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

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       CHAPTER 1

      It was like another world here on the other side of the green baize door that connected 59 Broadway to the next-door building where C had his office. Or rather suite of offices. Persons wishing to see C had to pass first through a narrow, rectangular anteroom between his two sentries – a pair of elderly, white-haired ladies wearing identical pairs of horn-rimmed glasses who were ceaselessly busy on Remington typewriters, sending out an endless stream of memos dictated by their invisible master. Known interchangeably as Miss Taylor and Miss Jones, they sat straight-backed behind matching desks, facing each other across a thin strip of blue carpet that ended at a big oak door. Above the lintel, a green light and a red light had been installed so that visitors would know when it was permitted to enter C’s presence, but as far as Thorn was aware, the lights had never worked. The secretaries were much more effective gatekeepers. Known universally as the twins, they ran C’s diary and fielded his telephone calls. All communication with the head of MI6 passed through them.

      Unlike their employer, the twins never smiled and they had no small talk whatsoever. They had come with C from the Admiralty when he succeeded Albert Morrison as director of MI6, and popular opinion in HQ was that they had been born as they were now, hatched in some secret government factory as fully fledged septuagenarian spinsters with steely eyes and bony, typing fingers. Their hard, unforgiving faces certainly indicated another side to C’s character that he usually kept under wraps, concealed behind his normal hail-fellow-well-met, debonair exterior. Thorn was a veteran of the corridors of power, and he knew full well that a man didn’t rise to C’s position without being ruthless where necessary along the way. He sometimes wondered whether it was the lack of a hard edge that had held his own career back and had earned C the nod over him when it came to choosing Albert’s replacement three years earlier, but he had always dismissed the thought. Drive and determination had never been his problem, and he knew himself well enough to realize that it was a fundamental lack of charm that had ruined his chances of promotion. Clubbable – that was the word for it. C was clubbable and he was not. It was as simple as that. All his life he had set people on edge rather than at their ease. And it was far too late to change now.

      It wasn’t that he was disqualified from further advancement by any accident of birth. Quite the opposite, in fact. Thorn was the youngest son of a baronet, a fully paid-up member of the English aristocracy. He’d grown up in a damp, cold manor house on the Welsh borders with a choleric father and a pair of handsome, daredevil brothers who hunted foxes in tight red coats at the weekend and believed that history had reached its apogee with the founding of the British Empire. Thorn didn’t disagree with them. He shared their values, but he’d always felt separated from them in some profound way. As a child, he’d sometimes caught his father looking at him in an odd way. He knew why now: he was the runt of the litter. He read too many books, he didn’t know one end of a horse from another, and – worst of all – he was a natural pessimist.

      The family didn’t fare well in the First World War. One brother was blown to bits at Neuve-Chapelle in 1915; another – the heir to the title – lost his right leg on the Somme. But Thorn missed it all. He was taken prisoner during a night patrol towards the end of his second week at the front and spent the remainder of the war eating cold potatoes in a POW camp north of Munich. The experience left him fluent in German but obscurely ashamed of himself, and his career since had been in large part an attempt to repay his country for a failure that wasn’t his fault.

      And now, as the bombs fell on London and the Nazi net was drawn ever tighter around the kingdom, Thorn felt that his world and his class were disappearing, sinking like a holed ocean liner, swallowed up in a tidal wave of total war. The future, if there was one, belonged to unprincipled arrivistes like Seaforth, and he felt there was nothing he could do to stop its relentless advance. Except that he had to try. Because Seaforth was a traitor and a murderer and was pursuing a plan whose villainy Thorn could only guess at. Any doubts that Thorn had had on that score had been removed by what he’d seen in Ava’s flat three days earlier. But, as Thorn knew full well, believing in Seaforth’s guilt was one thing; getting C to accept it was quite another. Seaforth was C’s golden boy, the goose that was laying the golden eggs with the gilt-edged intelligence reports he was getting out of Germany with such clockwork regularity. Thorn felt a wave of despondency sweep over him as he went into C’s office, leaving the staccato noise of the twins’ typewriters behind him on the other side of the thick oak door.

      The room was in fact an office only in name. It was far more like the living room of an expensively furnished apartment, and HQ rumour had it that an equally capacious bedroom complete with a four-poster bed lay on the other side of the closed door behind C’s large mahogany desk. True or not, there was no doubt that there was a staircase or an elevator that allowed C to come and go undetected – an advantage that added considerably to his mystique and prestige.

      This lateral extension of HQ into the neighbouring house in the terrace was all C’s doing. Albert Morrison in his days as chief had inhabited a dreary office in the main building with small unwashed windows and second-hand Ministry of Works furniture, from where he had issued his directives amidst an organized chaos of books and papers. But C had refused to follow suit. Instead he had somehow managed to persuade the penny-pinchers over at the Treasury to approve the cost of purchasing the new space and converting it to his specifications, and Thorn had to admit that the results were impressive.

      C came out from behind his desk to shake his deputy’s hand and ushered him to one of two deep leather armchairs that were positioned on either side of a large marble fireplace in which a crackling fire was burning, made to Thorn’s astonishment of logs as well as coal. It was late in the day and the light was beginning to fade in the world outside, and the flames threw dancing shadows on the tall ceiling. A rectangular eighteenth-century portrait in an ornate frame above the mantelpiece showed one of C’s ancestors dressed in the uniform of the Household Cavalry, sitting astride an enormous warhorse with snorting nostrils.

      C sat down opposite his visitor. He was in his shirtsleeves, and a half-smoked Havana cigar burned between the fingers of his left hand, sending a column of thick blue-grey smoke up towards the chandelier overhead. The smell reminded Thorn of his visit to Churchill’s bunker with Seaforth two weeks earlier. He bristled at the memory, feeling a surge of anger against his enemy, but then he took a deep breath, forcing himself to calm down.

      ‘I have a confession to make,’ he began, trying to sound contrite.

      ‘Well, maybe I’m the wrong person to bring it to,’ said C with a smile. ‘I’m not a priest, you know.’

      ‘It’s not that kind of confession,’ said Thorn. ‘It’s about the decoded message that Hargreaves showed us at the morning conference ten days ago.’

      ‘The one sent by someone in Germany pretending to me?’

      ‘Yes. I took it to Albert Morrison.’

      ‘You did what?’ C looked shocked, as if he couldn’t believe what Thorn had just said.

      ‘I thought he might know who the sender was. I know I was wrong—’

      ‘You’re damned right you were,’ said C, interrupting angrily. ‘That message was a top-secret document and Albert had no security clearance. СКАЧАТЬ