his jacket and set off towards the car with the woman in tow. Another maid appeared, doing up her apron. She was even smaller than the first, with a face that had been pinched and drawn out to the length of a fox’s. Tiny eyes, closed up by malnourishment in pregnancy, flickered in her head. There was an exchange and the maid set off across the black and white chequered floor of the dark hall which was surrounded by oak panelling, and stairs that joined a gallery above. A huge, tiered iron chandelier hung from the wooden roof.

On either side of the door through which the maid had disappeared were two glass cases full of brightly coloured, naïve clay figurines. Dark, uncleaned oil paintings in heavy gilt frames hung above them. In one, the stern face of a bearded ancestor appeared as if through battle smoke, the woman standing behind his chair was pale with dark rings around her eyes as if illness had been a way of life.

‘Mafalda’s parents,’ said Cardew. ‘The Conde and Condessa. Dead now. She inherited the lot.’

Behind them the old man and the maid staggered in with Anne’s case suspended between them on the piece of cane. They started up the staircase and paused on the first landing. The old man held on to the shiny ball at the corner of the bannisters, panting. Anne felt the urge to get up there to help him and, sensing it, Cardew gripped her elbow. The other maid returned, taking tile-sized steps towards them, her foxy face nudging the air, suspicious, checking them for smells. Cardew steered Anne down the length of a wooden-floored corridor with a strip of carpet up the middle, tall mirrors on either side of mixed quality so that Anne appeared thin, chubby, wavy. A chandeliered dining room flashed past on the left. At the end of the corridor, just before the french windows out on to the back terrace, they turned right into a long, high room with six tall windows giving out on to the lawn. The shutters were open, the blue and gold designs on them faded from the fierce summer sun.

The quantity of furniture in the room gave the impression that there was a lot going on, that maps and compasses might have been helpful. This furniture was not in any way co-ordinated, colours clashed, brocade and velvet sat uncomfortably together, the muted carpets seemed embarrassed by the brashness and weight of it all. At the far end of the room was a carved marble fireplace which contained a frieze in bas-relief of an ancient people, Corinthians or Phoenicians, engaged in endless tussle with wild animals. Above the fireplace hung a painting, a hunting scene of wild and bloody savagery, with wild boar stuck and squealing and wounded dogs tossed in the air while mounted men with lances stared on.

Patrick Wilshere stood below this scene dressed in riding britches, boots and a loose, collarless white shirt undone at the neck. Cardew’s description of him as ‘rum’ and ‘not average’ was typical understatement. Wilshere had stepped out of a novel from a different, more romantic age. His grey hair, swept back behind his ears, was long, long enough so that it rested on the first vertebrae of his back. He had a moustache whose waxed tips pointed upwards and his eyes were creased at the corners as if on permanent look-out for the source of all amusement. His hands had long elegant fingers and they cradled a cut-glass tumbler half-full of amber liquid. He nudged himself away from the fireplace where he’d been leaning.

‘Meredith!’ he called down the room, pleased to see him, hearty.

The maid stepped back and Anne followed Cardew through the watercourse between the furniture to the small backwater where Wilshere stood, still with the faint reek of horse about him.

‘Sorry, haven’t had time to change,’ said Wilshere. ‘Been out on the hills all day, just got back and needed a blast to put the wind back in my sails. You must be Anne. Pleased to meet you. Been travelling all day, I expect. Could do with freshening up. Get yourself out of that suit and into something more comfortable. Yes. MARIA! If you can’t remember the maids’ names just shout Maria and you’ll get two or three.’

The maid came back and stood at the door.

‘All tiny, these people,’ said Wilshere, ‘no bigger than fairies. Come from my wife’s part of the country.’

He spoke in perfect Portuguese. The maid dipped and ducked in an attempted curtsy. Anne navigated the furniture to the door and followed the maid up the stairs and down a corridor to a room which would have been above the end of the living room. It was a corner room, with views of the sea and Estoril. There was a private bathroom which overlooked the terrace and, beyond some hedges, a grass tennis court, brown from the sun. The cast-iron bath had clawed feet holding on to small worlds. A shower rose the size of a frying pan stuck out from the wall. The maid left, closing the door. Anne waited for the footsteps to retreat, ran at the four-poster bed, flung herself at it wildly and writhed in luxury. She lay with her arms spread out, trying to encompass her new world.

She stripped, showered and changed into a pleated cotton skirt and a simple blouse which left her arms bare. She brushed out her hair, struck poses in the full-length mirror, pouting her mouth, flicking at her skirt, but still failed to match her surroundings.

She headed back down the corridor towards the stairs. A figure appeared at the far end of the gallery. A woman with a face whiter than her mother’s and long grey hair down to the middle of her back. She wore a white nightdress. The woman faded into the darkness of a room, shut the door.

Mafalda the Mad, very Jane Eyre, she thought, and fled down the stairs.

Anne returned to the living room, which was empty. Wilshere was sitting on his own on the back terrace in front of a wrought-iron table with a cigarette box and the cut-glass tumbler, emptier. He had his boots up on an unoccupied chair opposite. She joined him.

‘Ye-e-es,’ he said, ‘that’s better.’

‘What happened to Mr Cardew?’

‘Sit down, sit down, won’t you,’ he said, pulling her down into a chair next to him, his palm rough on her bare arm. His green eyes stroked her all over and the hand held on to the soft part below her shoulder. His look was neither prurient nor penetrative, two other looks she’d had that day, but attentive, oddly intimate, as if they were old friends, or even stronger – lovers, maybe, who’d had a life together, parted and come back for another visit.

‘Drink?’

How to play this? She’d been hoping to observe while Cardew talked but now she was in it. He likes a girl with spunk.

‘Gin,’ she said, ‘and tonic.’

‘Excellent,’ he said, releasing her arm, calling a boy over, who Anne hadn’t seen in the shade of the terrace.

Wilshere punched some words into him and drained his own glass which he handed over.

‘Smoke?’

She took a cigarette which he lit for her. She blew the smoke out into the still, very hot evening. It smelled like burnt dung. The boy returned and laid out two tumblers and a small dish of black, shiny olives. They chinked glasses. The cold drink and the fizz of the tonic smacked into her system and she had to restrain herself from jutting her breasts.

‘You’ll probably want to go to the beach tomorrow,’ said Wilshere, ‘although I should warn you that our friendly dictator, Dr Salazar, does not agree with men and women disporting themselves semi-naked on the strand. There are police. An intimidating squad of fearless men whose job it is to maintain the moral rectitude of the country by sniffing out depravity at source. All those refugees, you see, brought their immoral ideas and fashions with them and the good Doctor’s determined that it won’t get out of hand. The three F’s. Football, Fado and Fátima. The great man’s solution to the evils of modern society.’

