The Age of Treachery

by Gavin Scott

  Then to the gods crowed Gollinkambi,

  He wakes the heroes in Othin’s hall;

  And beneath the earth does another crow,

  The rust-red bird at the bars of Hel.

  Now Garm howls loud before Gnipahellir,

  The fetters will burst, and the wolf run free;

  Much do I know, and more can see

  Of the fate of the gods, the mighty in fight.

  A new reader began: one of the young Icelanders.

  Brothers shall fight and fell each other,

  And sisters’ sons shall kinship stain;

  Hard is it on earth, with mighty whoredom;

  Axe-time, sword-time, shields are sundered,

  Wind-time, wolf-time, ere the world falls;

  Nor ever shall men each other spare.

  He paused – and as he paused there was a sharp sound of glass breaking from somewhere outside the Lodge. Lady Hilary looked up, puzzled, then walked over to the window, pulled aside the curtain and peered out. Forrester heard her sharply indrawn breath.

  “Michael,” Lady Hilary called up to the gallery. “I’m so sorry to interrupt, but something strange has happened outside. I think you should come and look.” Her voice was oddly flat, as if she couldn’t quite put strong emotions into words. Moments later Forrester and the other guests were all crowded around the window, peering out into the quadrangle. The only light came from the moon, still partially obscured by clouds, but against the whiteness of the snow it was perfectly clear what Lady Hilary was looking at.

  Below a broken window on the second floor a body lay spread-eagled in the snow.

  3

  OPERATION TORCH

  They ran out across the untouched whiteness of the quadrangle, the light from the windows of the Lodge behind them – and stopped a few feet from the body of David Lyall, as he lay amidst a halo of broken glass in the otherwise untouched snow, staring sightlessly towards the Lodge.

  “My God,” said Peter Dorfmann. “The poor fellow.”

  Forrester came forward then, and as he knelt beside the body to check there was no pulse, he saw the puncture wound between the second and third ribs. He looked up at the window from which Lyall had fallen and knew, with a sinking feeling, exactly whose window it was.

  “Isn’t that Clark’s set?” asked the Master, his gaze following Forrester’s. No-one replied. “Perhaps I’d better go and see if he’s there.” He began to walk towards the cloisters, then paused and turned to Forrester. “Would you mind calling the police?”

  “I don’t think anybody should go up there yet—” said Forrester, but Winters had already disappeared.

  “I suppose we’d all better move back,” said Calthrop. “We’re rather messing up the evidence.” It was all too true; half a dozen sets of footprints had trampled the snow into a slushy mass around the body.

  “We can’t just leave him there,” said Lady Hilary.

  “I’m afraid we have to,” said Forrester. “It’s too late to do anything to help him now.” Suddenly the Master’s wife was sobbing in his arms.

  “That poor young man,” she said, again and again. “That poor young man.”

  Bitteridge stared at the scene as if it had been designed to give him personal offence. “This is appalling,” he said. “Absolutely appalling.”

  The two Icelanders stared, white-faced. Arne Haraldson was frowning, as if trying to solve a particularly difficult crossword puzzle. The remaining guests milled about, wondering what to do next.

  The Master’s head appeared through the broken window of Gordon Clark’s room, and Forrester noted blood dripping from his hand where he had cut himself on the glass.

  “There’s no sign of Clark,” he called down. “Does anyone know where he might be?”

  “He’s probably at home,” said Forrester. “He only uses his set for tutoring.”

  “Very well,” said the Master, and disappeared inside again.

  “To think it should have happened now,” said Lady Hilary, “when we were all just sitting there, reading. It’s too horrible.” Forrester took her back into the Lodge and handed her over to the wife of a don from Magdalen. Then he went to the Master’s telephone and dialled 999. As he gave the details he felt the nausea return; but this time it was not a response to his own memories, but to the conviction that his friend Gordon Clark had committed an act for which he would eventually be tried, convicted and hanged.

