The Conduct of Major Maxim

by Gavin Lyall

  "The same as you do: that she died in the Karls Hospital some time in the afternoon or evening, just like the others whodid die. And it means the hospital records can't matter even if they're still around. He'd never have named the hospital if there'd been anything to show shedidn't die there. "

  Very slowly, Sims put the certificate down on top of the rest. At the last moment his hand trembled and almost clenched, as if he were about to crumple the thin paper. But he didn't. He walked back and sipped his whisky.

  "I suppose," he said, "she had decided she could not find any true proof, so she decided to make some. Perhaps I was pushing her too hard. We needed Plainsong. All of us."

  All of us. The unit Sims had created, had rescued from the whirlpool of the Verfassungschutzonly to land it in Guy Husband's uncertain hands. They needed one big success to make themselves secure, but in her desperation to achieve it, Mrs Howard had turned to methods which could destroy the unit itself-just as her forgery had effectively destroyed Brigitte Schickert'sdeath certificate.

  Maxim finished his whisky and put the glass down. "She's still not buried in that cemetery. "

  "The sister," Sims said softly. "Mina. She must know.'Shemust know."

  "I'll go to Dornhausen tomorrow morning," Maxim promised, but he wasn't sure Sims heard him.

  Chapter 23

  In the morning, Sims was gone.

  Maxim hauled his hangover back from the telephone box by the barracks gate through a barrage of stamping feet and troops answering their names in ringing shouts. There was an atmosphere of rich self-satisfaction around; whatever ACE thought, the regiment was convinced it had done very well on its Agile Blade call-out and was flaunting it noisily. Maxim found himself having Civilian Thoughts as he escaped back into the officer's mess.

  There was, he told himself, no point in ringing George at Army dawn – particularly by German time, an hour ahead of Britain. The politest thing he'd get told would be to come home immediately, and however much he wanted to, he had promised Sims that second visit to Dornhausen. He went to ask advice on hiring another car.

  Just on eleven, he parked in the shade of Dornhausen's great linden tree and walked back to the little inn. The woman was sitting in there alone, drinking coffee and reading a newspaper. She instinctively got up as he went in, recognised him, and smiled perfunctorily.

  "Do you want coffee, or beer?"

  "Coffee, please."

  The floor was still damp from her mop and a cool evaporating smell contrasted with the sudden bitter tang of the coffee she put down in front of him. She wore the same dress as the day before, the same lined, tired expression.

  "Did you find out any more about Frau Schickert?"

  "I don't think so. Except for this…" He spread the Focus on Germany. "Is that picture still here?"

  "That old thing. I haven't seen it in ages."

  "It says it used to hang in here…"

  "I remember. On the wall, there." She pointed to a faded nude from a tyre calendar, tacked up just to the right of the front door. "But the glass got broken and somebody took it to be repaired and they lost it. "

  "Lost it?"

  "Yes." She met his look boldly. Too boldly?

  "Oh." He sipped the coffee; somewhere outside, a tractor worked in erratic surges of power. "When did that happen?"

  "Soon after they printed the picture there. A few people came in to see, becauseofthatarticle. I think one of them took it down, dropped it. "

  "Oh," Maxim said again.

  She wiped the table, an unnecessary but instinctive movement. "Does it matter where she's buried?"

  "Not to me."

  "Do you know what happened to the baby, little Manfred?"

  He looked up. Little Manfred, the one you gave the bottle to? Oh yes, I heard something about him. He hasn't quite grown up yet – some childish game he played with a chap in his office. Just boyish high spirits.

  "No," he said. "I don't know what happened to him." He put too much money on the table. "Thank you for the coffee. "

  First he had to ring George, then probably catch the Güter-sloh flight. He paused at the door, taking the last sniff at the country air: the rest would be busy roads, airports, Whitehall. Agnes had been right about needing to get out into the countryside, and it didn't matter much whose country.

  Behind him, she asked: "Are you going back to England?"

  "Yes."