‘Fado?’

‘Singing. Very sad singing…wailing, in fact,’ he said. ‘Perhaps some of my Irishness has worn off in this sunshine. All that rain and terrible history, I should have a natural inclination for drink and melancholy thought, but I don’t.’

‘Drink?’ asked Anne, archly, which earned a flash of white teeth.

‘I’ve never felt the need to brood over things. They happen. They pass. I move on. Construct. I’ve never been one for sitting about, longing for previous states. States of what? Lost innocence? Simpler times? And I don’t have much time for destiny or fate, which is what fado means. People who believe in destiny are invariably justifying their own failure. Don’t you think? Or am I a godless fellow?’

‘I thought belief in fate was just a way of accepting life’s inexplicability,’ said Anne, ‘and you still haven’t told me how fado is supposed to stiffen moral fibre. How can fate or destiny be a social policy?’

Wilshere smiled. Cardew had been right about spunk.

‘It’s what they sing about in the fado. Saudades – which is longings. I’ve no time for it. You know where it comes from? This is a country with a magnificent past, a tremendously powerful empire with the world’s wealth in their hands. Take the spice trade. The Portuguese controlled the trade that made food taste good…and then they lost it all and not only that…their capital was destroyed by a cataclysmic event.’

‘The earthquake.’

‘On All Souls’ Day too,’ he said. ‘Most of the population were in church. Crushed by falling roofs. Then flood and fire. The perils of Egypt, minus the plague and locusts, were visited on them in a few hours. So that’s where fado comes from. Dwelling in and on the past. There are other things too. Men putting out to sea in boats and not always coming back. The women left behind to fend for themselves and to sing them back into existence. Yes, it’s a sad place, Lisbon, and fado provides the anthems. That’s why I don’t live there. Go there as little as possible. You have to have the right spirit for the city and it’s not one that sits well with me. Pay no attention to fado. It’s just Salazar’s way of subduing the population. That and the miraculous sighting of the Virgin at Fátima…ye-e-e-s, Catholicism.’

‘That must be hard work if they all died in church back in 1755.’

‘Ah, well, you see, the good Doctor’s trained to be a priest, he’s a monk manqué…he knows better than anybody how to control a population. You might have heard of the PVDE.’

‘Not yet,’ she lied.

‘His secret police. His Inquisitors. They root out all non-believers, the heretics and the blasphemers, and break them on the wheel.’

She looked sceptical.

‘I promise you, Anne, there’s no difference except it’s politics now and not religion.’

He beckoned the boy, who approached, whisky bottle in hand, and filled Wilshere’s glass to within a quarter-inch of the brim. He took an olive, bit out the pit, and threw it unconsciously into the garden. He sucked the top off his drink, lit another cigarette and was surprised to find his old one still going in the ashtray. He crushed it out, flung a boot up on to the chair and missed. He looked at his watch as if someone had burnt his wrist.

‘Better change for dinner. Didn’t realize it was so late.’

Anne stood with him.

‘No, no, you stay here,’ he said, patting her arm. ‘You’ll do fine like that. Perfect. I still smell of horse.’

He did. And whisky. And something sour, which smelled the same as fear but wasn’t.

‘Will your wife be joining us?’ Anne asked his retiring back.

‘My wife?’ he asked, turning on his boot heel, the whisky from his glass slopping on to his wrist.

‘I thought I saw her…’

‘What did you see?’ he asked rapidly, drawing on his cigarette, which he then flicked away across the terrace.

‘On the way down from my room. A woman in a nightdress…that was all. In the corridor upstairs.’

‘What did Cardew say about my wife?’ asked Wilshere, the savage edge to his voice even sharper.

‘Only that he thought she was unwell, which was why I asked you…’

‘Unwell?’

‘…which was why I asked you whether she would be joining us for dinner, that’s all,’ finished Anne, holding her ground against Wilshere’s sudden blast.

His top lip extended over the glass rim and sucked up an inch of whisky, the sweat from the alcohol in this heat standing out on his forehead in beads.

‘Dinner’s in fifteen minutes,’ he said and turned through the french windows, clipping the door, which juddered in its frame.

Anne sat back down, a small tremble in the tip of her cigarette as she put it to her mouth. She sipped more gin, finished smoking and walked out on to the crepuscular lawn. Lights were on down in the town – rooms here and there in buildings, streets brought up in monochrome, the crowns of the gathered stone pines billowing like thick black smoke, the railway station with people waiting, mesmerized by the track or staring off down the rails of past and future. Normality, and next to this, the vast and threatening blackness of the unlit ocean.

Two squares of light came on in the house behind her. A figure came to one of the lit windows and looked down on her although, in the twilight, she wasn’t sure if she was visible. She felt the drag, almost heard the sinister rattle of the pebbles as with the inevitability of tide she was being drawn into the complicated currents of other people’s lives.

Chapter 9

Saturday, 15th July 1944, Wilshere’s house, Estoril, near Lisbon.

The servant came out on to the lawn to get her, made her jump as she was lounging about in her own thoughts. She’d lost herself in the graininess where the town’s light met the darkening air. She turned to the boy and found that the façade of the house was now lit by footlights as if it was a monument. It only came to her then. The freedom of artificial light. She hadn’t thought about it looking down on the town. No blackout. This alarming country – free and yet forbidding.

She followed the boy. His thighs thumped out of the side of his trousers, massive as a weightlifter’s. He walked her across the terrace, already cleared of her half-drunk gin and tonic, and on to the dining room halfway down the corridor. Three glass chandeliers hung over a table which had been shortened to fifteen feet for this, more intimate, occasion. Wilshere stood, almost at attention. He was dressed in a dinner jacket with a board-hard shirt front and black bow tie. He presented his wife, who was in a floor-length evening gown, breasts encased, waist pinched, skirts full of animal rustlings. Her hair was up and she wore a necklace of three large, set rubies. Her face still had the terrible pallor but it was not the alabaster whiteness of her mother’s, more the ghastliness of unsuccessful junket.

Anne shook her hand which had been held out like a bishop’s, waiting to be kissed. It was puffy, swollen by fluid retention, so that the knuckles were dimples. They sat. Anne, midway between their two ends, awkward in her informal dress. The light from the three chandeliers was surgically bright and harsh – operative.

A soup was served, greyish-green with a slice of sausage floating in the middle. White wine trickled into glasses. Mafalda refused the wine, placed her spoon in her soup and looked about. The wine tasted of cold metal with a fizz like the end of a battery. The soup was replaced by a plate of three fish each, their eyes cataracted by frying. Anne’s intestines screamed for a break to the shattering silence but Wilshere, unmoved, holding his knife like a scalpel, dismantled his fish expertly, while Anne reduced hers to a pile of bony hash. Mafalda’s knife and fork tinkered around the sea bass and subsided. The fish were taken away. Large chunks of indeterminate meat flecked with red were served, clamshells rattled on the plates.