  * * *

  Forrester heard the clanging bells of the police car from far away, which did not surprise him: he was familiar with the peculiar acoustics of snowy landscapes; there had been times when his life depended on it. The rest of the party, remaining in the Lodge on the Master’s instructions, were sitting around the drawing room in a state of shock; even those with drinks in their hands simply held them, not raising them to their lips. As Forrester watched them he was willing Clark to keep moving, to take a train, get to a Channel port and onto a ferry, to get out of the country as soon as he could.

  It was while he was thinking this that he noted Arne Haraldson was no longer present and then, glancing out into the quad, saw him disappearing into a stairway.

  Seconds later there was a flash of torchlight in the upper floor.

  Almost without thought Forrester slipped out of the drawing room and opened the front door. Bells still clanging, the police car was turning into the driveway, its headlight illuminating the bushes. Forrester melted into the shrubbery even as the car pulled up outside the front door.

  As he did so he remembered Lyall taunting Haraldson with his references to Nazis and the occult – and Haraldson’s look of fury in response.

  But Haraldson had been in the room with him when Lyall had died: Forrester had been listening to him. It was impossible that he had had anything to do with Lyall’s death.

  From the front of the Lodge, Forrester slid into the passageway that separated it from the chapel and found himself in the cloisters below the damaged Lady Tower. He hurried along them until he reached the wooden stairs on which he could still see traces of the snow from Haraldson’s boots.

  At the top of the stairs a single forty-watt bulb dangled from the ceiling of the corridor, leaving most of it in shadow. Then his eyes became accustomed to the dark and he could see a pale glow of light emerging from the open door of one of the rooms. Keeping his back against the wall he edged up the stairs and along the landing towards the open door of David Lyall’s rooms.

  The light came from under the body lying face down on the floor, feet towards Forrester, dark head pointing towards the window. It came from a torch, trapped under the man’s chest. Below, in the quadrangle, he heard the Master speaking to the police. As Forrester knelt down he saw that his impression the victim’s hair was dark had been wrong: the hair had been darkened by blood, in copious quantities, running from Haraldson’s blond head.

  Forrester’s eyes flickered around the room. What had Haraldson been doing here? And who had wanted to stop him? Not Lyall, obviously: Lyall was already dead. The books on the shelves seemed to have been disarranged, and one or two drawers were open. He looked at the shelves: English classics, some Russian novelists; nothing unexpected.

  He stood back for a moment, contemplating the room as a whole, glanced at the ceiling; the plaster seemed to be intact. He knelt down again beside the Norwegian and as he examined the floorboards, felt a pair of massive hands clasp themselves around his throat.

  “Du jævla drittsekk!” said Haraldson – and began to throttle him. For a moment Forrester was too startled by the realisation that Haraldson wasn’t dead to do anything to defend himself, and when he grasped the man’s wrists and began to tear them away from him he found it was impossible: the Norwegian had the strength of a berserker.

  “It’s me, Forrester,” he croaked, but the other man’s eyes were wild and Forrester was certain his words had had no effect.

  Then, as the flow of oxygen to Forrester’s brain was beginning to diminish and his vision wa
s beginning to dim a voice said, “What the bloody hell is going on here?” and someone dragged them apart. As Forrester staggered to his feet, he realised his rescuer was a police constable. Another man wearing a raincoat stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the light from the hall, watching them.

  For once, the police had arrived in the nick of time. “What’s all this about, then?” said the man in the raincoat.

  Forrester massaged his bruised throat. He could still feel the imprint of Haraldson’s iron fingers.

  “It’s alright, officer,” he said. “It was a misunderstanding. Somebody hit this gentleman, I found him lying here and he thought it must have been me who attacked him. My name’s Duncan Forrester. I’m a tutor here – I was with the party that found the body. And you are?”

  “Detective Inspector Alec Barber,” said the man in the raincoat. “Oxford Constabulary.” He had a pale, weary face and the lid of his left eye drooped oddly. “Is this true?” he said to Haraldson.