  She paused. "The glass didn't get broken. It was borrowed, somebody wanted to make a copy of it, just like the people from the magazine had done. He didn't give it back. "

  "Hecame back. Gu-Rainer Schickert. He came back. "

  "Yes." She put the empty cup on the bar. "I was a fool to lend it him, he said it was the only picture of her at that time. He didn't even have one from the wedding. He said he was in shipping, I think, in Hamburg, but I couldn't find him in the directory."

  "It was really him?"

  "He looked different, but it was him. He knew everything; you can't be wrong about that. It takes only a few words. He came early one morning, before anybody else who might know him – I don't know why. But if you see him, you might mention the picture. He did promise."

  "Oh yes, it can be done," Captain Apgood said. "Happens all the time. If you know the right people, or you've got the right money, any East German can get a doctor's chit saying he needs a couple of weeks at some West German spa. It's one of the accepted perks of office, over there. Of course, they want to be sure you'll come back. You've got to own property or leave your wife and family behind. Does your chap fit into that category?"

  "I think he would." Nine years back Gustav- soundly remarried, sister's defection forgotten, back in political favour but not yet important enough to make a trip West into an Event – would fit perfectly. And he could be using his SSD connection to tip him off to any mention of wartime Dorn-hausen. Any magazine written for the Allied forces would be on the SSD's reading list.

  So Gustavhad come back.

  "I can get somebody to check around the hotels in Bad Schwarzendorn," Apgood offered. "They've probably still got their old records. What name would your man be using?"

  "I wouldn't know… You wouldn't have any idea when the Gutersloh flight goes?"

  "Ah, you've missed that already."

  At the start of the holiday season, commercial flights and even train/ferry tickets were difficult to come by, or so Maxim told George on the phone. He would spend another night with the Army and be on the next trooping flight for certain sure, honour bright, cross his heart.

  "Stay there a couple of days," George said, surprisingly. "Enjoy yourself. Talk about Pay And Emoluments, discuss SA8o and PJRAD and why the Headmaster always chooses such clunks as defence advisers. As long as that so-and-so Simshas got what he wants, there's no rush. I don't think you've heard about Rotherhithe?" He told about Sims's unit being involved in the shooting, and Maxim saw why he was being offered a short exile in Germany. George feared he might want to have words with Mr Sims. And George, Maxim reflected, could be right.

  "How's the Prime Minister?"

  "Birds of a feather, mostly carrion coloured, are flocking to his bedside." George sounded suddenly tired. "His chest doesn't appear to be good. I think he'll resign next week and then God help us all. But I don't want him going out in a cloud of cow-shit."

  "All right, I promise I'll stay in Germany. "

  "Ididn't mean that… I don't think I did, anyway. Just make sure we know where you are. "

  "If he goes, will you stay on at Number 10?"

  But George had already rung off.

  The summer days were too long. While the light lasted she couldn't really feel sleepy, so she sat by the window and watched the slow shadows pooling in the valley. Lights glowed on in other houses down there, but she just waited, soaking in the darkness as if it were drowsiness itself. Soon it would be time for the last of the yellow pills, then the sleeping pills and then perhaps two hours of total oblivion, sleep without pain, before the
terrible long process of waking, remembering and hurting all over again.

  For the moment, there was the brandy which she was trying to make last until the weekend, and little nibbles of cheese or chocolate and of course the flask of soup. Like most touring musicians she had learned to take a flask of soup to a recital, since wheedling even a plate of sandwiches out of a provincial hotel at ten or eleven at night was a virtuoso performance in itself. Now she clung to the habit as one last reminder of having been Mina Linnarz.

  A little crowd of people spilled out of the chapel down the street, swirled gently for a moment in final conversation and then drifted away in twos and threes. It couldn't have been a film show, they would have asked her to that, but they didn'tseem to have them any more. Probably everybody in the village had television by now. Most likely it had just been some committee meeting to organise or object to something. They'd tried to get her involved in that sortofthing, but she was past trying to reform the world. No, she'd never really cared enough; that sortofthingshe always left to Gustav.