Anne, desperate to communicate, found her thoughts crashing about her head like a late-night drunk looking for food in a hotel kitchen. Mafalda corralled her meat on one side of her plate, the clams on the other, and laid down her irons. Red wine jugged into different glasses. It smelled of damp socks but tasted as complex as a kiss. Wilshere swilled it in his mouth, his lips pursed to a smooch beneath his joyous moustache.

‘Your husband was telling me about fado this evening,’ gasped Anne, having two goes at it, finding not just a frog in her throat but a whole fat toad.

‘I can’t think why,’ said Mafalda. ‘He doesn’t know anything about it. Loathes it. Runs – no, sprints – to turn it off when it comes on the radio.’

Wilshere’s jaws chewed over the meat in his mouth, interminable as cud.

‘He was saying,’ Anne pressed on, ‘he was saying that they’re songs about longing, about dwelling…’

Mafalda just rattled the cutlery on the side of her monogrammed plate and Anne shut up.

‘I like that new girl. Amália,’ said Wilshere. ‘Amália Rodrigues. Yes, she’s rather good.’

‘Her voice?’ asked Mafalda on the end of a coal-black look.

‘I didn’t know there was anything else to fado,’ said Wilshere, ‘or were you asking me whether I thought she had the spirit, the soul, the alma of fado?’

A twitch had started up around Mafalda’s left eye. She stroked it down with her little finger. Anne looked from one end of the table to the other – the idiot spectator.

‘Of course, she has marvellous…’ said Wilshere, and his search for a word set the air quivering, ‘…marvellous deportment.’

‘Deportment?’ scoffed Mafalda. ‘He means…’

She reined herself in. Her small puffy fist banging the edge of the linen tablecloth a light thump.

‘Perhaps I should have chosen something less contentious,’ said Wilshere. ‘We were merely conversing about our good friend the great Doctor and, of course, the three “F”s came up. Perhaps we should have talked about history, but even that’s a minefield. You’ll be glad to know that I didn’t make any mention of O Encoberto, the Hidden One, my dear.’

‘The Hidden One?’ asked Anne.

‘Dom Sebastião,’ said Wilshere. ‘No, I didn’t make any mention of him, my dear, I knew you’d rather tell Anne all about that yourself. My wife, you see, Anne, is a monarchist. A state that hasn’t existed in this country for more than thirty years. She believes that the Hidden One, who was killed – ooooh, four hundred years ago, wasn’t it? – on the battlefield of El Kebir in Morocco, will somehow return…’

Mafalda stood with some difficulty. Wilshere broke off. A servant was pulling back her chair and offering his shoulder for her to lean on.

‘I’m not feeling so well,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid I will have to withdraw.’

She left the room without appearing to shift any of her weight on to the servant’s shoulder, which she gripped in a fistful of material. She hadn’t been that unsteady upstairs in her nightclothes. Mafalda gave Anne the shadow of a nod. The door closed with a brass click. Anne dropped back into the dent of her upholstered chair, traumatized. Her half-eaten meat was removed. Fruit salad appeared. Steps receded to the kitchen. They were left alone in the chandeliered glare, the red wine on a small silver tray in front of Wilshere.

‘Words, words, words,’ said Wilshere under his breath, ‘it’s only words.’

Earlier, out on the terrace Wilshere had been on his way up to drunkenness. The flash of anger at the mention of his wife had been a hiatus in the usual, uninterrupted progression. In the short fifteen minutes he’d taken to get changed he’d shot through drunkenness and regained sobriety, but with a difference. He was now capable of seamless transformations from belligerent to maudlin, from vindictive to self-pitying. Perhaps Cardew’s estimation of the mental state of the occupants was the reverse. Mafalda was just unwell and the man drumming his stiff bib at the end of the table, contemplating the level of wine in his glass, was, if not mad, then close to it.

‘Don’t eat dessert myself,’ he said. ‘No sweet tooth.’

He chinked the edge of his plate with the spoon, drank the wine and poured the remains into his glass. The servants arrived with coffee. He told them to serve it out on the terrace. He finished the wine in a single draught as if compelled to drink it – condemned to death by poisoning.

On the terrace Wilshere forced a glass of port from another century on to Anne. This was no longer pleasurable drinking.

‘Let’s take a walk down to the casino,’ said Wilshere after a prolonged silence in which his body became an impregnable fortification, behind which the man’s mind had retreated to fight some internal battle. ‘Run along and put your best party frock on.’

She put her only party frock on, one of her mother’s from before the war. She looked down out of the bathroom window on to the terrace where Wilshere sat immobile. Refocusing on her own image in the glass she felt a crack of fear opening up. She remembered her training – the talk about mental stamina for the work – and breathed the panic back down.

She walked downstairs with her shoes in her hand, not wanting another confrontation with the spectral Mafalda. On the terrace she rejoined Wilshere, who was staring through the footlights into the wall of darkness. He jerked himself out of his chair, held her by the shoulders but not with the soft touch of her old piano teacher. His breath, an ammoniacal reek that could have blistered paintwork, made her blink. Sweat had appeared in the parted channel of his perky moustache. His mouth was no more than inches from her own. Everything in her body recoiled and a squeal moved up from her stomach. He let her go. Goose flesh flourished where his hands had been.

They walked through the curtain of light on to the lawn and round to the cobbled pathway that led down the garden. A half-moon lit the way. Not far from the bottom a path forked off to a summerhouse and a bower which had formed around some stone pillars providing a shelter of hanging fronds for a bench with a view out to the sea. It looked unused, as if the house’s occupants had no need of such tranquillity but preferred the relentlessness of the dark halls and the corridors of their natural habitat.

They crossed the road under the dense darkness of the stone pines at the rear of the casino, a modern featureless building which knew that its attraction was not architectural. They joined the current of expensive-looking people going in – the rustle of taffeta, the sizzle of nylons and the crack of wads of freshly minted folding money.

Wilshere headed straight for the bar and ordered a whisky. Anne opted for a brandy and soda. As Wilshere lit her cigarette a meaty arm came around his shoulders. His slim body flinched.

‘Wilshere!’ said an expansive American voice, not looking at him but putting his head close as if about to touch cheeks. A hand stretched out towards Anne. ‘Beecham Lazard.’

‘The third,’ said Wilshere, shrugging the American’s arm off. ‘This is Miss Anne Ashworth.’

