Simon Tolkien Inspector Trave Trilogy: Orders From Berlin, The Inheritance, The King of Diamonds. Simon Tolkien
a theatre set, waiting for a play to begin.
There was only one picture, but it dominated the room. It hung in pride of place above the mantelpiece and depicted the distorted head of a human being. The skull was half caved in and the eyes had almost disappeared up into the bulging grey forehead, pushed back by the open howling mouth. All this set against a burning orange background. Ava was horrified by the painting. It was like nothing she’d ever seen. She could not deny its hard, visceral power, but she realized that the vision behind it was of life as pain – an endless, searing brutality that only death would end.
‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ said Seaforth, watching Ava with interest as she took in the picture.
‘It’s terrifying. Who painted it?’
‘An artist called Francis Bacon, who believes that men are meat,’ said Seaforth with a wry smile. ‘He’s a penniless alcoholic gambler who paints over his own pictures because he can’t afford to buy canvas, but I’m quite sure that one day people will say he’s the century’s greatest painter – if he doesn’t kill himself with booze before his time, which is more than likely,’ he added.
‘Why do you like his pictures?’
‘Because he tells the truth.’
‘That men are meat?’
‘That they are cruel, certainly. How could you think otherwise after what has happened in the world in the last thirty years? But let’s not talk about that any more,’ he said with a smile. ‘We keep coming back to the war and that’s the subject we agreed to avoid, wasn’t it?’
He went into the kitchen to make coffee, leaving her sitting on the sofa. She felt frustrated. The apartment was beautiful but impersonal. It told her nothing about Seaforth. She needed to make something happen.
Just as he was coming back into the room, the phone rang. He went over to the desk and picked it up, listened for a moment, and told the person at the other end of the line to wait.
‘I’m sorry. I have to take this,’ he said. ‘I won’t be long.’
‘Is there somewhere I can freshen up?’ she asked.
He pointed towards a half-open door across from the kitchen and returned to the telephone.
She went through the door and found herself in a bedroom – a thick carpet and expensive modern furniture – and beyond, through another door, the bathroom was a vision of white tile and chrome and glass. But it was a vision that Ava resisted. If she was careful, there was time to look around. She could hear Seaforth talking in the room behind her. There was nothing personal that caught her eye except for a single photograph of a young man in uniform on top of a chest of drawers opposite the bed. It looked like Seaforth, but it wasn’t him. She opened the drawers, but, as she suspected, they were full of clothes, so she went over to the night table by the bed and opened the drawer in that. There was a book inside – an old, battered book. She picked it up and began to turn the pages. It was a diary of some kind, written in September and October 1915.
She chose an entry at random and began to read:
All day it has rained. Just like yesterday and the day before that. There are corpses of our mates that we can’t get in from the German wire. It’s death to try – the Boche leave them hanging there like warnings. As the days pass, they swell until the wall of the stomach collapses either naturally or when punctured by a bullet, and then a disgusting sweet smell floats back to us across no-man’s-land. We thought it was gas at first until we realized. … And the colour of the dead faces changes from white to yellow to red to purple to green to black to slime. These are things that I thought I would never see. I do not know why I am writing them down. There can be no God that would permit this slaughter.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? Give that to me, damn you!’ Seaforth yelled. She’d never heard him shout or even raise his voice before, but now he was angry, transformed by rage into a person she didn’t recognize.
He was coming towards her now. She had no idea what he would do, but she could see that his eyes were focused not on her, but on the book in her hand. It didn’t matter that she didn’t know why he cared about it so much; it was enough to know that he did. It gave her an opportunity, and at the last moment she threw it at him. It bounced off his chest and fell to the floor, and instinctively he bent to pick it up. And in the same moment she ran past him into the living room and wrenched open the front door of the apartment.
Out on the landing she hesitated for a second, unable to decide between the elevator and the stairs; but the sound of movement behind her forced her to choose. She dashed down the stairs, taking them two at a time, somehow managing to stay on her feet, until she reached the hallway at the bottom.
She stopped. She had to. She was doubled over, hanging on to a pillar in the semi-darkness. It was the only way she could stay upright. Her heart was beating like a hammer in her chest and her legs felt like lead. There had been no sound of pursuit on the stairs, but now to her horror she could hear the elevator cage descending from above. He was coming. She knew he was. For a moment she was unable to move, caught like a rabbit in the headlights, staring at the elevator door. But then she forced herself to look away. There was still time. Clutching her aching side, she pulled open the heavy front door of the building and went stumbling onto the steps.
She put out a hand to steady herself but found no support, and losing her balance, she fell forward onto the pavement. She lay still, unable to get up. Someone was leaning over her, taking hold of her arm. She wanted to resist, but she had nothing left, only surrender.
‘Are you all right, miss?’ asked a voice. ‘That looked like a nasty fall.’
She opened her eyes and saw a kindly-looking old man staring down at her. She wondered who he was for a moment, until her eyes focused on the ARP letters on his tin hat and she realized that her rescuer was an air-raid warden doing his rounds.
He helped her to her feet. Leaning on his shoulder, she looked back through the door of the apartment building and saw nothing – an empty shadowy hallway; no sign of Seaforth at all. It was as if nothing had happened.
‘Here, put this on,’ said the warden, taking off his coat and wrapping it around her shoulders. ‘You’d better come with me. I’m on my way back to my control centre anyway. They can check you over there, see that you’re okay. And then you’ll need to take shelter. That last siren was a false alarm, but word is there’s a big raid coming our way tonight.’
Ava sat on the top floor of the double-decker bus, looking at the war-torn city as it went slowly by outside the mesh-covered windows. It was just past nine on the morning following her ordeal. The shops were beginning to open and the sun was shining down out of a clear blue sky. It was hard to believe that this same sky had been filled with hundreds of bomb-laden enemy planes only a few hours before. It had been one of the worst nights of the Blitz so far, and there was bomb damage everywhere, making for slow progress. But Ava didn’t mind; she was too busy taking in the sights. Grimy, excited children were out in force, playing in the ruins, looking for incendiary bomb tails and nose caps and other interesting pieces of shrapnel. Shopkeepers swept away broken glass and rubble from outside their shop fronts or were posting defiant signs in their windows: business as usual and more open than usual. Milk and coal carts drawn by hard-working shire horses picked their way through the debris; rag-and-bone men cried out their wares; women in headscarves talked to each other over their garden walls … Everywhere Londoners were going to work and getting on with their lives, contributing to the war effort in thousands of different ways. ‘We can take it,’ was their message. ‘That Hitler won’t stop us doing our jobs.’ It was inspiring.
Ava had felt their defiance even more the night before in the public shelter on the King’s Road to which the kindly ARP warden had taken her after rescuing her outside Seaforth’s apartment. She’d sat on an