Simon Tolkien Inspector Trave Trilogy: Orders From Berlin, The Inheritance, The King of Diamonds. Simon Tolkien
he had made using the last leaves of his weekly ration. He held the chipped mug in both hands, feeling the warmth travelling up his arms, and thought of helping the bereaved woman to drink tea in her dead father’s flat on the other side of the river the previous evening. He’d felt sorry for her, and she’d reminded him of his wife in some way that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Something about her hair, or maybe it was just that all women had started to remind him of Vanessa. He missed her and missed his three-year-old son too with an ache that had wound itself around his heart and never seemed to go away. They were only sixty miles away, still living in the same little terrace house in north Oxford that had been their first family home until Trave’s transfer up to London in the early summer, but they might as well have been at the north end of Scotland for how often he got to see them now. There was never any time. Between police work in the day and his civil defence duties at the weekends, he lived his life in a state of permanent exhaustion. In the first weeks of the bombing, he’d dutifully crossed the park with the rest of the local population and gone down into the Underground at Fulham Broadway to take shelter, but now on his nights off he didn’t bother. He was too damn tired, and he would kick off his shoes and fall into bed in his clothes on his return home and sleep even as the bombs fell sometimes as close as a few streets away. And then wake like today in the cold dawn with the sensation of having forgotten something vitally important – vivid important dreams that his conscious mind couldn’t recover.
Trave rubbed his eyes, trying to concentrate on the case in hand. He hadn’t liked the woman’s husband, the fat doctor with the bow tie, any more than his inspector had. He knew the type – officious domestic tyrants expecting to be waited on hand and foot by wives who’d been brought up to love and obey by equally chauvinistic fathers. And Brive hadn’t denied knowing all about the old man’s will; he’d probably had a hand in persuading Morrison to add his name to his wife’s as co-beneficiary of the estate. It was going to be interesting to see how much Mr Albert Morrison was worth. Perhaps the son-in-law was in financial need. God knows that could provide motive enough to commit murder in these impoverished times. But then why would he go about it in such a stupid, messy way? Ava had made her father sound like a professional hypochondriac, and Brive was Morrison’s doctor. It would have been easy for him to poison the old man by persuading him to take some newfangled medicine that he’d specially recommended. Unless, of course, the murder was unplanned: the result of some argument between the two of them that had got out of control – over money, perhaps, or the dead man’s will.
And if Brive was the murderer, why had he returned so quickly to the scene of his crime and with such an inadequate explanation for his sudden appearance? Was it to get rid of something incriminating, or was it to fetch something that he’d left behind when he’d had to leave in such a hurry, running breathless down the fire escape and out into the night? He’d certainly tried to pick up the discarded papers from the floor before Quaid had stopped him. Ava had been adamant that they hadn’t been there in the afternoon, and Morrison’s will had been among them. That much couldn’t be denied.
Trave knew what Quaid’s take on the case was going to be. It was obvious that Brive had made a bad impression on the inspector from the moment he’d walked through the front door of Gloucester Mansions, and Trave had worked with Quaid long enough to know how much importance the inspector attached to first impressions. Once he’d latched on to a suspect, the legal burden of proof in any investigation tended to get stood on its head. Today he would get busy building a case against Brive, and he wouldn’t stop until he had enough circumstantial evidence to charge him with the murder. Evidence that led in other directions would be studiously ignored – like the strange handwritten note that Trave had found in the dead man’s pocket or Morrison’s sudden unexplained departure in the taxi in the late afternoon, shortly after Mrs Graves had brought him up the other note that the middle-aged balding man called Thorn had left for him while he was out.
The system worked well when Quaid had the right man in his sights, but sometimes Trave wasn’t convinced that the inspector had got it right, and there had been several occasions recently when his efforts to point out the holes in Quaid’s theories had led to angry clashes with his superior officer, who’d accused him of disloyalty and even sabotage.
Trave didn’t know why he cared so much. He looked at his pale reflection in the cracked mirror over the sink as he began to shave and felt he could make no sense of the thin, hollow-cheeked man staring back at him out of the glass. Hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of innocent people were dying in the city every night. Blown to pieces by high-explosive bombs so that sometimes there was not even a trace left of their bodies; or trapped underground, drowning in water or gas leaking from ruptured pipes. Why, then, should he spend his days worrying over whether Quaid had charged the wrong man with a crime? All he was doing was making Quaid hate him and pushing for the day he’d be kicked off the force and sent off to join the Army or what was left of it after the disaster at Dunkirk. Unless, of course, that was what he really wanted and his constant questioning of orders was no more than a protracted form of professional suicide.
When he was a boy, Trave had never had any doubts about what he wanted to be when he grew up. Other kids in his class at the local grammar school had fantasized about becoming fighter pilots or emigrating on a steamship to America like Charlie Chaplin and becoming stars of the silver screen. But as far back as he could remember, he had always known that he was going to be a policeman. Looking back, he supposed that his ambition was rooted in some ideal of fighting for the right side, making sense of a senseless world by bringing it order and justice; but where that idea had originated he could only speculate – perhaps in his vicarious experience of the First War, the one his father had fought in on the Ypres Salient twenty-five years before. Harold Trave had disappeared down the front garden path in his bright new khaki uniform with a smile and a wave of the hand one autumn day in 1915 and had come back three years later utterly changed. And from then on, it was as if he were somewhere else all the time, even when he was physically present in the house, living in a terrible unseen world entirely outside the boundaries of his family’s experience. Trave remembered as if it were yesterday looking up from his schoolbooks in the front parlour one afternoon in 1920 and seeing his father gazing sightlessly into the middle distance with tears rolling down his cheeks.
And he recalled how in the evenings after the Armistice his father would go to bed with the rest of the family but then get up quietly in the middle of the night, put on his shoes by the door, and go out God knows where until morning. Trave asked his mother about it once or twice, but she was harsh with him, telling him in that quick scolding voice of hers that she didn’t know where his father went – it was none of their business; something they had to accept; something his father needed to do. And now Trave thought that Harold had probably just walked and walked as so many other soldiers did in those years after they were demobbed, silently wearing out their shoes on the city streets, alone in the darkness with their memories until morning brought an end to their wanderings.
Once, in the summer of 1916, Trave’s mother had taken him down to Brighton for the day. He’d built sandcastles on the beach and paddled in the cold surf, but his heart hadn’t been in it. Over the sound of the waves, he could faintly hear the boom of the guns on the other side of the Channel and had known without asking that it was the war that was making the noise; it was where his father was. And now they were back where they had started – the war to end wars had kept the peace for barely twenty years.
Trave closed his eyes and was back in Oxford with Vanessa, listening to Neville Chamberlain’s sad, reedy voice coming over the radio from 10 Downing Street that hot summer’s day the year before: ‘This morning the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by eleven a.m. that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.’ At war with Germany. Trave had stood outside the railway station and watched the soldiers going off to fight and had seen them a year later coming back on the troop trains from the coast after Dunkirk with that same hollow, faraway look in their eyes that his father had had when he came home. And he had felt, still felt, that he should have been there with them.
Churchill was right: the civilized world