Lazard was taller and wider than Wilshere. He was dressed in a dinner jacket too, but his was crammed full and bulging. He was younger than Wilshere by twenty years and had black hair with a precision-tooled side parting. His smile was faultless and his skin tone utterly consistent. There was something of waxwork perfection about him, both fascinating and repellent.

‘We gotta talk,’ said Lazard to the side of Wilshere’s face.

Wilshere looked down his shirt front like a man on a high ledge.

‘Anne is my new house guest,’ he said. ‘Flew in from London today. I was just showing her the wonderful place in which we live.’

‘Sure thing,’ said Lazard, releasing Anne’s hand, which he’d been rubbing with a smoothing thumb. ‘It’s just about dates…a few seconds, that’s all.’

Wilshere, annoyed, excused himself and backed off to the entrance of the bar where they talked, jostled by others streaming past them. Anne fiddled with her cigarette and felt juvenile in her outfit. Haute couture Paris had shifted to Lisbon and the clothes on the people around her made her feel as if she was waiting for the jellies to come out at a tea party. She smoked as a diversionary tactic and cast about to compensate. Even that proved difficult. Her idle, confident gaze was easily met by others’ with stronger, more demanding eyes. Her head snapped back to the mirrors and glassware of the bar, which reflected a multiplication of eyes, some drunk, some sad, some hungry, some hard – but all wanting.

‘Americans,’ said Wilshere, back at her side. ‘No idea of the time or the place.’

He took her over to a table and introduced her to four women and two men. The foreign names rushed past like a hunt in full cry, all titles and ancestry, fanfare and heraldry. They spoke to Wilshere in French and ignored her. All they needed to know of Anne was apparent in her dress – some skivvy that Wilshere was tupping. He detached himself from their imploring jewelled and knotted fingers, and bowed.

‘Has to be done, I’m afraid,’ he said to Anne’s cheek. ‘Ignore the Romanians at your peril. Frightful gossips.’

They headed for the caixa where Wilshere wrote a cheque for some chips and they wheeled through the swing doors into the gaming room. He gave Anne an inch of his chips and went straight to the baccarat table, took a seat next to another slumped player and lapsed into dense concentration. Anne hung at his back, suspended in layers of smoke. Cards were drawn from the slab. The players turned up the corners. Sometimes they asked to stand, other times to draw and rarely they declared a natural. It was tedious unless you were one of the rivet-eyed players, who clenched the air in fists, hissing at their losses and uncurling, but only for a second, at their wins.

Wilshere’s transformation was instant. All vestiges of amusement and ennui had left him. His interest now was only calculable in percentages, his intelligence reduced to a wavering telepathy with numbered suits. Anne diverted herself by computing the bank’s advantage in the game and started to yawn. The gambling had sucked out the oxygen in the air. She wandered the room, keen to get away from the joyless backs of the baccarat players. No straying eyes connected with hers, money more compelling than lust in here. The room was quiet, but prickling with anticipation and torment. The yards of green baize and acres of carpet added stealth to wealth and hushed any sudden collapse of funds.

She was drawn to roulette. There was noise in roulette, especially when an American was playing, and the clicking of the ivory ball, playing its own fado, was almost a sweet distraction after the murderous cards. She joined the crowd, found herself embraced by it, welcomed, offered a cigarette, crushed and, in this familiar, slaughter-yard jostle, confirmed what she had known from the moment those swing doors had batted shut behind her. She was being watched.

It would have been easy enough to turn, to look over the heads bowed in supplication to the green baize god. It would have been easy to find the only other face in the room uncomplicated by numbers, unconcerned by the concentration of avidity. But she couldn’t do it. The tension set in her neck, her head began to tremble. An arm snaked around her shoulder and dragged her into a damp shirt.

‘Ladies for luck,’ roared the American. ‘Come on. Let’s hear it for number twenty-eight.’

The American gripped her tighter. The croupier terminated the betting, span the wheel and set the ball in motion. Girls squealed. The ball began its chatter. Anne was clenched to the American’s chest, harder. His smell as strong as roast meat. The ball played the flibbertigibbet – coy, tantalizing, coquettish – jumping in and out of bed, over the numbers’ brass divides. Anne’s head was almost on the man’s chest now, such was his determination, and into the corner of her eye, back from the crowd, just inside the spread of light, came the strap of neck muscle, the prominent jawline, the hollow cheek of the one she knew was watching her.

He dipped his head. The cheekbones high against the blue eyes, the vulnerable mouth, the dented chin, the throat like a small fist framed by the straining neck. Seeing the eyes complicated matters. It was impossible to understand the motive, to accurately translate the look. Her throat closed up, heat prickled up her neck. She wrestled her eyes back down to the table but not to the squares and numbers, not to the black and red diamonds but to the soft, green felt that was easy on the mind. Her head clicked back up, jerked on a nervous string. Still there. His intent as close as thunder. A roar went up.

‘Vingt-huit,’ said the croupier.

The American’s fist punched the underbelly of the smoke above, cigar in the corner of his mouth. Anne, released from his grip, fell forward and saw another girl on his other side still in the man’s hug, tiny, thrush-sized with pointy breasts and a sharp beak. He kissed the little bird’s head. The croupier raked in the dead chips, leaving the American’s bet. He made his calculation and pushed a New York skyline back. Anne backed out of the crowd, sucked on her cigarette and headed for the baccarat tables. She had to concentrate on her walking, as if she had someone else’s legs and feet, ones that might run off on their own.

Wilshere’s back was still buttressed against the baccarat table, but now Beecham Lazard was sitting next to him. She held back from their orbit. The dealer had his back to the two men, preparing new slabs of cards. The American looked left and swept a stack of high-denomination chips across to Wilshere, whose shoulders widened for a moment and collapsed back.

Anne had to get out of the room, get away from the suffocating quiet of money, the fierce addiction of the gamblers, and away from those blue eyes. She headed for the padded swing doors. The way out of the asylum. She heard music from the Wonderbar and headed for it. She hid in the darkness, away from the lighted dance floor and smoked the cigarette down to her nails.

‘Surprised to see you out on your own on your first night,’ said a voice from below her.

The band’s drummer enjoyed a roll and thrashed his cymbals. Jim Wallis was sitting at a table a few feet to her left, with a spare chair next to him. Across the dance floor, the face from the gaming room appeared at the edge of the light, swept round and fell back into the dark. She took Wallis’s offer of a cigarette and drank some of his whisky and soda, which clawed at her throat. Blood smacked into her cheeks.

‘I seem to be being followed already,’ she said through the music.

‘Not surprised,’ said Wallis, almost miserable.

‘I thought nobody was supposed to know who I am.’

‘They want to, though,’ he said and leaned into her with his lighter.