  “Hvor er jeg? Hvem er du jævler?” said the Norwegian.

  “Can’t he speak English?” said Barber.

  “Perfectly well,” said Forrester. “I think it’s the blow to the head. He needs medical attention.”

  “Hva gjør jeg her?” said Haraldson. “Jeg har en forelesning til å gi ved Oslo universitet i en halv times tid!”

  “What’s he on about?”

  “That he has to give a lecture in Oslo in half an hour’s time,” said Forrester.

  “Ask the doctor to step up here,” Barber said to the constable. “Tell him we’ve got a live one.” He straightened up and looked around the room in a leisurely way, almost as if he was alone. Then he turned to Forrester.

  “So what were you doing up here, Mr. Forrester?”

  “Dr. Forrester, not that it’s important, just for the record,” said Forrester, lightly. “I saw a torch go on in Lyall’s room and came up here to find out who it was.”

  “And you hit this gentleman because?”

  “I didn’t hit him,” said Forrester impatiently. “As I said, I came up here and found him. I thought he was dead. That’s why I was still in the room when you arrived.”

  “I see,” said Barber noncommittally, and turned to Haraldson. “Who do you say hit you then, sir?” he asked.

  “Likevel er det ax-tid, sverd-tid, vind-time, ulv-time,” said Haraldson. “Når skjermene er sundered og verden faller ned i avgrunnen. Vil du likevel vite mer?”

  “What?” said Barber.

  “I think he’s quoting from the Icelandic sagas,” said Forrester. “Wolf time and sword time and axe time, that sort of thing. The end of the world. It’s from the saga he was reciting before David Lyall was killed.”

  “Noen slo meg med dette,” said Haraldson.

  “What’s he saying now?”

  “Somebody hit me with that,” translated Forrester, as Haraldson pointed at the torch, which had rolled under Lyall’s desk during the struggle.

  “Somebody’s been searching the place,” said Barber, bending down to examine the torch. “Was it you?”

  “No. It must have been Haraldson – or whoever attacked him.”

  “Hmmm,” said Barber. “Well, I’d like to have a talk with you about that.”

  An old man with a pronounced tremor appeared in the doorway. “Ah, Dr. Hopkins,” said the inspector, pointing to Haraldson. “Would you take a look at this gentleman’s head?” He smiled thinly at Forrester. “This’ll be a nice change for him,” he said. “He usually only gets to look at people after they’re dead.”

  Then he stood up and looked Forrester full in the face. “As for you, sir,” he said, “I think we need to have that little chat, don’t you?”

  4

  MEETING IN A RUINED CITY

  But Barber’s “little chat” with Forrester was unexpectedly postponed. Haraldson, his head bandaged and still muttering incomprehensibly in Norwegian, was taken to the Churchill Hospital, but the police kept nearly everyone else well beyond midnight, despite Winters’ pleas to allow them to go home. Forrester was not surprised: as the police forces of occupied countries and totalitarian states alike had long known, human beings are at a low ebb in the early hours of the morning and less able to resist questioning. Normally British policemen did not have the opportunity to take advantage of this fact, but with Lyall’s body outside in the quadrangle and all the witnesses assembled, Detective Inspector Barber had the perfect excuse.

  “But by definition all these people are innocent,” protested the Master. “They were all in this room when the murder happened. What possible reason can you have for interrogating them now?”

  “Questioning them, sir,” corrected Barber, courteously enough. “While their memories are still fresh.”

  “They are exhausted, in a state of shock and eager to go home,” said Winters.

  “It will not be long now, sir,” said Barber. “Provided no-one delays me.”

