by Gavin Scott
At the same time he realised that this was exactly what had happened, time and time again during the war, when MacLean had sent him on some expedition and assured him it was just to gather a few facts he was almost certain of anyway, and that the whole thing would be a doddle. It never was then, it certainly wasn’t now.
His next task was to persuade Sophie of this, but to his relief, it didn’t take long. The Grevinne Arnfeldt-Laurvig had also spent the last five years in occupied Europe, much of it outwitting the occupying power – she knew when there was time to argue and when there was not. And despite her slightly formal, accented English, their communication was lightning fast. Each knew what the other meant almost before anything was said, and if there was any uncertainty, when their eyes met, it was gone.
He had guessed Sophie would have a car, and indeed she did, in one of the barns, but the tank was empty and so were the petrol cans. Instead, they hauled the big sleigh out of the front hall while Josef harnessed the horses. Helga brought fur coats from the cupboards and when they were all aboard, the old man cracked the whip and the horses began to move. Helga sat beside Josef and Forrester and Sophie sat bundled in furs behind them, while the horses’ breath crystallised in the freezing night air and the runners slid smoothly over the moonlit snow. Forrester kept his eyes on the dark verges of the road: if their attackers were going to try again, that’s where they’d be.
But no shots came from the darkness and after a mile or so he saw the tracks of the assassins’ car swing away onto the main road. He tapped Josef on the shoulder and gestured for him to bring the sleigh to a halt. Then he got out and knelt down to examine the tyre tracks. Worn, of course, as all tyres would be in Norway after the war years, but with a distinctive chunk out of the one that had been on the right rear wheel.
With numb fingers he drew out his notebook and made a sketch of the tyre track. “How will that help?” asked Sophie, not taking her eyes off the trees.
“I think they followed me from Germany,” said Forrester, “so they must have come by air and hired a car here. If we give this to the police they may be able to use it to trace the hire.”
“It’s possible,” said Sophie, “there are not so many cars back on the roads here yet.”
As he got back into the sleigh Forrester said, “They might still pull off the road and wait in ambush. Is there another route?”
“Yes.”
“Might it take us past a police station?”
“It will pass through a small town where I am known to the authorities.”
“Then we should go there,” said Forrester, and when they reached the next junction the sleigh hissed off to the left, away from the road bearing the tracks of their attackers.
“What should we tell the police?” asked Sophie.
“Everything,” said Forrester. “If only for your protection later on. At least one man is dead, but your house was invaded; you have nothing to hide. Josef and Helga should feel free to tell the truth too.”
“What about you?”
“I can’t stay,” said Forrester, and he felt rather than saw the expression on Sophie’s face. “As long as I’m with you, you’re in danger. And I have to get back to England as soon as possible. Is there a station somewhere along our route where you could drop me, so I can catch a train back to Oslo?”
There was a beat before she answered, “Yes.”
He took her hand. “I’ll come back,” he said.
She turned to look at him, and he wanted to look into those eyes for ever. “I’ll be waiting,” she said, simply.
Then they were racing along the edge of another fjord, the moonlight glittering on the distant waters and the sky above them jammed with stars. Forrester held Sophie’s hand until they paused beside a little log-built station beneath an icy mountain peak, glittering as if it was made of silver. He opened his mouth to speak, but she shook her head.
“We will talk again when you are safe,” she said, and moments later they saw the plume of white steam of an approaching train rising in the distance, and the sleigh slid back up to the road, turned a bend and disappeared.
He stood there for a long moment after it had gone and then walked onto the snow-covered platform and waited until the train pulled in.
* * *
Forrester sat in the carriage, looking into the darkness of the forest, fighting off sleep. He could not afford to sleep. Besides, his nose hurt too much, which was good: the pain would keep him awake.
The train rattled along the edge of a long lake and Forrester saw, or imagined he saw, the sleigh racing along the road that ran along the far side and a tide of longing swept over him. Love had died in him long ago, and now, out of nowhere, it had returned, and he felt like a sleeper in a tomb when the stone is lifted from the entrance and the world opens up to him again.