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘You’re beautiful,’ he said, the flame wavering in her face. ‘Simple as that.’

‘Jim,’ she said, warning him.

‘You asked a question.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Waiting and watching,’ he said. ‘Do you want to dance…pass the time?’

‘Aren’t you with someone?’

‘She likes roulette,’ said Wallis, holding open his hands to reveal a man with shallow means.

He led Anne to the dance floor. The music started slow. They danced close but formally. She told him about the summerhouse and the covered bower which would make a good place for a dead-letter drop. She’d check it out the next day. The band leader announced a dance number and the couples multiplied on the floor.

She danced for half an hour and went into the powder room when the band took a break. By the time she arrived back at the bar, Wilshere stood on his own with his back to her, foot up on the brass rail, his elbow turned out so that she knew he was still drinking. She told him she wanted to get back to bed. He finished his drink with small ceremony and held out his arm, which she took and they went out into a night that was no cooler.

‘These nights…’ said Wilshere, panting, but without offering anything more, weary of them she could tell.

Wilshere’s pace slowed as they reached the edge of the stone pines near the entrance to the garden. She thought at first that he couldn’t face going back to the house, that smell on him again, which wasn’t fear but like it. He disengaged his arm and put it around her shoulder. They moved on, she supporting him.

The moonlight coaxed the darkness of the garden to blue and Wilshere was staggering and snatching at the fat leaves of the hedge. He was sobbing from such a depth that it came out as a retch, as if he was trying to sick up this thing inside him, some horror tormenting his innards. He hugged her tighter to him. The sharp edges of the jacket stuffed with casino chips cut into her ribs. Anne’s heels ripped over the uneven edges of the cobbled steps. They careened off the path and crashed through the hedge and landed, humped on top of each other, in the soft earth on the other side. Wilshere lay on his back. His face was slack, his breathing regular. She pushed away from his limp embrace and started at the sound of wildlife, large and loud, coming through the foliage. A white shirt front flitted, cuffs reached down to the comatose Wilshere.

‘You’re going to have to help me,’ said the voice in quiet, accented English.

She helped Wilshere over the stranger’s shoulder, chips cascading down his legs. He backed out of the hedge and set off at a steady lope up the lawn. The lights were off inside and outside the house. They went in through the french windows by the terrace.

‘Where does he sleep?’

‘I don’t…I think…just put him in there,’ she said.

The stranger sidestepped into the sitting room, threw Wilshere down on the first sofa and pulled off his shoes. Wilshere struggled with himself and fell silent. She went to the window and opened the shutter which the servants had closed against the morning sunshine. By the time she’d turned back the stranger had gone. Back at the window she saw him cross the moonlit lawn at a calm night-watchman’s pace. He turned at the top of the path to look back, his face obscure. He trotted down the steps, his leather soles pattering the cobbles to silence.

Chapter 10

Sunday, 16th July 1944, Wilshere’s house, Estoril, near Lisbon.

In the heat of the morning Anne lay in bed, a crack of light across the foot of the bed warming her ankles. The night’s events crawled through her mind and she understood how quickly adults’ lives could complicate themselves – a compression of thought and action in time, of too much happening in a confined space, of daily need and greed, triumph and disappointment – and how interminably slow a child’s life was, how long the summers used to be with nothing in them. Her mind worked cyclically, coming round to fix on the same single image which had disturbed her even more than Wilshere’s behaviour; the man’s face, his look, intense and intent – inscrutable, too – threatening or benevolent?

She replayed the night to a final tableau in the casino. As she collected Wilshere from the bar Jim Wallis was sitting at his table with a girl. The girl was the song thrush from under the American roulette-player’s arm. She was pretty, in the way of a porcelain doll, if a face that gave out so little could be attractive. It was a hard face that promised but never rewarded. Wallis’s good nature might break itself against that face.

Her dress on the back of the chair was filthy. She recalled the catastrophe in the bushes. Wilshere fighting his way into unconsciousness, desperate to stop living with whatever he had in his mind. She threw on some clothes and ran downstairs barefoot. There was no Wilshere in the silent drawing room where dust motes rolled in the single shaft of light from the one half-opened shutter.

She ran out of the house, across the lawn, hot and rough underfoot, to the cobbled path and down to the bushes which she crashed through to find the soil raked over. The neat furrows twitched with ants. She felt around with her feet and fingers and found a casino chip of the highest denomination: five thousand escudos – fifty pounds. She crossed the path to the summerhouse and the pillared bower whose wooden crossbeams were overgrown with passionflower, its exotic purple and white tropical discs hanging above the stone seat. She placed the casino chip on the top of the left pillar to test her dead-letter drop.

The sun was already grilling her shoulders as she went back up to the house. She broke into a run across the lawn, thudded over the empty terrace and up to the french windows where Wilshere caught her by the arms so suddenly that her feet dangled for a moment. He brushed his thumbs over her hot shoulders, ran his fingers down her arms and off at her elbows so that she shivered.

‘Mafalda doesn’t like running in the house,’ he said, as if this was a rule he’d just made up.

He was dressed as she’d first seen him, in riding gear, and if she expected to see a man dishevelled by his hangover, she was disappointed. He was fresh, perhaps in a way that had taken some work – washing, boiling, starching and ironing – but he was not the man who’d tried to throw himself into hibernation the night before.

‘D’you fancy a ride?’ he asked.

‘You don’t look as if you mean a donkey on the beach.’

‘No-o-o.’

‘Well, that’s just about the upper limit of my riding experience.’

‘I see,’ he said, teasing his moustache up to points with his fingers. ‘It’s a start, I suppose. At least you’ve been aboard an animal before.’

‘I don’t have any clothes…or boots.’

‘The maid’s laid some things out for you on your bed. Try them on. They should fit.’

Back in her room the dirty evening dress had been removed and on the bed were britches, socks, a shirt, a jacket, and boots on the floor. Everything fitted, only the britches were a little short in the leg. She dressed, buttoning the shirt, looking out of the window, thinking that these were not Mafalda’s clothes. They belonged to a young woman. Wilshere came striding back up the cobbled path, whacking his boot with his crop.

She turned, knowing she wasn’t alone in the room. Mafalda stood in the doorway of the bathroom, hair down, wearing the nightdress again, her face shocked and taking in every inch of Anne as if she knew her and couldn’t believe that she’d had the nerve to reappear in her house.

‘I’m Anne, the English girl, Dona Mafalda,’ she said. ‘We met last night…’

The words didn’t break the spell. Mafalda’s head reared back, incredulous, and then she was away, the cotton nightdress wrapping itself around her thighs, her slippered feet striding the hem to full stretch. The floor in the corridor creaked as Mafalda disappeared in a sound of unfurling sailcloth. Anne pulled on the boots, a dark weight settled in her. If Sutherland thought that Cardew had successfully positioned her in this house without Wilshere’s premeditation, he was wrong.

