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

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СКАЧАТЬ else after what he’d been through? But in recent days he had felt a growing sense that some invisible force was guiding him, leading him by the hand until the moment his fingers would squeeze the trigger of the Colt semi-automatic pistol registered to Alec Thorn that was currently locked in the bottom drawer of his desk on the other side of the room, and he would dispatch to kingdom come the two people he disliked most in all the world.

      As far as Seaforth could see, the only complicating factor now was Ava. He was due to meet her in Sloane Square in an hour, and he was looking forward to the prospect. It was true that he didn’t need her any more now that her husband had been charged with Albert’s murder, but he didn’t think he could simply stop seeing her. That would make her suspicious, and the last thing he needed was for her to show up at HQ and start asking questions. So he’d waited a day to let the dust settle after Bertram’s arrest and had then called her as agreed. She’d picked up straight away. It was almost as if she’d been waiting by the phone, and she’d sounded much more enthusiastic about seeing him than she had before. Perhaps tonight he would be able to take their relationship to a different level.

      Seaforth prided himself on his ability to live without women. They weren’t worth the risk. From time to time he paid money to a high-class agency that guaranteed discretion for ‘professional visits’. But in recent months he’d preferred abstinence, and the arduous process of conquering Ava’s reservations had proved far more fulfilling than anything the agency could provide. It was early days yet and she was still suspicious of him – but slowly, inch by inch, he could feel her giving way. And as she yielded, she also emerged from her shell. Underneath her head scarf and mackintosh, away from the shadow of her awful husband, she was a different person. She was like a chrysalis metamorphosing into a brightly coloured butterfly. There was a fire in her green eyes and a hunger for life that he found attractive. Yet she was fragile too, thin and delicate; he knew he could break her with a twist of his wrists.

      Why should he deny himself the pleasure of pursuing her to a final seduction when seeing her was the more sensible course? He was enjoying himself, and she was a useful distraction from the restlessness he’d been suffering ever since his visit to Churchill’s bunker two weeks earlier.

      He’d always been a good sleeper, but now he woke up every night in the small hours, struggling in a cold sweat out of horrible nightmares in which his brother and father returned as living dead, covered with the mud of Flanders, reproaching him with white, wide-open, empty eyes for leaving them so long unavenged. The noise of the Blitz didn’t help, of course, but he was sure it wasn’t fear that was causing his insomnia. It had never occurred to Seaforth to take shelter even when the bombs had started falling close by to Cadogan Square. Perhaps it was his newfound sense of personal destiny, but he was irrationally certain that no bomb had his name on it. If he was going to die, it would be in a more significant way than being blown to bits in a public shelter.

      The nightmares were in fact just a symptom of a growing overall agitation that he was finding harder and harder to control. For years he had been patient, biding his time as he burrowed steadily into the heart of MI6, and now suddenly he couldn’t stand to be idle and became irrationally angry at even the slightest irritation.

      He thought constantly of his brother, gazing for minutes at a time at Alistair’s silver-framed photograph that held pride of place on the rosewood chest of drawers opposite his bed, positioned so that it would be the first thing he saw in the morning when he woke up and the last at night before he went to sleep. The picture had been taken on the day before Alistair’s embarkation for France in the late summer of 1915. He’d been home on leave after the end of basic training, and it had been the last time Seaforth had ever seen his brother smiling, resplendent in his new khaki uniform.

      Seaforth closed his eyes, remembering the red flush of the young blood in his handsome brother’s cheeks; the devil-may-care laughter in Alistair’s bright hazel-coloured eyes; the way he would burst out singing for no discernible reason when they were out walking together in the Eskdale hills with the wind blowing up their coat-tails in the years before the war. And he remembered too how all that had gone, disappeared forever, when Alistair came back shell-shocked from the Loos battle three months later and wouldn’t speak or look anyone in the eye, just shook down his whole right side with a tremor that he couldn’t seem to control. The white-coated doctors stopped it at the hospital, gave Alistair electric shocks until they said he was well enough to go back, this time to Belgium. And that was the end – he never returned from there. But his diary did, in a brown War Office envelope that also contained his identity disc, a tattered picture of his mother, and a St Christopher’s medal that she’d given him for luck when he first went away. He’d written it at Loos the previous year. As far as Seaforth knew, his brother never wrote another word after he went back to the front in January 1916. It was as if he were already dead when he got on the train at Carlisle.

      Seaforth went and fetched the battered book from the drawer of the night table by his bed. He always kept it close by. He knew many of the entries by heart, but he preferred to read them in his brother’s bold, slanting handwriting, which had already begun to deteriorate by the end of his first month in France, until at the end it was no more than a scrawl. The murdering English had made a mistake returning the diary. They should have destroyed the book just as they destroyed its writer, but they were careless about small things, and Seaforth had long ago sworn to make them pay for their negligence.

      He opened the book, quickly turning the pages until he came to his brother’s description of the first day of the battle.

       September 24th, 1915

       They took away the cookers and we all fell in. An English general with a white moustache and a swagger stick came and gave us a speech. It was about blood and sacrifice, but the guns were firing up ahead and we couldn’t hear very well. When he was finished he got back in his staff car and drove away.

       On the march up to the line we sang Bonnie Scotland, but the song stopped in our throats when we came to the trenches they were digging for the dead. Stepping over our graves in the twilight we were, while a redhat ticked off our names, and up ahead the green and white flares of the Very lights and the flickering flashes from the exploding shells lit up the slag heaps and the big redoubt that’s the object of the attack in our sector. Hohenzollern, they call it – like the old kings of Prussia. It sticks out its nose into no-man’s-land like it’s some kind of earth monster; crawling with Boche; waiting for us to come over.

       The bombardment goes on all night, crashing in our ears like an endless thunder. There’s no point in talking – we can’t hear ourselves speak, and so I write, leaning on the firestep, crouching over the flickering butt of a candle, thinking of home. Our brigade is in reserve and we can see the gun crews stripped to the waist for work – they bring up water in buckets and throw it down on the smoking barrels. The guns are lined up wheel to wheel. They never stop firing, but there’s a rumour going down the line that a German plane scored a direct hit on our ammunition dump two days back and that we haven’t got enough of the heavy stuff to smash their wire. Who knows if it’s true? But I’m glad it’s the Boche, not us getting shelled.

       A grey watery dawn breaks over the redoubt and the drumfire reaches a crescendo. There are sappers with red and green armbands coming through our trenches carrying cylinders made of iron. We know what they are but we say nothing. Chlorine gas is no way to fight a war. Don’t they know that?

      Seaforth’s hand shook as he turned the page to read the next entry.

       The 26th and 28th Brigades went over at half past six. We heard the whistles and the shouts and the German machine guns starting up. With a trench periscope you can see. I looked and there was the gas cloud – yellowish green and drifting eastwards, thank God. Will the wind blow it back towards us? No one knows what is happening up ahead. We put on our masks, tuck them into СКАЧАТЬ