  But she liked the villagers, with their slow speech and equal slowness to interfere. They were farmers, like her mother's people in the Harzmountains. They knew about frost and hailstorms, and crippled hands too; these things happened. There was no peace, but there at least there was silence, silence that she would never find in a city. She had been a fool to go to London, even to see Leni…

  She took the pills with the last of the soup, saving the final half-inch of brandy in her glass for when she was in bed. Now the drowsiness was real, the pain dulled to another brief defeat. This was the best time of the day and she stood up slowly, luxuriating in the silence within her own body. At first, she barely heard the tap on the front door.

  Oh dear Lord, not somebody come to say little Rosemary won't be at her piano lesson because… it could wait until tomorrow. What did they think she'd do if little Rosemary simply didn't arrive? Perhaps make the greatest-ever recording of the Romance in FSharp? Or merely dash down and give a sell-out Wigmore Hall recital? Or maybe drink a little more brandy, a little earlier than usual.

  When she opened the door she didn't know them, but she knew what they were. For thirty years they had been visiting her in nightmares; at last they had come when she was awake.

  "Get Major Maxim back from Osnabrück,"George told the Number10switchboard.

  Chapter 24

  Although it was the middle of a normal working day, the corridors of the Foreign Office seemed almost deserted, and Miss Milward's high-heeled footsteps echoed between the cracked mosaic floors and the high arched ceilings. The walls were lined with central heating pipes, pneumatic message tubes, drooping power cables and clumps of odd-lot filing cabinets and cupboards secured, if that was the word, by an extraordinary variety of padlocks. Everything had a dusty look, although that was probably the faded colours and the lighting.

  "You haven't been in here before, have you?" she asked. "First they plan to tart it all up and then they say No, we're having a whole new office built, so they scrap the paint job, and then they find there isn't any money for the new office anyway… and so it goes. They keep the one corner up to snuff to impress visiting Arabs… Scottie's using the Foreign See's room. He's up in Scotland consulting the PM… It's just up here…"

  After two flights of stairs and a near-miss with an old lady pushing a trolley of file boxes, the fresh paint suddenly appeared and they were in Arab territory.

  Nobody actually explained why Scott-Scobie was colonising Lord Purslane's room, since his own could hardly have been insecure, although it might have been too secret for a mere major. Looking back, Maxim decided it was probably a move to impress him, which the room did. High ceilinged, it was built on a corner overlooking both the Horse Guards and St James's Park, and furnished like the Committee Room of a well-off but moderately progressive London club. The walls were papered in dark green and gold, with a tall cabinet ofbound Hansards; the furniture was made of rich wood and red leather and – except for the leather-topped desk – not too antique; the quiet pinky-blue shade of the thick carpet could have been taken directly from the faces of the hunting aristocracy. In the evening, lit only in patches over the pictures on the walls and from the desk lamps in their green glass shades, it would have been a place for considered opinions and memorable phrases; at midday it was still impressive but dominated by the familiar babble of a television set by the empty fireplace.

  George was sitting in front of it, the usual glass in his hand. "Morning, Harry. You haven't met Scottie, have you?"

  Scott-Scobie was chubby but quick, striding across to shake hands and smile one-two-off like a fast salute. "Very kind of you to come in, Major. You know Agnes already."

  She was sitting at one end of the long overstuffed sofa; she lifted a hand.

  "A nice little place Milord's got here, don't you think?" Scott-Scobie went on. "George, do turn that blasted thing off. What would you care to drink?"

  George leaned forward and switched off the TV. "If they'd got it, they'd be flaunting it. More Scotch, please."

  "I didn't mean you. Major?"

  "Nothing for me. "

  "You can change your mind at any time. George, how much more background does the Major need?"

  "My impression all along has been that he knew more of what was going on than any of the rest of us, but I may be wronging the honest fellow."

  Scott-Scobie coughed and looked at Maxim. "Sit down, Major, sit down." Maxim sat carefully in a horseshoe back chair; Scott-Scobie paced abruptly away, turned and asked: "When you last saw Dieter Sims, in Germany, what conclusions had you come to about Plainsong?"