Wilshere was standing in the hall, nodding his approval as she came down the stairs and smoking.

‘Perfect fit,’ he said on the way to the car, a soft-top Bentley polished to new.

‘Whose are they?

‘A friend of Mafalda’s,’ he said.

‘She seemed surprised to see me wearing them.’

‘She saw you?’

‘She was in my bathroom.’

‘Mafalda?’ he said, unconcerned. ‘She’s such a stickler for cleanliness. Always checking up on the maids. I tell you…you wouldn’t want to be in service here.’

‘She seemed to think I was someone else,’ she said, pressing him.

‘I can’t think who that would be,’ he said, smiling out of the corner of his face. ‘You don’t look like anybody else…that we know.’

They drove down to the seafront, turned right and along the new Marginal road to Cascais. Anne stared ahead, thinking of opening gambits to break through Wilshere’s shiny, deflecting carapace. None came to her. They rounded the harbour, drove up past the block of the old fort and out to the west. The sea, with more swell in it than yesterday, pounded against the low cliffs and sent up towers of saltine spray through holes in the rock, which the light breeze carried across the road, prickling the skin.

‘Boca do Inferno,’ said Wilshere, almost to himself. ‘Mouth of Hell. Don’t see it like that myself, do you?’

‘I only see hell how the nuns taught me to see hell.’

‘Well, you’re still young, Anne.’

‘How do you see it?’

‘Hell’s a silent place, not…’ he stopped, shifted again. ‘I know it’s Sunday but let’s talk about something else, can we? Hell isn’t my…’

He trailed off, put his foot down on the accelerator. The road broke through a clump of stone pines and continued along the coast to Guincho. The wind was stronger out here, blowing sand across the road, which corrugated to washboard, hammering at the suspension.

The hump of the Serra de Sintra appeared with the lighthouse at its point. The road climbed, twisted and turned back on itself – a grim chapel and fortification high above on a wind-blasted peak, naked of vegetation, looked out over the surf-fringed coast, now far below, tapering off into the Atlantic.

At the highest point the road turned north and into a thick bank of cloud. The vapour condensed on their faces and hair. The light sunk to an autumnal grey. Homesickness and gloom descended with it.

At the hamlet of Pé da Serra Wilshere turned right up a steep climb and on the first bend stopped outside some wooden gates flanked by two large terracotta urns. A servant opened the gates and they rolled into a cobbled yard in which vines had been trained to form a green canopy over a right-angled arcade. Piles of dung littered the stones and a Citroën was parked with its nose under one of the arches.

As the Bentley pulled up alongside, a man mounted on a black stallion came from behind the building. The horse stepped daintily around the piles of ordure, its hooves ringing on the damp satin cobbles. The rider, seeing Wilshere, turned his animal, the musculature in the horse’s hindquarters straining to be out on the gallop. The horse snorted and tongued the bit. Wilshere shrugged into his jacket, introduced Anne to Major Luís da Cunha Almeida and tried to stroke the stallion’s head, but the horse shook him off. The major was powerfully built, his shoulders as restless as the animal underneath him. His hands and wrists toiled with the reins while his thick knees and thighs gripped the horse’s impatience. They exchanged a few words and the major turned his horse and trotted out of the yard.

The groom brought a large grey mare and a chestnut filly into the yard. Wilshere mounted the mare, took the reins of the filly and led it to some steps. The groom held the stirrup while Anne mounted. Wilshere arranged her reins for her, gave brief instructions, and they followed the major out on to the hills.

They walked the horses, climbing steadily through the pine on a sandy track through the forest. Wilshere retreated into himself, blended to the animal beneath him. Anne moved her body with the filly’s strides, trying to think of a way into Wilshere, looking at the man in his silent place – his hell, he’d said. After three-quarters of an hour they arrived at a stone fountain and a low, miserable grey rock building, with a cross on the apex of its roof, which was submerged in the surrounding vegetation with the green streaks of damp clinging to its walls. Wilshere seemed surprised and annoyed to find himself at this spot.

‘What is it?’ asked Anne.

‘Convento dos Capuchos,’ said Wilshere, turning his horse. ‘A monastery.’

‘Shall we take a look?’

‘No,’ he said abruptly. ‘I took the wrong road.’

‘Why don’t we take a look now that we’re here?’

‘I said no.’

Wilshere turned her horse and set her off back down the track. His own mare kept settling back on her hindquarters, raising her forelegs off the ground, apparently uncomfortable with the rider. They danced while Wilshere tried to wrestle her back down. Then he dug in his heels and let her have her head. They careered down the track, almost sideways, Wilshere bent over the horse’s neck. They closed rapidly on the filly and, as they reached her, Wilshere leaned over and gave the animal a whack across the rump with his crop. Anne felt her horse start beneath her, tip back on its hind legs. Then the filly lunged forward, tearing the reins from her fingers and throwing Anne on to its neck so that the mane, coarse and bitter, was stuffed into her mouth.

The filly’s fast hooves rattled over the dry stones and the hard-baked track ripped past underneath. Anne hung on to the mane with her cheek pressed to the smooth skin, felt the thick beam of muscle in the horse’s neck, saw the animal’s eye wild and white-edged with panic.

The track narrowed, the trees closed in. The filly’s tongue was hanging out of its head as foam crept up her jaws. Branches snapped at their flanks, cracking against Anne’s flattened back, whipping against the horse’s chest, spurring it on. Adrenalin had burst into her system and yet she found herself detached – both on the horse and yet looking on, too.

They burst out of the trees and cloud into the brilliant sunshine, a rough brush underfoot. The wind crumpled in her ears. There was a clattering noise off to the right. A charging presence pursued by dust swirling in tight screws closed on her. The hot lathered flanks of the major’s black stallion pulled alongside and a thick wrist gripped the strap of the bridle and the fractions crunched into each other to make slow seconds until they stopped altogether.

She pushed herself up straight against the major’s arm, legs quivering.

‘Where’s Senhor Wilshere?’ asked the major, in English.

‘I don’t know…I…’ she ducked at the memory of him, crop raised, bearing down on her.

‘Something frightened the horse?’

Anne, gulping at the air, working at the events in her brain, searched for any possible reason for Wilshere’s bizarre action.

‘Whose clothes are these?’ she asked.

‘I don’t understand,’ said the major, squinting at her.

‘Mr Wilshere…did he come riding here with someone…before? Before me. Another woman?’

‘You mean the American?’

‘Yes, the American. What was her name?’

