Simon Tolkien Inspector Trave Trilogy: Orders From Berlin, The Inheritance, The King of Diamonds. Simon Tolkien

       CHAPTER 1

      Albert stood waiting at the bus stop for a full half-hour before he gave up. He’d have taken a taxi if he’d had the chance, but the only ones that passed were already taken. He cursed the driver that had brought him over from Battersea and refused to wait – a stupid little man who’d gone the longer way deliberately just so he could charge a higher fare. The only choice now was the Underground. It was getting late and Albert knew he should have bitten the bullet and taken the Tube earlier, but he had delayed because he hated it below ground. He always had. It was why he made his daughter so angry, refusing to go down in the basement with the rest of his neighbours at Gloucester Mansions during air raids until she’d started coming round and forcing him. Ever since the last war, he’d had nightmares about being buried alive. He didn’t want it to happen even after he was dead, and he’d left strict instructions in his will that he was to be cremated. He’d even made Bertram swear an oath to carry out his wishes, and Bertie, not Ava, was his executor. Albert was no fool. He knew that his son-in-law was never going to set the world on fire, but he’d do what he was told. Not like his daughter, Ava, who always thought she knew best. She’d abandoned him just when he’d needed her most – after her mother died and he’d been forced out of HQ and his world had come tumbling down on him like an avalanche of broken rocks.

      Buried alive … Albert was claustrophobic, chronically claustrophobic, and now he had no choice but to confront his fears. He couldn’t stay where he was, waiting for darkness and the German bombers to appear overhead, and besides, he was convinced he was being watched. He was a sitting duck out here in the open; he’d be much better off below among the crowds sheltering on the platforms and the stairs, even though his hands shook and his heart thumped at the prospect of being pursued through the subterranean passages under the flickering lights, stepping over the shelterers, tripping on their possessions until at last he fell.

      Unless his imagination was playing tricks on him, of course, and there was no one observing him from across the street or around the corner, waiting for the chance to strike. God knows it was possible. The sensation that he was being watched was just that, a sixth sense, nothing more. He hadn’t actually seen anything suspicious since he got out of the taxi. Once upon a time, he would have known how to secure his position; how to find out for sure if anyone was there. Thirty years earlier, in another lifetime, he had been an agent himself, out in the field in Austria-Hungary and the Kaiser’s Germany, with a mission to scent out war plans and assess military intentions in the years before Sarajevo, before the old order crumbled and fell to the ground. His language skills had qualified him – he was fluent in German – and as a young man he had been quick on his feet and clever with people. He’d known how to look after himself in a hostile environment – how to check for telltale shapes in the shadows, how to tell innocent from purposeful footsteps, how to double back on himself at the critical moment of a pursuit. But it was all too long ago: he’d spent too many years since then sitting behind a desk reading the reports of other agents to know how to survive as one himself, so he would just have to trust to luck and hope that his anxiety was the product of an old man’s overactive imagination. After all, wasn’t that what Ava said when he worried too much about his health?

      Reluctantly, he crossed the road and joined the straggling queue of people who were heading down the concrete steps into the Underground. They were a ragtag lot, these refugees from the bombing, Albert thought. Whole families with blankets and pillows and portable stoves and in one case even a wind-up gramophone, all desperate to get below and claim the best pitches until every inch of platform space was taken and latecomers had to sleep as best they could, sitting up on the winding stairs or flattened against the walls in the narrow corridors. All of them crammed in together like sardines because they thought they’d be safe, except that that was an illusion. Albert knew that even if they didn’t. Only the day before a heavy bomb had fallen on Marble Arch station, rupturing the water mains and fracturing the gas pipes. Seven people had died, enduring horrible deaths that didn’t bear thinking about, buried under piles of broken masonry, slowly drowning in sewage and seeping water, choking on the dust and gas. And the Tube would be hit again. It was only a matter of time. Nowhere was safe any more in this God-forsaken city.

      Albert bought his ticket and picked his way down the stairs to the westbound platform, holding his nose against the stench of the overflowing toilets in the booking hall. And down below it was even worse, with the stink of hundreds of unwashed bodies crammed together in the fetid, airless atmosphere. The heat was extraordinary after the cold outside; some of the men were stripped to the waist, and most of the children were half naked. And the noise too was overwhelming. People were singing and shouting; a few were even playing mouth organs and beating on home-made drums. Albert was astonished by their cheerfulness inside this living hell. At least the overpowering assault on his senses meant that he no longer had the sensation of being followed. Someone could have been right on his shoulder and he would have neither known nor cared. All he wanted to do was get on a train and escape.

      Slowly and laboriously, concentrating only on remaining upright, Albert picked his way between the shelterers and their possessions – filthy mattresses and battered suitcases, several that were serving as beds for tiny babies – until he reached the edge of the platform, where he waited nervously for his train, staring down at the columns of mice running this way and that between the tracks.

      None of the shelterers seemed to be paying any attention to the rule that only passengers could stand in front of the white line painted eight feet from the platform edge, and when the westbound train finally arrived, there was a further delay while it waited in the tunnel as a team of London Passenger Transport Board officers went up and down the platform with sticks, pushing back the stray feet and arms that were overhanging the line.

      Finally the train doors closed and Albert slumped back in his seat, exhausted by his ordeal. All this for a wasted journey, he thought bitterly, unless the message he’d left got through, and even then it might be too late. No one took him seriously any more at HQ except Alec. He knew that. He was yesterday’s man, and his fears were yesterday’s news. He closed his eyes for a moment, lulled by the noise of the train, and then came wide awake again, starting up from his seat. Someone was touching him, feeling at his neck, feeling for that point where a man could be killed with a single chop of the hand. But when he turned around, he saw nothing – just people getting on and off at Victoria, brushing against him as they passed.

      He got out at Sloane Square and walked down to the river. A few cars and bicycles passed him by, but once again there were no taxis and the only bus he saw was going in the opposite direction. Albert looked up at the passengers’ anxious faces behind the meshed-over windows and wished he were home. He was too old for this, he thought as he stumbled and almost fell over a green hose twisting like a snake across the pavement. Glancing to his left, he saw its nozzle lying useless in the front garden of a half-destroyed Victorian house – a casualty of the previous night’s bombing. It had been sliced down the middle by a direct hit. Upstairs, the front wall had been blown away and an unmade bed and an open wardrobe hung on the edge of what was left of the sagging floor, like an unlit film set for a cheap movie, while at the back a full-length mahogany mirror swung gently to and fro in the breeze, creaking on its hinges but yielding no reflection, as all its glass was gone, shattered into a million silver fragments that glistened like raindrops on the dark blue carpet. But on either side of this scene of devastation, the other houses in the terrace were all untouched – rows of placid doors and windows, even a smoking chimney or two. Albert didn’t need reminding that this war was random in its choice of victims, the destruction it wrought entirely indiscriminate and unpredictable.

      He turned away. He’d seen worse, far worse, in France and Belgium twenty-five years before – severed limbs and bloated soldiers’