  Maxim said carefully:"He reckoned that Gustav Eismarkhad killed his first wife. "

  "Did you think so?"

  "Yes, I think I think so."

  "But he didn't have any proof?"

  Maxim blinked at him.

  "I'm sorry, Major, but the only really silly question is the one you don't ask."

  "He had no proof that I knew of. He said he was going to get hold of the sister -Mina."

  "He got hold of her, " Agnes said in a flat voice; Scott-Scobie shot her a look, ran a hand quickly through his dark curls then had to reach for his pocket to hoist up his trousers. His figure really needed braces but he liked taking off his jacket – as he had now – and showing one's braces was no part of British foreign policy under Lord Purslane.

  "Do you think she would be able to supply proof?"

  "I don't know. Gustavsaid he was going off to find his sister; we know he found her, but I couldn't guess whether he killed his wife in front of her or even told her he'd done it. "

  "I'mnotjoking, Major!"

  "What other sort of proof could she have?"

  Scott-Scobie ignored that. "Can you think of any other proof that might exist?"

  George said: "It's a serious question, Harry."

  Maxim tried to think. "Germany must have been a mess at the time, but even then you'd takesome care about murdering somebody. And he was pretty cool about arranging the death certificate; that wasn't an impulse… I'm sorry: I suppose you could scratch around asking anybody and everybody if-"

  "Which we donot wish to be caught doing," Scott-Scobie said.

  "Yes… The only answer is that it was a hell of a long time ago."

  Scott-Scobie looked across at George, who was holding out his glass hopefully in the direction of Miss Milward, and gave a brief sigh. "So it appears to be Mina Linnarzor nothing. At leastthey seem to accept that she might know something. "

  "What's happened to her?" Maxim asked.

  There was a sudden silence. Scott-Scobie walked a quick little circle and stopped. "Major – I want you to realise that this is above and beyond Top Secret. Do you appreciate that? I'm sure Agnes will back me on this. This is one where there's nothing on paper at all. "

  Maxim didn't know enough about the Diplomatic Serviceto realise that Nothing On Paper was not just the ultimate in security but also the supreme sac
rifice. Still, he got the general idea and tried to look impressed.

  Agnes said: "Our Harry may have his little failings, but telling people what's going on isn't usually one of them. I thought your people would have told you that much." She was sitting with her legs primly together, the skirt of her pale greenish suit arching just across the middle of her knees. She smiled wanly at Maxim, who was looking at her legs.

  "Very well." Scott-Scobie sat abruptly on the edge of the conference table. "What Sims and his brotherhood have done is to kidnap Wilhelmina Linnarz- or Eismark – and are preparing to hand her over to her brother Gustavfrom East Germany. How doesthat grab you?"

  "Do you mean they haven't actually done it?" Maxim asked.

  "No…"

  "Then how do you know about this?"

  "Agnes's service – no, Agnes herself, I understand – managed to locate her a couple of days ago. Until then nobody even knew she was alive. Then she suddenly vanished. Am I right?"

  "They got the address," Agnes said grimly, "from a routine report I had put in tomy service's registry. All in the spirit of inter-service co-operation."

  "You mustn't blame your own people," Scott-Scobie said, deliberately missing the point. "Sims was exceeding his authority – of which he appears to have been given far too much in any case – and your registry wasn't to know his allegiance had changed."

  Agnes didn't even glance at him. "We weren't keeping a watch on her, just being aware. Yesterday morning the neighbours reported to the police that she'd gone missing, her bed not slept in, and she couldn't really get around by herself much. There was a story of a strange van late the night before…"

  "Are the police involved, then?" Maxim asked.

  "Not very much. They don't know who she really is, for a start, and there's no proof of abduction. She was a bit of a lonerin her village, so she wouldn't necessarily have told anybody if she was going away. They're not actuallydoing anything yet. "

  "Then how are we sure that -?"

  "Ah yes." Scott-Scobie took command again. "One of Sims's little friends had the… you can't call it patriotism…"