‘Senhora Laverne,’ he said. ‘Senhora Judy Laverne.’

‘What happened to her? What happened to Judy Laverne?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve been away some months. Perhaps she went back to America.’

‘Without her clothes?’

‘Her clothes?’ he asked, confused.

‘These clothes,’ she said, slapping her thigh.

The major wiped sweat out of his eyebrow.

‘How long have you known Senhor Wilshere?’ he asked.

‘I arrived in Portugal yesterday.’

‘You didn’t know him before?’

‘Before what?’

‘Before you arrived,’ he said, solid, calm.

Anne filled her lungs with air, unbuttoned her jacket. The filly turned and put its head to the stallion’s flank. High up on a ridge Wilshere appeared, white shirt against the blue sky, and waved at them. He worked the mare down through the brush and rocks and on to the path.

‘I lost you,’ said Wilshere, approaching them on the now subdued mare. As if that was all it had been.

‘My horse bolted,’ said Anne, not ready for confrontation, not in front of the major. ‘The major rescued me.’

Consternation crossed Wilshere’s face. It seemed so genuine that Anne almost accepted it, even though she’d seen he’d stripped off his jacket, which was strapped to the back of his saddle. Not the behaviour of an urgent man.

‘Well, thank you, Major,’ said Wilshere. ‘You must be rattled, my dear. Perhaps we should head back.’

Anne eased the filly out from under the stallion’s haunch. Wilshere gave the major a casual half-salute. They headed back down the path towards the dense cloud on the north side of the serra. The major stayed behind, motionless on his horse, solid as an equestrian statue in a city square.

They walked nose to tail back to the quinta, back into the gloom of the low cloud. Anne, mesmerized by the rhythm of the horses, replayed the incident; not Wilshere’s madness, but the exhilaration of the adrenalin rush on the back of the runaway horse – fear had not been as frightening as she’d imagined. It seemed to tell her something about the faces in the gaming room of the casino, about the thrill and fear of gain and loss. Perhaps there was more thrill in losing – the morbid draw of possible catastrophe. She shuddered, which turned Wilshere in his saddle. She gave him a smile torn from a magazine.

They dismounted in the courtyard of the quinta and the groom led the horses away. Anne’s buttocks and thighs felt like a cooling bronze’s, the heat deep within, the surface set hard. The sweat in her hair was now cold, her muscles seizing as she followed Wilshere under the arches and into a rustic stone-flagged room with heavy wooden furniture, a dark family portrait and English hunting prints on the walls. Stags’ horns pricked the palpable, mildewed air in the room. A macabre chandelier of antlers hung from the ceiling, unlit, over a refectory table set with plates of cheeses, chouriços, presunto, olives and bread. Wilshere poured himself a large tumbler of white wine from a clay jug and handed a clay goblet to Anne.

‘Cheers,’ he said. ‘You’ll need it after that.’

She was infuriated by his coolness and sank her wine. Questions backed up inside her. She wanted to find the join in his armour, prise it open, stick him with something sharp.

‘Care for anything to eat?’ he asked, diverting her, fluttering his hand over the food, not interested himself, gulping at the wine.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I didn’t eat breakfast.’

‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have dragged you out…’

‘No, no, I was glad of it,’ she said, facing off his mask of infallible politeness. ‘I wanted to ask…’

‘What?’ he teased, an interruption to undermine her. ‘What did you want to ask?’

‘I wanted to ask about the major,’ she said, not that interested in him, but he could be a lever, man against man. She took an olive from the table.

‘What about him?’

‘He seemed a very…ah…noble man,’ she said, walking around to the opposite side of the table, grinding her teeth on the olive pit.

‘Noble?’ Wilshere asked himself. ‘Noble. Yes, noble’s…very apposite. He is a noble fellow.’

‘Nobility sounds so old-fashioned these days,’ said Anne, keeping her eye on Wilshere, who had come round to her side of the table.

‘Something, perhaps, we associate with earlier conflicts,’ he said.

‘Except the major’s not at war and yet he has…’

‘Quite so, Anne, quite so. Perhaps because he was mounted on a horse, that made you think of nobility and other aspects of the chivalric code.’

‘Other aspects?’

‘Rescuing damsels in distress,’ he said, blinking, almost batting his eyelids.

She peeled a length of skin off a slice of chouriço, Wilshere’s presence close, unmistakably extortionate. He seemed like a small boy curious as to what would happen to a spider if he were to dismember it.

‘I suppose if he’d had a red satin-lined cloak and a plumed tricorn hat…’ she started, and Wilshere guffawed to the antler chandelier, reducing this little episode to some romantic nonsense. Anne gritted her teeth.

‘Is that Mafalda’s family up there?’ she asked, pointing with her cup to the portrait of a group whose white faces stared out of the dark oil of the painting.

‘Yes,’ said Wilshere, without shifting his gaze from her. ‘They used to come out here…’

‘Hunting?’

‘No, no, these trophies are from all over…Spain, France…I think there’s even some Scottish ones up there…Yes, look, Glamis Castle. No. The family came out here to keep cool in the summer. Lisbon, you know, can get awfully torrid and the family seat is in the Alentejo, which is even more so.’

‘And her family now?’

‘Most of that lot are dead now. In fact her father died only last year. She took it very badly…been rather unwell as a result. Not good…as Cardew said…’

Anne paced the perimeter of the room. Below the antlers were photographs, hunting parties standing behind the day’s slaughter, which in some cases was so considerable that the hunters were reduced to stick figures at the apex of thousands of rabbits, birds and some fewer deer and boar.

‘Isn’t that Mafalda,’ asked Anne, surprised to see the woman young and smiling, gregarious amidst a group, ‘with a gun?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Wilshere, black against the grey light of the window, ‘she’s very handy with a twelve bore. Crack shot with a rifle too. I never saw it, mind, but her father told me she had quite an eye.’

‘Mafalda,’ said Anne, impressed.

She moved round to the portrait.

‘Is she in this?’

‘It’s not that good, is it?’ said Wilshere. ‘She’s third from the left, next to her brother.’

‘And the brother?’ asked Anne, face up to the two figures.

‘Hunting accident…years ago, before I met Mafalda,’ he said, almost confirming that he couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with it. ‘Tragic.’

‘Mafalda must feel quite lonely now.’

Wilshere didn’t answer.

Chapter 11

Sunday, 16th July 1944, Wilshere’s house, Estoril, near Lisbon.

The heat steepened in the late afternoon, the Quinta da Águia slumped in silence. Anne’s room on the west side of the house was hot, even with the shutters closed, and she couldn’t sleep with the fan churning the stuffiness. She took her swimsuit, a robe and a towel and went down to the beach. Estoril was submerged in a haze, the sea blended into the sky.