The coffee in the station at Oslo scalded his mouth, and he drank it scanning the crowd, ready for the slightest thing that seemed out of place, but there was nothing. He needed to get out of Norway, back to Denmark at the very least. He would take the ferry. As he walked through the city to the terminal he watched warily, but no-one took any interest in him.
Little notice was taken of him on the ferry either, although he took the precaution of seating himself with his back to a metal bulkhead and a good view of the arriving passengers. With every minute that passed it was harder to fight off sleep, but he was determined to, and determined to think through what had happened and what he had learned.
But he managed neither. Instead he found his eyes closing and his thoughts filling with Sophie and then sleep came and when he woke the ferry was bumping against the jetty in Copenhagen and he was being bundled off with the others.
He drank more coffee at a restaurant on the Nyhavn, the dockside red-light district where Hans Christian Andersen had once lived and where Forrester had eaten before he crossed to Norway – a lifetime ago, it seemed, now – and then made his way to a phone box and called the RAF base at Lindquist.
The sergeant who answered was matter-of-fact and helpful. There was a flight leaving for Blighty at midnight, and if he was there, they could get him aboard. He looked at his watch: it was not yet noon. He had no desire to wander around Copenhagen until midnight, wondering if anyone was going to take a potshot at him, and even less desire to sit in a Nissen hut at the RAF base listening to bored squaddies make predictions about the Cup Final. And as one of the things Forrester had learned during the last five years had been that if any downtime became available you should seize it, he decided to visit the home of a man with whom, at times, he felt a certain spiritual affinity. He had lived in Kronborg Castle in the town of Helsingør and his Danish name had been Amleth.
Helsingør was just an hour or so up the coast from Copenhagen, and Forrester took a bus there, gazing idly out of the window at the deserted beaches as the road wound along the coast. At one point he passed a group of men removing the iron plating from what had clearly been an improvised armoured car, presumably used by the Danish resistance.
The resistance in Denmark had been slow to gather momentum, but they had kept crucial German reinforcements from heading to France after D-Day by sabotaging the railway network and to their everlasting credit they had steadfastly refused to persecute the Jews. Directive after directive from Berlin was sidestepped or prevaricated, and when German patience finally ran out and Hitler decided to send all Danish Jews to the concentration camps anyway, the Danes packed every Jew they could find aboard motor boats and fishing smacks and ferried them across the Baltic to the safety of Sweden. It was, Forrester thought, a typically Danish combination of decency and pragmatism.
Finally the bus reached Helsingør and he got out to stroll through the winding streets into the medieval Carmelite Priory, whose cloisters Hans Christian Andersen had insisted were the most beautiful in Denmark.
As he walked he let what he had learned during the last few days float down through his mind like sand drifting down through water. The first
was that his attempts in Berlin to uncover the true nature of Peter Dorfmann’s activities during the war had clearly stirred up a hornets’ nest. A team had been assembled in Berlin to kill him, and when they had failed a second attempt had been made in Norway. Considerable resources had been devoted to this effort: this was clearly more than a personal matter.
What had he found out in Berlin? Essentially, that although Dorfmann had indeed been a relatively obscure academic during the Nazi years, he had enjoyed good relations with senior members of the party, including its intelligence apparatus. That he had been in possession of some kind of Old Norse manuscript, and that such a manuscript had been used by German intelligence, involving two figures codenamed Erik and Saint, the latter having been in a position to give information on the intentions of the Soviet High Command and the Murmansk convoys.
Which reinforced the idea that Dorfmann might be behind Lyall’s death, because there was no doubt Lyall had been talking up his possession of an ancient Norse manuscript when he was killed. Both Haraldson and his conversation with the Scandinavian students confirmed that.
