The Girl in Berlin (10 page)

They dashed down the marble staircase and out by the back way to avoid the reporters. As they hurried towards the
department store, the whole extraordinary business began almost to seem exhilarating, an adventure, like playing truant from school. Yet, once inside the store, it was as if nothing had happened. The jostling hysteria a hundred yards away no longer existed. Women in couples or alone were seated at the square tearoom tables, drinking tea and eating cakes and biscuits at ten o’clock in the morning. Women going shopping: that was reality, surely, not this Dick Barton fantasy.

‘He’s still upstairs apparently,’ said Jeremy, referring to Dr Blunt’s flat at the top of the Courtauld building.

‘Have you seen him?’

‘No,’ admitted Jeremy, ‘but I might sneak up this afternoon, to see if I can get him to talk to me.’

Jeremy, with his mop of curls and warm brown eyes, was loved or lusted after by everyone. He was Dr Blunt’s favourite of the moment: not that he intended to do anything about it, he assured them. I only like girls, I’m afraid, he would say, as if that were a failing.

‘Perhaps they’re in love and ran away together,’ suggested Polly.

‘Maclean’s married,’ said Dinah stoutly, having picked up that much from her rapid glance at the
Express
. ‘It was his wife who reported him missing.’ But of course it wasn’t as simple as that. Oscar Wilde had been married. ‘I don’t
really
understand why everyone is going on about it so.’ For in her heart of hearts she did not believe in spies and spying. It seemed like something out of a novel or a film, a fantastic fictional world, both impossible in itself and entirely unrelated to her life of ordinary domesticity. The idea they could be Russian agents … ‘I can’t really believe that. That would be – well, extraordinary.’

‘It’s rather frightening, actually,’ Jeremy was looking away, across the tearoom, ‘that’s there’s so much that’s hidden.’

‘It can’t
really
be anything to do with Dr Blunt, though, can
it?’ asked Polly, but it wasn’t a question.

They returned as they had come by the back entrance, but it was simply impossible to do any work. It was not long before Jeremy poked his head round the library door and beckoned Dinah.

‘Don’t be long, Dinah,’ said Miss Welsh, her voice like a wince as if it hurt her to speak. ‘We’re still very behind with the cataloguing.’

But who cared about cataloguing now? The cataloguing was the least of the Courtauld’s problems. There was an air of suppressed panic about the place. The wheels were spinning, but the vehicle wasn’t moving. And Dinah didn’t know what to do with the new set of references Dr Blunt had asked her to look up.

‘Guess what.’ Jeremy’s eyes were darker than ever with excitement. ‘I’ve just seen him. I went into the office and Miss Lefebvre said he’d rung down saying he had terrible toothache, he simply had to go to the dentist. He wanted someone to go with him. What an opportunity! Of course I said I’d go. We left by the back entrance. We walked round the side and up Baker Street together. Somehow we managed to avoid the reporters. When we got to Baker Street station he said I could turn back. He’d got away from the vultures.’

‘How did he seem?’

‘How d’you think! Pretty edgy. Tense. And he didn’t look well. White as a sheet. He’d been drinking.’

‘Poor Dr Blunt. But how did it help, you being with him?’

‘Gave him a bit more Dutch courage, I suppose. It gave him the nerve to leave the building. But the main thing was they still haven’t realised there’s a back entrance.’

‘That was stupid of them.’

‘Very.’ Jeremy leant against the stair rail. ‘At one point I thought he might be going to say something – you know, about it all. He sort of cleared his throat and I thought – but
all he did was ask me how my work was going. Nice of him to think of that in the circs.’

Day after day the headlines shouted, the rumours grew: ‘According to a friend they planned the journey to serve “their idealistic purposes”’; ‘Police in Berlin and West Germany have been asked to be on the lookout’; ‘Boatloads of police landed in Ischia where they interviewed W.H. Auden, the poet. It was rumoured that his white-painted villa on this sun-soaked island was to have been the end of the line for Burgess’; ‘Burgess knew atom spy Alan Nunn May’.

Day after day reporters gathered in Portman Square.