There was no breeze in the gardens of the square. The palms hung their shredded heads in the heat. The cafés were empty. She crossed the road, the silver railway tracks, continued past the empty station and on to the beach. She woke up an attendant, who lay in the shade of one of the huts, gave him a coin and changed.

The beach looked empty at first, but as she walked down towards the sea a couple lying on the sand, arms linked, were given away by a dog digging at their feet. A woman in a white two-piece bathing costume stood up to reveal she’d been lying with someone in a dip in the sand. She wore white-framed sunglasses and was talking to a comatose man at her feet while smoking a cigarette in a short black holder. Anne sat on her towel twenty feet away from the woman, who whined loudly in an American accent.

‘Hal,’ she said.

‘Yeah,’ said Hal, drowsy, a straw hat over his eyes and a cigar burning out of the back of his hand which lay on his chest.

‘I don’t see why we have to be nice to Beecham Lazard.’

No answer. She toed him in the leg.

‘Yeah, right. Beecham. Before you get going on Beecham, lemme ask you, what are we doin’ here, Mary? What are we doin’ in Lisbon?’

‘Making money,’ she said, bored to death.

‘Right.’

‘Except we ain’t made none yet.’

‘Right, too. Know why?’

‘ ‘Cos you think Beecham Lazard’s the key to success. Me…?’

‘Yeah, I know what you think…but he happens to be my only contact.’

She sat back on her heels and looked around. Anne studied the sand between her toes. Hal snored. Mary shook her head, stood and walked straight up to Anne.

‘You speak English?’

‘I am English.’

‘Oh, great,’ she said, and introduced herself as Mary Couples. ‘I knew you had to be a foreigner…sitting on your own on the beach. Not a Portuguesey kinda thing to do.’

‘No?’

‘Not yet. The girls have shaken off their chaperones but they haven’t quite got the idea of going some place on their own. You ever seen a Portuguese woman in a bar without a man?’

‘I haven’t…’

‘Exactly,’ she said, and removed the smoked cigarette from her holder.

Hal snorted, growled and continued snoring louder.

‘That’s my husband, Hal…over there…making all the noise,’ she said, and looked at him, sadly, as if he was permanently crippled. ‘He got stewed lunchtime. He got stewed last night in the casino. He was playing roulette. He won. He always gets stewed when he wins. He always gets stewed, period.’

‘I was in the casino last night,’ said Anne. ‘I didn’t see you.’

‘I stay at home when he plays roulette.’

‘Where’s that?’ Anne asked, being polite.

‘A little place in Cascais. You?’

‘I’m staying with the Wilsheres here in Estoril.’

‘Oh yeah, nice place. Hal and I are going up there tonight for the cocktail party. You gonna be there?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Anne, digging a hole in the sand with her heel. ‘Do you know many of the Americans round here? I heard you talking about Beecham Lazard.’

‘Sure…he’s not my favourite out of all of them…’

‘Did you know a woman called Judy Laverne?’

‘I heard about her. She was before my time. Hal and I have only been here a couple of months.’

‘But you know what happened to her?’

There was a fraction of silence, a half-beat, before Mary replied.

‘I think she was deported. Some confusion with her visa. She went to the PVDE, like you have to every three months, and they wouldn’t renew it. She had three days to leave. I think that was it. Judy Laverne…?’ She repeated the name to herself, shook her head.

‘You don’t know why?’

‘The PVDE don’t have to give explanations. They’re the secret police. They do what the hell they like and a lot of it’s not nice. I mean, it’s OK for foreigners, the worst that can happen is they deport you…no, that’s not true, the worst that can happen is they stick you in jail and then deport you…but they don’t do anything to you.’

‘Do anything to you?’

‘Torture is something they do to their own people,’ she said, putting a new cigarette into the holder. ‘Like Hal says, it’s all palm trees and the casino on the surface and…You haven’t been here very long, have you?’

‘Didn’t Judy Laverne work for somebody? Wasn’t there anybody who could help her?’

Mary weighed that for a few moments.

‘You mentioned Beecham Lazard,’ she said.

‘I was introduced to him last night…in the casino,’ said Anne. ‘She used to work for him?’

Mary turned down the corners of her heavily lipsticked mouth.

‘If he couldn’t keep her in the country, nobody could.’

‘And what does Beecham Lazard do?’

‘If you want to do business in this town – with anybody, with the government, with the Allies, with the Nazis, anybody – you gotta go through Beecham Lazard…that’s what Hal says, anyway.’

‘You don’t like him…I heard you earlier.’

‘Only because he likes to touch and I consider myself a bit of a museum piece these days…you can look and that’s it,’ she said, pushing the sunglasses up over her head and squeezing the bridge of her nose.

Mary Couples was no longer stunning. She had been, but the green eyes under her dark hair didn’t shine any more. They had the matt finish of someone who saw things a little more clearly. She was in her thirties and, although intact on the outside, the mind had been working from the inside and the first signs of that weariness, from the long years of holding things together, had crept into her face and started making a bed.

‘So why couldn’t Beecham Lazard help her?’

‘What’s your interest in Judy Laverne?’ asked Mary, nailing Anne with a direct look.

‘I found myself wearing her riding clothes this morning,’ she said. ‘I was with Patrick Wilshere out on the serra. I was just wondering why.’

‘Welcome to Estoril,’ said Mary, and the sunglasses dropped over her eyes.

‘Does that mean Wilshere was having an affair with her?’

Mary nodded.

‘And somebody arranged for her to be deported?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, irritated now. ‘Ask Beecham Lazard. One of his pals is the Director of the PVDE, Captain Lourenço.’

‘Are you saying that he got rid of her?’

Mary froze and then in a nervous reaction started checking herself for a lighter which was still lying next to Hal’s heaving body.

‘Gotta get a light,’ she said, and staggered back to her husband, whose cigar was still trailing acrid smoke into the late afternoon.

A figure ran and plunged into the sea and set off in an explosive burst of crawl.

‘The PVDE,’ said Mary, handing her a cigarette, lighting it, ‘is a state within a state. Nobody tells them what to do…Did you tell me your name?’

‘No, I didn’t. It’s Anne. Anne Ashworth.’

‘You working out here?’

‘I work for Shell. I’m a secretary. My boss is a friend of Patrick Wilshere…which is why he offered me a room.’

‘Who’s your boss?’

‘Cardew. Meredith Cardew,’ said Anne, her insides congealing as Mary turned the talk around.

‘Merry,’ she said, ‘that’s what Hal calls him, which I suppose is fair. He’s always smiling. Saying nothing, but smiling.’

‘Yes, well, he’s my boss.’

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