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

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СКАЧАТЬ but she couldn’t tell him that. So she smiled and, leaning forward, finished her glass of wine and waited for him to pour her another.

      The siren went off just as Seaforth had finished paying the bill and they’d got up to go. Ava hated the sound of it, and instinctively she put her hands over her ears, trying to block out its undulating wail.

      He looked at her and smiled. ‘You really have had enough of the war for one night,’ he said. ‘Come on. Let’s go.’

      ‘Where?’

      ‘To my place. It’s near here. Just around the corner.’

      ‘You never told me that.’

      ‘I’m a man of many secrets, remember?’

      ‘What about the siren? Shouldn’t we take shelter?’

      ‘With the trogs down in the Underground?’ he asked, pointing down the street towards the square, where a rapidly growing queue of people had formed outside the Tube station. ‘It’s up to you, but I think I could live without overflowing toilets and rats for one night. There’ve been no bombs in Chelsea for a couple of days now, and there’s a shelter round the corner in Cadogan Place if you get scared. And I can take you home later. I promise,’ he added, noticing her hesitation.

      Ava wasn’t really frightened of the bombs, at least not before they had started to fall. She was more concerned about what kind of signal she would be sending Seaforth by going back to his house or flat or wherever it was that he lived. She didn’t want him to think of her as some woman of easy virtue who could be seduced over a couple of bottles of wine in an Italian restaurant, but she’d come out determined to find out what made him tick, and to do that she needed to see where he lived. It was an opportunity that she couldn’t afford to pass up.

      He took her arm and led her behind the Peter Jones department store into a district of tall, turn-of-the-century red-brick houses. Ava knew that it took money, a lot of money, to live here on the borders of Knightsbridge, and she wondered how Seaforth could afford it. But perhaps spying paid well. She remembered how affluent her miserly father had turned out to be.

      They turned the corner and came out into Cadogan Square. It was the jewel of the neighbourhood, visually impressive even without the wrought-iron railings that had been removed the previous year to be melted down for the war effort. The tall, stately houses surrounding the gardens on all four sides seemed unchanged by time, far removed from the bustle of Sloane Square two blocks away and the war-torn world beyond. There was no one in sight as they walked across the grass and then up the wide steps of a well-maintained house under a brick portico supported by elaborately decorated Corinthian columns. The door was unlocked and they went inside and took a narrow, wood-panelled elevator to the top floor.

      When Seaforth opened the door of his apartment, she let out a cry of surprise. Even in the failing light, the panoramic view was extraordinary. There were landmarks she recognized in all directions – the tower of Westminster Cathedral, Big Ben beside the river, and to the south the white chimneys of Battersea Power Station. She would have liked to spend longer staring out of the windows, but Seaforth was already going round lowering the blackout blinds.

      He turned on the lights and went to hang up her coat, leaving her to look round at the furnishings of the apartment. She could see straight away that they were expensive, but she was now prepared for that. She was surprised rather by the look of the place. It was not at all what she would have expected. Everything was modern, characterized by hard, severe lines. The sofa and the armchairs had tubular steel frames, and the desk in the corner was made of some form of metal too. A pair of rectangular jet-black vases on a table in front of the centre window held no flowers. There were a multitude of books, and she recognized some of the titles from her father’s collection, but their arrangement was entirely different from the organized chaos in Gloucester Mansions. Here the spines were lined up in precisely descending heights on built-in bookcases. Nothing was out of place.

      She looked around in vain for something personal, something to connect the room with its owner, but there was nothing. It was as if no one lived in the apartment. She felt she was standing on 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 СКАЧАТЬ