The Missing Diplomats even cropped up at Dinah’s peace group. This consisted of just a group of half a dozen women to whom Dinah had been introduced by a local Labour Party friend. Until she joined the group she’d felt alone and isolated in her horror of the atom bomb. To find other women who felt as she did had helped her get a grip on herself. You felt so much better when you were at least trying to do something. They’d been meeting for some time, but only now were they ready to plan their first action: they were going to leaflet a shopping centre.

Instead of discussing this, however, the meeting was swamped in speculation about the Missing Diplomats. It was always the same conversation, Dinah thought. It always circled round the possibility that the two men were Russian agents, communists, spies. The unthinkable. One member of the group said that Guy Burgess was obviously unstable. Surely the Secret Service would have more sense than to trust someone like him – and so would the Russians. A second dismissed all the stories, convinced the men were just a couple of rogues playing a practical joke. A third mentioned Klaus Fuchs, who’d been convicted of treason, but he only gave secrets to the Russians
because he believed that science should have no national boundaries, that knowledge belonged to everyone and that the world would be safer if both sides had the bomb.

If only there were real peace instead of the Cold War there wouldn’t be any need for atomic weapons, nor for spies. Sometimes when Dinah thought about it all she felt anxious and close to tears. Sometimes she did cry, alone in the evening, seated by Tommy’s cot as he slept.

Peace was so important. You’d do anything to stop another war.

Alan meanwhile said the BBC was also awash with gossip. He was burning with impatience to have his say, like everyone with the slightest claim to acquaintance or inside knowledge. All joined the stampede for their moment of notoriety, desperate to have their second-hand moment in the spotlight.

They went to a party the first Saturday after the news had broken. Guests from broadcasting, journalism and the arts drifted through the rooms of a dilapidated house in Maida Vale near the canal. Everyone was talking about Burgess and Maclean.

Dinah stood beside Alan as he argued with some colleagues, speculating about what could have happened, where the two men really were. But not only was she sick of the mystery, it also didn’t do to look too dependent on your husband. It was never good to cling; better to roam around until you found someone who was willing to talk to you. And soon enough she found a rather jolly young man with tousled hair and a Fair Isle jumper, who was also bored with the Missing Diplomats and told her instead about the history of cinema he was writing. Later they danced to Jelly Roll Morton and Humphrey Lyttleton records. When there was a slow blues, the jolly young man (the name’s Frank, he told her) held her close and she enjoyed that, but then she said: ‘It’s awfully late – I’d better find my husband.’ As soon as she’d said it she wished she hadn’t, but it
was
late.
She looked round for Alan and saw him standing with a little group of men and one woman by a marble chimneypiece. The woman was about thirty and was holding court, one arm resting along the chimneypiece.

‘Who’s she?’ she asked Frank.

‘Edith Fanshawe; she edits
Poetry Now
.’

Edith Fanshawe’s pale, fluffy hair curled round a pointed face in which the features seemed too large. Her eyes were light and there was something imperious and mocking in the way she gazed at her audience. The black dress accentuated her curves in an attractive way, so that you did not notice that she was really rather too plump. When Alan saw Dinah he put his arm round her waist and said: ‘There you are. Come on. We’re going.’

Dinah was pleased enough to leave. They took a taxi home and during the journey Alan leaned back moodily in his corner. She knew him like that; he was usually thinking about work.

‘I enjoyed the party,’ she offered, but he merely grunted and she was content to doze in the enclosed space as it carried them through the quiet streets. When they reached home his mood changed again and in bed their coming together was as passionate as it had once always been. He was insistent and demanding, almost angry in the way that both excited and unnerved her.

ten

M
CGOVERN COULD NOT REMEMBER
when he’d last stood like this beside a dead body. One of the advantages of working for the Branch was that death was not a piece of rotting flesh on a slab, but an abstract event which had happened somewhere else. Visits to the mortuary were rare.

Every sound that echoed in the white tiled chamber – a dropped instrument, a visceral squelch, the drip of water from a tap – underlined the silence it interrupted. The smell of decaying human offal, blood and stagnant canal water leaked through the lime-juice odour of disinfectant.

The sterilised façade of normal life was pulled away in the mortuary. This was the real event, and an obscene contrast to the good manners of gentlemanly discussions with Kingdom and the colourless boredom of watching and waiting for conspiracies that seldom materialised.