  There was a pause, and the Master turned away. Oddly enough Forrester was one of those allowed to leave earliest, because after the encounter in Lyall’s rooms, Barber had made a mark beside Forrester’s name and the sergeant in charge of drawing up the schedule of interviewees assumed that he had already been questioned. Forrester knew that the respite was temporary, but he was grateful for it; the calm he had found in the churchyard that afternoon was beginning to dissipate. He returned to his rooms, went to bed and prepared to spend several uncomfortable hours tossing and turning as the events of the night replayed themselves in his mind. Instead he fell into a sound sleep from which he was awakened by his scout, Nesbit, who pointed out that unless he got a move on his chances of catching the train he needed for his appointment with the Empire Council for Archaeology in London were now very slim.

  * * *

  But Forrester was fast; the last few years had given him plenty of opportunities to prove that. After cramming his papers into a very shabby briefcase and sprinting through Oxford as fast as he had through the streets of Bordeaux when the Vichy police were pursuing him, he caught his train and threw himself into one of the dirty, crowded, unheated carriages just as it lurched arthritically away from the platform. He squeezed into the last available seat opposite a clergyman doing his best to suppress his unchristian resentment of the intruder, and began hauling documents from the briefcase to prepare for his meeting. As the train groaned and wheezed its way through snow-covered fields, past leaden streams and leafless woods, Forrester focused on what he needed to say to convince the ECA to approve and fund his expedition to Crete.

  For some months during the war Forrester had been part of the Special Operations Executive Group in German-occupied Crete, under the command of Patrick Leigh Fermor. Leigh Fermor was a showman, a daredevil, a born partisan; and he had seen in Forrester a fellow spirit – the very man to help him crown his extraordinary military career by kidnapping one of the German generals in command of Crete and taking him to Egypt by submarine.

  It was Forrester who had led the Cretan guerrillas in the diversionary raid that made the kidnapping possible; who had scrambled over the bony spine of the island with the Jäger patrol in pursuit to lead them away from the real action. Who had encouraged the Cretan guerrillas to scatter while he himself lured the Germans after him into the Gorge of Acharius.

  And it was in the Gorge of Acharius that he found the cave.

  The Germans had found the cave not long after him, of course – they were good. But they weren’t sure whether he was there or not, and as they entered he had forced himself into the cleft at the back, fighting his horror of confined spaces, wriggling backwards until, far beneath the earth, the passage brought him to the chamber.

  It was an almost spherical space, and in the centre was an irregularly shaped rock. And as Forrester ran his hands over it he realised he had found his own personal Rosetta Stone.

  Moments later, the Jäger patrol in the cave above him heard a noise from the cliffs on the other side of the gorge and raced out to invest
igate. Forrester waited for them to come back, but they did not, and when darkness finally fell he had emerged and headed down to the coast to join up with Leigh Fermor and the kidnapped German general.

  Not long after, he left Crete in a Greek caïque and eventually made his way to Cairo. He had never seen the cave again, but he knew it was there, waiting for him.

  Which was why he was going to see the Empire Council for Archaeology.

  He looked down at his shoes to make sure they looked moderately respectable, and was relieved to see they were at least clean. The broken and re-mended shoelaces slightly marred the effect, but it couldn’t be helped – unless he came across one of the increasing numbers of ex-servicemen who were appearing on the London streets with trays of laces and boxes of matches.

  Then, just when he was feeling confident he was ready for the fray, the train began a series of doleful, unexplained stops, first in the middle of empty fields and then in the dispiriting fringes of West London. Unconsciously, he began grinding his teeth.

  “Well,” said the clergyman, “if our new Socialist government decides to nationalise the railways the Great Western will deserve everything that’s coming to them.”

  Forrester glanced up from his papers. “There are in fact times when the railway services between Oxford and London,” said the clergyman, “put me in mind of the more lurid passages in the Book of Revelation.”

  Forrester found himself smiling, realising that the man was trying to help, and answering in the same vein. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said, “if the Beast with Seven Heads isn’t the chairman of the board.”

  “Certainly the sandwiches on sale at the Oxford Station café could easily have been made by the Great Whore of Babylon,” said the clergyman. As if stung by the gibe, the train started again, wheezily.