Simon Tolkien Inspector Trave Trilogy: Orders From Berlin, The Inheritance, The King of Diamonds. Simon Tolkien
dust instead and once again took hold of the hand. He squeezed it gently and felt an answering response, and then he remained where he was, summoning all the love in his soul, trying to communicate it through the medium of touch to the invisible dying woman by his side.
He had no idea how long his vigil lasted, except that it was dark when the hand held his hard for a moment and then relaxed, letting go. She was gone. He could feel it. She didn’t need him any more. He wondered who she was, what her life had been, and realized that he would never know. Yet he felt certain that he had learnt more in the preceding hour than he had done in all his life before he entered the ruined street. And until his dying day, he never forgot the feel of the woman’s hand in his and the knowledge it brought of the transcendent power of human love in the face of certain death.
Earlier the same evening, Seaforth sat alone in the living room of his Chelsea apartment, twirling the stem of a glass of dry white wine between his fingers. From his carefully positioned armchair, he had a beautiful view not only over the canopy of the plane trees in Cadogan Square below, but east too over the rooftops towards the Palace of Westminster, where Churchill was no doubt meeting his ministers, plotting his next move in the war against Germany. A war he was going to lose because he now had less than a week to live. Seaforth knew he might be being optimistic about the timing. The journey of the Portuguese diplomatic bag from Lisbon to the embassy in London could take anywhere from several days to more than a week depending on interruptions to air and shipping routes caused by the war, but he had no doubt that he would receive the go-ahead from Berlin by the end of the month and that Heydrich would provide him with sufficiently appetizing intelligence to ensure another summons to the Prime Minister’s presence.
He had prepared the ‘detailed written report’ on the assassination plan that Heydrich had requested in something of a hurry, distracted by the unwelcome news that Heydrich’s radio message to him had been intercepted and decoded. But he had ended up feeling pleased with his composition. The writing was clear and sharp, and in the days since he’d taken it to the embassy, Seaforth had enjoyed reading the text over to himself in bed before he went to sleep, repeating some of his better phrases out loud as he imagined Hitler considering the same passages in his office in the Reich Chancellery, admiring the daring and brilliance of Agent D.
It was the simplicity of the idea that delighted Seaforth the most. He would receive credit for trying to prevent an assassination that he had in fact committed, and with any luck he would end up taking over Thorn’s job as deputy director as a reward for having shot the poor bastard in the head. Seaforth smiled at the thought of Thorn, patriotic to his backbone, immortalized in death as the ultimate traitor to his country. Commemorated in wax, he could have a special place alongside Guy Fawkes and John Wilkes Booth in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds.
Seaforth wondered why he hated Thorn so much. His own pursuit of Ava had been necessary to cover up her father’s murder, but Thorn’s obvious jealousy, first apparent at the funeral, had added spice, and Seaforth had taken a sadistic delight in observing Thorn’s impotent rage when they passed each other in the corridors at HQ and, best of all, when Thorn found him hiding in Ava’s bedroom. He looked forward with relish to the prospect of putting a bullet in Thorn’s head. Why? Partly, of course, it was because Thorn hated him. But it was more than that. Thorn had come to stand in Seaforth’s mind for that whole class of self-assured, born-to-rule, upper-class Englishmen that this war was on the way to wiping out once and for all.
Seaforth shuddered as he recalled his Scottish border childhood and his father touching his cap as the old squire rode past on his big black hunter; the same toffee-nosed English landowner who made his father pay an exorbitant rent that he could not afford for a tumbledown shack not fit for human habitation. His family had had so little money during the last war that his mother had been forced to work in the scullery up at the big house, washing their expensive porcelain plates and crystal glasses to make ends meet, while her husband and her eldest son fought and died in the Flanders mud to preserve the very system that was grinding them and their kind into the ground.
Seaforth remembered how she’d dressed up in her Sunday best and gone down on her hands and knees to the squire to get her surviving son an exemption when the government lowered the conscription age to seventeen in the last year of the war. And then she’d told Seaforth to be grateful when the tribunal gave him a six-month postponement on his call-up. Grateful! Seaforth would have liked to pull the old man out of bed by his wiry white whiskers and kick him down the stairs of his Queen Anne manor house. But for now he’d have to be content with killing Thorn.
And Churchill too. With Winston out of the way, England would make peace. As far as Seaforth was concerned, this was the only downside of his plan. The Blitz was levelling London and levelling society too; with peace, that process might be delayed. But not for long. Seaforth agreed wholeheartedly with Karl Marx that Thorn and his class could not last. The tide of history was against them. Seaforth was without political ideals. Neither Fascism nor Communism had any great appeal for him, and his tie to Nazi Germany was a marriage not of love but of convenience. His interest was in destruction, not creation. What came after didn’t much matter.
He was a confirmed atheist, had been for as long as he could remember. How could he be anything else after what he’d been through? But in recent days he had felt a growing sense that some invisible force was guiding him, leading him by the hand until the moment his fingers would squeeze the trigger of the Colt semi-automatic pistol registered to Alec Thorn that was currently locked in the bottom drawer of his desk on the other side of the room, and he would dispatch to kingdom come the two people he disliked most in all the world.
As far as Seaforth could see, the only complicating factor now was Ava. He was due to meet her in Sloane Square in an hour, and he was looking forward to the prospect. It was true that he didn’t need her any more now that her husband had been charged with Albert’s murder, but he didn’t think he could simply stop seeing her. That would make her suspicious, and the last thing he needed was for her to show up at HQ and start asking questions. So he’d waited a day to let the dust settle after Bertram’s arrest and had then called her as agreed. She’d picked up straight away. It was almost as if she’d been waiting by the phone, and she’d sounded much more enthusiastic about seeing him than she had before. Perhaps tonight he would be able to take their relationship to a different level.
Seaforth prided himself on his ability to live without women. They weren’t worth the risk. From time to time he paid money to a high-class agency that guaranteed discretion for ‘professional visits’. But in recent months he’d preferred abstinence, and the arduous process of conquering Ava’s reservations had proved far more fulfilling than anything the agency could provide. It was early days yet and she was still suspicious of him – but slowly, inch by inch, he could feel her giving way. And as she yielded, she also emerged from her shell. Underneath her head scarf and mackintosh, away from the shadow of her awful husband, she was a different person. She was like a chrysalis metamorphosing into a brightly coloured butterfly. There was a fire in her green eyes and a hunger for life that he found attractive. Yet she was fragile too, thin and delicate; he knew he could break her with a twist of his wrists.
Why should he deny himself the pleasure of pursuing her to a final seduction when seeing her was the more sensible course? He was enjoying himself, and she was a useful distraction from the restlessness he’d been suffering ever since his visit to Churchill’s bunker two weeks earlier.
He’d always been a good sleeper, but now he woke up every night in the small hours, struggling in a cold sweat out of horrible nightmares in which his brother and father returned as living dead, covered with the mud of Flanders, reproaching him with white, wide-open, empty eyes for leaving them so long unavenged. The noise of the Blitz didn’t help, of course, but he was sure it wasn’t fear that was causing his insomnia. It had never occurred to Seaforth to take shelter even when the bombs had started falling close by to Cadogan Square. Perhaps it was his newfound sense of personal destiny, but he was irrationally certain that no bomb had his name on it. If he was going to die, it would be in a more significant