On the other hand, there was the fact that Dorfmann had been in the room with Forrester when Lyall was killed – and Forrester now knew that, contrary to what he had supposed, Lyall had not taken a manuscript from the Arnfeldt-Laurvig estate when he had been there during the war.
But he might have taken the knowledge of the manuscript’s existence. Knowledge gained in that depleted library with its sinister history.
And suddenly Forrester was certain that Lyall had used both the manuscript and the occult associations of the house from which it came to draw Haraldson to Oxford.
But why? Why had he wanted the Norwegian in England in the first place? What had he got to gain by it?
Forrester walked out of the cloisters into a shadowy quarter full of half-timbered medieval merchants’ houses and emerged into the Axeltorv, where a farmer’s market was going on under the watchful eye of Erik of Pomerania. Erik, after being dethroned as King of Denmark, had set up as a pirate and piled up vast quantities of treasure, now reputedly hidden in a castle in Pomerania. But treasure or no treasure, the eyes of Erik’s statue seemed to be fixed wistfully on a large ball of Gouda on the stall below him. Perhaps even pirate kings longed, in the afterlife, for a bit of cheese.
Even as he contemplated Erik’s statue, Forrester thought of Lyall eyeing the photographs in Sophie’s albums – and slipping into his pocket the photograph revealing the identity of the visitors who had come to Bjornsfjord in 1937.
But if he had taken the photograph Lyall had never spoken about it to anyone in Oxford; he had just talked about a manuscript. And he had taken no manuscript from Sophie’s house. Forrester’s thoughts were beginning to march in a circle, and he had to stop. He began to walk towards Hamlet’s Castle.
It wasn’t really Hamlet’s medieval Elsinore, of course, but a handsome renaissance building complete with pitched roofs and elaborate towers around a central courtyard. The story that had inspired Shakespeare had originated long before his time in a document known as The Saga of Hrolf Kraki. In that version the murdered king had two sons, who instead of pretending to be mad, while trying to solve the mystery, went about in disguise. There was also a tantalisingly elusive Icelandic hero called Amlóði, who accidentally killed the king’s advisor in his mother’s bedroom before dispatching the usurper himself. Whether any of those events had taken place here at Elsinore was another matter, but Forrester was prepared to believe they might have, and enjoy the sensation of being, for a while, in the heart of a legend.
He approached the castle across the star-shaped expanse of grassy fortifications, crossed the bridge over the moat and gazed up at the green copper spheres of the Trumpeter’s Tower. Beneath the tower was the statue of Ogier the Dane, the Viking chieftain who was supposed to wake and save his country if it was ever in peril, but who never had.
Inside the castle, he walked under huge seventeenth-century chandeliers along the length of the Great Hall and through the Royal Chambers. In the Royal Library a gnome-like librarian, looking like a character in a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, was perched on a tall wheeled ladder, pulling out one leather-bound book after another, examining it and writing in a large notebook before putting it back. As Forrester watched, the librarian leaned out too far and the ladder began to tilt dangerously. Forrester darted in and steadied it until the man could climb down. “Tag,” he said, and when Forrester replied in English, immediately switched languages.
“Thank you,” he said. “Very quick you were.”
“Very high were you,” said Forrester, and then realised there was a reason why the man had been leaning out instead of wheeling the ladder along: the castors on which it ran were jammed. He took out his penknife and bent down to free them. “Wonderful library,” said Forrester, as much as anything to make polite conversation while the man calmed down. “Any early editions of Hamlet?”
“If we had them,” said the librarian, “they would have been stolen by the Germans.”
Forrester processed this. “Of course. I imagine they took a fair bit.”
“Anything they thought they could get away with.”
“Including sagas?”
“Probably. That is what I am trying to find out. Nordic they believed they were, though they really just as gangsters should be described in my opinion.”
Suddenly Forrester’s mind was racing. “Listen,” he said, “I wonder if I could ask a favour.” And he wrote down his name and address. “If you do find out that the Germans removed any Old Norse manuscripts during the occupation, would you let me know?”
