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

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       CHAPTER 2

      Quaid looked up from writing his report for the prosecuting lawyer on ‘the case of the falling professor’, as he’d decided to call it for filing purposes, and noticed the worried look on his assistant’s face.

      ‘What’s eating you?’ he asked.

      ‘The loose ends in the Morrison case. I understand Bertram’s guilty, but I can’t get them out of my mind,’ Trave replied. In normal circumstances, he would have given an evasive answer to his boss’s question, but the inspector had been in an extremely good mood ever since Bertram had signed his confession, and Trave felt he could risk a direct response.

      ‘What loose ends?’ Quaid asked.

      ‘The old man rushing over to St James’s Park in the taxi; the weird note we found in his pocket; his friend lying about the other note that he left with the neighbour downstairs; and all of that having nothing to do with the murder, like it was some unrelated sideshow.’ Trave spoke quickly but took care not to mention Seaforth. There was no need for Quaid to know that he had disobeyed a second direct order to stay away from the office building in Broadway if his elusive quarry had decided not to renew his complaint, although Seaforth’s unexpected silence was in fact one of the ‘loose ends’ that bothered Trave most about the case.

      ‘Sometimes cases are like that,’ Quaid said tolerantly. ‘People’s lives are complicated, particularly nowadays. They don’t fit together like jigsaw puzzles. You have to look at the bigger picture – you’ll learn that with time,’ he added with easy-going condescension.

      ‘But it just seems like we should have asked more questions. Just to be certain, you know,’ Trave said lamely.

      ‘We didn’t because we didn’t need to,’ said Quaid, beginning to sound irritated. ‘Some people in government can be very sensitive about us coppers stamping about in our hobnail boots, poking our noses in where we’re not wanted, shouting their secrets from the rooftops. And frankly I can understand that. The point is we’ve got the right man. Bertram Brive has confessed to the crime and he’s guilty as charged. And that’s an end to it. You hear me?’ he asked harshly.

      ‘I hear you,’ said Trave. He knew he needed to put the Morrison case behind him. He had other work to do, and it was up to the court now to decide whether Bertram was guilty. And so for most of the rest of the day, he tried his best to put all thoughts of the case out of his mind, but his efforts were in vain. Eventually he gave up and tried a different tack, listing on a piece of paper all the reasons Bertram had to be guilty: the blackmail that gave him the motive; the will that gave him the opportunity; the cuff link that proved his presence at the scene of the crime; and last but not least, the confession that sealed his guilt. But still Trave’s doubts persisted. Bertram might well have confessed because of Quaid’s clever promise to make the blackmailer go away, and the cuff link could have been planted just as Bertram had claimed. And nothing explained the sideshow of unexplained evidence whose significance Quaid was so determined not to acknowledge.

      Trave couldn’t sit still. His mind kept wandering and he couldn’t concentrate on the mound of paperwork that Quaid had handed him when he left for a meeting midway through the afternoon. He stuck it out valiantly until the stroke of six and then bolted for home. But halfway to the underground he changed his mind and went back. The keys to Gloucester Mansions and Albert Morrison’s flat were still there among the case exhibits, and Trave pocketed them. He’d make one last visit to the scene of the crime, not because he expected to find anything, but to try to set his mind at rest, and afterwards he’d move on. He had no choice in the matter.

      He got out of the Underground at Sloane Square and began walking down Lower Sloane Street towards the river. He stopped for a moment on Chelsea Bridge, looking down at a coal barge passing underneath the parapet and then re-emerging a moment later out into the evening, chugging on downstream towards Vauxhall while the grey water lapped hungrily in its wake against the thick granite piers of the bridge. A horn blew somewhere in the distance, adding to the melancholy of the setting.

      It occurred to Trave that he was probably following the route of Albert’s last journey. Had the old man been followed? Was that what had happened? Trave looked back over his shoulder, half-expecting to see a figure standing behind him in the shadows, but there was no one in sight.

      It was colder now than when he had set out. A sharp breeze was blowing in off the river and Trave pushed his hands deep inside his pockets, turning his head away from the whirl of autumn leaves blowing down from the trees. He quickened his pace, anxious to get to his destination.

      It was still light, but the moon had risen in the cloudless sky, hanging balefully over the towers of the power station on his left, gazing across at the absurd spectacle of two enormous barrage balloons tossing in the wind above Battersea Park like a pair of drunken elephants. Trave remembered them from the night of the murder.

      At a turn in the road, he passed the site of a bombed-out house where brambles and weeds were already pushing up through cracks in the broken masonry. Pathetically, someone had planted a tiny Union Jack flag among the ruins. It fluttered forlornly from side to side like an obscene joke, while up above, the whistling wind blew through the remains of the windows. But there was otherwise no sound. London seemed like a city of the dead; the nameless, uncounted dead. Trave thought of the rows of waxed cardboard coffins stacked up in requisitioned swimming pools and public baths all over the capital, and he remembered the mortuary he’d gone to on police business the week before – the corpses had been identified by luggage tags tied to their feet, but a bomb had taken the roof off the building and a night of rain had washed away the writing on the labels.

      Suddenly he was there. The building’s name, Gloucester Mansions, was emblazoned in jet-black curlicue letters above the door, standing out against the bright white-painted portico, while up above, the tall red-brick mansion block loomed against the skyline with myriad symmetrical square windows looking out over the park opposite. Trave hesitated at the top of the entrance steps, fidgeting to fit the key in the lock. This was Albert’s key; this was where the old man would have stood at just this time of the evening, thinking he was safe when in fact he was standing on the brink of extinction. Inside, the big hallway was deserted – full of shadows, with the only light coming in through the oval window above the door. There was nothing to suggest that this was where a man had met a horrible death less than two weeks before.

      Trave had got halfway up the stairs when the silence was shattered by the horrible stomach-churning wail of СКАЧАТЬ