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

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СКАЧАТЬ of wine, and told him that he was looking thin and pale and that he needed ‘a good woman’ to take care of him. Alec had shaken his head, said he wasn’t the marrying kind, but Ava’s father wouldn’t let it go. ‘There must be someone,’ he’d said. And Alec had looked away, flushing red with embarrassment, and had caught Ava’s eye as she got up from the table to clear the plates. And in that moment she had known. He hadn’t said anything and her parents missed the exchange, but from that moment her relationship with Alec changed.

      He came less, and he was awkward with her when they met. Once or twice when they happened to find themselves alone, he’d hesitated, clearing his throat as if he had something important to say; but someone had always come in at the critical moment, or he’d lost confidence and turned away. The nearest he’d got to a declaration had been after her mother died – the last funeral she’d been to before today. It had been a different church, but the same cold wind had been blowing the brown leaves off the trees, and inside, her father had stood bolt upright beside her in the pew, looking straight ahead at the pulpit as if he were participating in a military inspection rather than his wife’s funeral. And Thorn had come up to her afterwards when they were walking back from the grave to the lych-gate. He’d had no umbrella, and she remembered his thinning hair plastered down by the rain and the look of mute appeal on his careworn face.

      ‘I’m so sorry, Ava. If there’s anything I can do … anything,’ he’d stammered.

      She’d thanked him, expecting that would be the end of it, but he’d leant forward and taken hold of her hand.

      ‘You’re very important to me, you know,’ he’d said, looking her in the eye. And she’d felt sure that he was going to say more, but her father had come up and taken her arm, in a hurry to get home and ‘get the damned thing over with’, as he’d confided to her in the car.

      And that had been the end of it. Five months later, she’d married Bertram. Alec hadn’t been at the wedding. He’d made some excuse and sent an expensive present – a dinner service that they never used – and after that, he’d seemed to fade from their lives. It had to have been six months or more since she’d last seen him, but he was here now. He had to be: Albert had been his best friend. Standing on her tiptoes, Ava searched the crowd and caught sight of Thorn standing alone, smoking a cigarette. He was a little way further up the pavement, keeping his distance from the rest of the mourners. He looked the worse for wear – less hair and more wrinkles, a shadow of the man she’d first met twenty years before. But then the war seemed to be ageing everybody, not just Alec.

      It was time. The coffin had passed through the crowd and been set up on a table in front of the altar, and Bertram came and took Ava’s arm and led her inside. The church with its permanently blacked-out windows made her feel claustrophobic. Sitting in the pew at the front beside her husband, she felt the eyes of the other mourners fixed on her back. She knew what they were all thinking about – not her father, but the manner of his death. The cold-blooded English liked nothing better than a good murder to puzzle over, to discuss back and forth over their Kellogg’s Corn Flakes in the morning. Who had pushed him? Was the killer here with them in the church? Would he kill again? It didn’t help that the young policeman from the night of the murder was here too, standing at the back, watching. She’d seen him as she came in.

      And the presence of Bertram next to her, clasping his hands in prayer with a pious look on his face, infuriated her. He’d chosen all the hymns and now sang them with gusto in an excessively baritone voice that made her squirm with embarrassment. She wanted to get out, to run back down the aisle away from Bertram and away from her father’s coffin with its brass plaque screwed into the top, bearing his name and dates in a style of lettering that Bertram had spent a considerable time picking out from a catalogue at the undertaker’s office several days earlier.

      She tried to concentrate on the service. ‘In the midst of life we are in death’ – yes, that was true. Bombs were raining down from the moonlit sky night after night. Albert Morrison was lucky to even have his own funeral. Ava had read in the newspapers about mass burials of bomb victims. She’d seen the pictures of the trenches dug by mechanical diggers, the lines of coffins draped in Union Jacks, and the ranks of the bereaved stretching back into the grey distance. Life was cheap. Tomorrow she too might be dead. Something about the thought jolted her – like a charge of electricity. She needed to live, to take risks, to be herself for a little while before it was too late.

      Outside after the service, she was alone again while Bertram went to fetch the car for the journey to the crematorium, or the garden of remembrance, as he insisted on calling it. She felt a hand on her sleeve and turned, coming face-to-face with a handsome man she’d never seen before. He held out his hand and she noticed as she took it how clean and graceful his fingers were, like those of a pianist.

      ‘I’m Charles,’ he said, looking straight into her eyes as if he were confiding something important. ‘Charles Seaforth. I’m sorry for your loss. Your father was a great man, Mrs Brive. He will be sorely missed. I can assure you of that.’

      Her head was full of questions. How did this stranger know who she was? What was his connection to her father? Why would he say that her father was great when it was such a strange word to use? In her confusion, she could only nod her head.

      ‘It must be very hard for you,’ he went on. ‘Not just to lose your father, but to lose him like this. I hope they will soon find the person responsible.’

      She knew she ought to have been upset by the man’s direct reference to the murder, but in fact she felt the opposite. She hated the way Bertram and the vicar seemed determined to pretend that her father’s violent death had never happened. Talking about it was like a breath of fresh air.

      ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I don’t want the person who did it to get away with it. I want him to pay.’

      With what? With his life? She was surprised at her own vehemence. It was as if she hadn’t chosen her words, but that they had been pulled out of her by some force beyond her control. She felt as though she hadn’t meant anything she’d said about the murder until now.

      ‘I understand,’ said the stranger. ‘I felt the same when my father died, except that he was killed in the last war and so there was no one to take responsibility, no one to punish. I was angry, but there was nothing I could do.’

      ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She felt she should step back or look away, but she didn’t. The stranger’s crystal-blue eyes drew her, held her where she was. ‘How did you know my father?’ she asked.

      ‘We worked together. Not for very long, but there was enough time for me to understand his value even if others did not.’

      ‘What work? What did my father do?’ Ava asked the question quickly, without thinking, and then immediately dropped her eyes, ashamed at the way she’d revealed her ignorance; mortified that this complete stranger should know more about her father than she did. But Seaforth didn’t seem to notice her discomfort, or at least he didn’t show that he did.

      ‘I can’t tell you, I’m afraid,’ he said apologetically. ‘It’s against the rules.’

      ‘I understand,’ she said hurriedly, trying to hide her confusion. ‘Really I do. I’m sorry I asked. I—’

      ‘Don’t be. It’s not easy. Nothing about death is ever easy,’ he said, laying his hand on her arm for a moment. It made her skin tingle, even through the cloth.

      She felt tears spring into her eyes. This stranger was the first person since the young policeman on the night of the murder to show her any genuine sympathy. She wanted to thank him but couldn’t find the words. СКАЧАТЬ