“Certainly,” said the librarian. “May I be asking why?”
Forrester smiled. “It’s a long story,” he said.
23
CONVERSATION WITH A WIFE
Forrester landed at Northolt in the early hours of the morning and hitched a ride on an army lorry going to the Kensington Barracks. From there he called MacLean’s office at the War Ministry and was told he wasn’t in yet. He took the tube to Whitehall, had a cup of tea and a bun at a cabman’s stand and called again. This time MacLean’s secretary told him to go to the bridge in St. James’s Park and wait there. By the time MacLean finally arrived Forrester was feeling unwashed, unshaved and exhausted; all he really wanted to do was go to bed.
“So you dropped me in it again,” he said as MacLean appeared. “Why do I never learn?”
MacLean took out a cigarette, lit it judiciously, and offered one to Forrester, who declined.
“You seem to have survived very well,” he said. “Although your nose is looking a bit bent.”
“I would have had a better chance of surviving if I’d been told what I was up against.”
“My dear chap, if I’d known, I’d have told you,” said MacLean, “but I’m all ears now,” and he listened intently as Forrester gave a short précis of what had happened to him since landing in Berlin.
“You really seem to have put the wind up somebody, don’t you?” said MacLean, when Forrester had finished. “Good for you. So, let’s have a look at the snap you pinched.”
He examined the photograph Forrester had taken from the album in Sophie’s drawing room, and said he’d keep it to see if the boys in photo analysis could glean anything more. Forrester said he wanted to show it to the police first as part of the evidence about Lyall’s murder, and MacLean looked reluctant. “Tell you what,” he said, “let’s go back to the Ministry and see if we can get it copied.”
Forrester agreed, and they walked back through the park to Whitehall along paths covered in ice, which had melted and refrozen so often it was like a range of miniature mountains. The snow on the grass was grey now, and miserable-looking ducks watched them suspiciously from the bleak surface of the lake.
“But whatever we get out of the photograph, you did very well, you know,” said MacLean. “Your hand seems to have lost none of its cunning.” Forrester suppressed a wry smile
at his old boss’s continued use of judicious flattery. He remembered all too vividly how MacLean had been able to deploy a little understated flattery to calm his agents after the most disastrous and ill-planned missions, as though the whole point had really been to allow them to demonstrate their remarkable abilities to stay alive. Before Forrester could point this out Maclean said: “And it was worth it, of course. What you’ve found out could prevent a very bad apple from rising to the top of the barrel. I think I’m mixing a couple of metaphors there, but you know what I mean.”
“It’ll only mean something if the Americans take it seriously,” said Forrester. “I haven’t exactly got definitive proof that Dorfmann is a bad apple.”
“Circumstantial evidence may well be good enough in a case like this,” said MacLean. “And if we can track down the rest of the files referring to ‘Erik’ and ‘Saint’ and identify them, we may have something actionable.”
“The problem is,” said Forrester, “I’m not sure any of this is going to help save Gordon Clark. Dorfmann may have been part of the Nazi intelligence apparatus, but that doesn’t prove he killed David Lyall.”
“Unless Lyall thought what he’d found out about Dorfmann in Norway gave him some sort of leverage. Something to do with Satanism?”
“You think he might have tried to blackmail Dorfmann?”
“What do you think?”
Forrester considered. “He was perfectly capable of it,” he said, and then added, “The problem is Dorfmann has an alibi: me.”
“Because you were with him when Lyall was killed?”
“Exactly.”
“Perhaps he had an accomplice. After all, he didn’t come after you himself, did he, in Berlin or Norway? He sent professionals. Perhaps one of them did it.”
“Good point,” said Forrester. “Let’s hope we can persuade the police to consider that possibility.”
“Anyway,” said MacLean. “I very much appreciate what you’ve done. We need good Germans in power when we hand the place back to them, not people like Dorfmann.”