When the canvas sheet was rolled back, a sharp intake of breath from Jarrell hissed through the silence, but Jarrell, whose curd-white skin looked greener than ever in the harsh light, turned not a single carrot-coloured hair at the gruesomeness of his surroundings and the body on the slab (his first, he said). The corpse was not in good shape: a flabby, slack, over-used body; the sallow skin as if pickled in nicotine; the bony cage of ribs and shoulders contrasting with the swollen belly; short,
skinny legs like a toad. The coarsely sewn-up cut down the length of the torso reminded McGovern of Frankenstein’s monster. There was a pathos about the body, neglected by an owner who’d been more interested in things of the mind.

‘It’s Eberhardt,’ said Jarrell.

‘You recognise him?’

‘Yes, we recognise him,’ said McGovern. ‘Any identification?’

The pathologist gestured to a wallet and a bunch of keys. ‘These were found at the side of the canal. No money, so robbery could be a possible motive. He died from drowning,’ he continued, ‘but there’s also a nasty blow to the side of the head. The skull’s fractured. He was probably tipped into the water while he was unconscious, but he might have fallen in when he received the blow. Impossible to tell, really. He was also ill. He had very early signs of lung cancer, but I don’t expect he knew that. I’m not sure he was murdered, but it’s a working assumption. And I should say he hadn’t been in the water for more than … oh, not much more than twenty-four hours, certainly not more than two days. The body had got caught on a plank near that old cemetery in Paddington.’

‘Yes. We saw him two days ago, so it couldna be longer than that.’

It could indeed have been robbery with violence, an assailant who didn’t even mean to kill him, who either tipped him into the water or else just hit him and then fled and afterwards the unconscious man somehow rolled sideways off the edge of the towpath and into the canal. But McGovern remembered that there was no towpath on that side of the canal. No robber could have come that way.

‘One other thing,’ added the pathologist. ‘The brain wasn’t normal. He was suffering from signs of dementia.’

It was Kingdom who’d instructed him to get down to the mortuary. It shouldn’t have been a Branch case at all, and was in fact assigned to DI Slater of the CID, but now
it was McGovern’s case too, because Kingdom wanted it to be. Kingdom had somehow known about the dead man, but didn’t know his identity. This was bound to be awkward. Slater would have to accept there was a security angle, if that was what he was told, but he was bound to resent a Branch colleague muscling in and interfering. It was irregular and could be construed as insulting. But McGovern could tackle that. What he didn’t understand was why Kingdom was so interested. It wasn’t an interesting case. A body in the canal wasn’t unusual. Accident or foul play, it could be either. Even suicide, although someone bent on self-destruction would hardly choose a method that involved hitting himself on the head before jumping into the canal without weighing himself down. Slater might prefer to be able to put it down as an accident, but it ought to be treated as a suspicious death because of the head wound.

Back from the mortuary, McGovern called in at Gorch’s office.

‘It’s a tricky situation. Go carefully,’ advised the Detective Chief Superintendent. ‘Kingdom’s preoccupied with the Burgess-Maclean affair. Everyone’s tearing their hair out over there. I’m not too happy he’s dragged you into this business, but I suppose they’re so stretched …’

‘He wants me to keep an eye on this suspicious death. An old man’s body dredged up from the canal. Turns out it’s an old émigré scientist.’

‘Did Kingdom know that?’

McGovern shook his head.

‘Is there some sort of connection with this person of interest he’s got you shadowing? The whole thing’s tricky. I don’t like it. But there you are. We’ll just take it step by step. Easy as she goes.’

McGovern returned to his office and began to examine the contents of Konrad Eberhardt’s wallet, but he was interrupted.

DS Monkhouse was a tight-lipped young man. McGovern had him as one of the new postwar breed coming into the police force, but then reflected that he himself was more or less one of them too. ‘I’ve been sent to request the return of the dead man’s effects, sir. They shouldn’t have signed them off to you, sir, with respect. DI Slater wishes to remind you that they constitute evidence, which we need in pursuance of our investigation.’

McGovern leaned back in his chair, swivelling it round at the same time. He loved his swivel chair, a new acquisition. ‘You may not know this, but I also happen to be involved in the investigation.’