The Age of Treachery

by Gavin Scott

  “With enough force to send it right across the quad, and into Dr. Clark’s rooms?” asked Winters, sceptically.

  “Not into Dr Clark’s rooms: just far enough to hit the window before falling to the ground beneath them. But that was all that would be needed to create the illusion he had been killed in there. We could try an experiment, if you like.”

  “I’d rather not, Forrester, if you don’t mind,” said Winters. “I can see a host of embarrassing outcomes from such a venture, however entertaining it might be for you. But I must say, I am impressed, as always, with your enthusiasm and ingenuity, and I suggest that you pass on this idea to the police. Is our business completed for the night?”

  “Not entirely,” said Forrester. “I did promise to tell you the identity of the killer, didn’t I?”

  “You did, but frankly, I didn’t take you very seriously. And I have to tell you that your latest theory does not encourage me to do so.”

  “Well, you must admit that at the very least the ballista idea greatly widens the range of suspects, because if David Lyall was killed here and not in Dr. Clark’s rooms, many people sitting in the Lodge with me during the saga reading could theoretically have done it.”

  “I can’t argue with that,” said Winters. “Even if I consider it a very far-fetched premise.”

  “It could mean, for example, that Peter Dorfmann might have been responsible.”

  “We discussed this,” said Winters. “I pointed out to you that Lyall would have had little to blackmail him with if all he was able to reveal was that Dorfmann had been drafted in to help German intelligence during the war. I thought you’d understood that.”

  “I did, Master, I did,” said Forrester. “And to further exonerate Dorfmann I had someone help me make a little cardboard model of the Lodge and the Lady Tower.”

  “A cardboard model? This is becoming absurd,” said Winters, but Forrester ploughed relentlessly on.

  “A model which made it very clear it would have been almost impossible for anybody with me in the drawing room to have reached the tower, killed Lyall, sent him flying off into space and returned to his seat by the time we all heard the crash.”

  “Well, that at least is something,” said Winters.

  “Indeed,” said Forrester. “But when I examined this model – it was made for me by Kenneth Tynan, by the way, a man I think has a very bright future ahead of him in the theatre – I realised that these strictures did not apply to anyone sitting up in the minstrels’ gallery.” He paused. “The minstrels’ gallery where the reading was taking place.” Winters said nothing.

  “Remember that night when you kindly allowed Harrison and me to go up onto the roofs? We conclusively proved it would take at least twenty minutes to reach Dr. Clark’s rooms from the Lodge and return there. But from the minstrels’ gallery it would take only three minutes to reach the Lady Tower.”

  Winters put a hand on his arm. “But my dear fellow, everyone who saw us in that gallery can provide us with an alibi: we were all reading the saga. You heard us yourself.”

  “Yes, I heard you,” said Forrester. “But I didn’t see you. The gallery was in darkness apart from the reading lights over your texts. And I have no idea when one reader left off and the next began. One of you could easily have left his seat in the darkness and slipped away to the Lady Tower during the reading.”

  “Killing David Lyall with a single blow en route and setting up this absurd Heath Robinson contraption you ask us to imagine?” said Winters. “Really, Forrester, with all due respect, this is becoming laughable.”

  “I agree it would have been impossible in the time had there been no preparation,” said Forrester. “But what if the contraption had been set up earlier that day? And if Dr. Lyall had been lured up to the tower and stabbed between the end of High Table and the beginning of the reading, the task would have been relatively simple. All the murderer had to do was slip out of the room under cover of the Ragnarök reading, send the body flying across the quad, and then mingle with the crowd as they left the Lodge in response to the noise of breaking glass.”

  Winters was silent for a moment.

  “So which of the saga readers do you suggest performed this feat of malign ingenuity?” he said. “One of the young Icelandic engineers? Haraldson? Not me, I hope?”

  “How could I suspect you, Master, when you’ve done so much to help me find the real killer?”

  “I’m glad you appreciate that,” said Winters.

  “Of course,” said Forrester. “You were the last person on my mind. And then I received something in the post today. From the librarian of Kronborg Castle in Helsingør.”

  “And what was that?”

  “A complete manuscript of the Heimskringla.”

  For a long moment Winters did not speak. And then he broke into a huge smile. “This is wonderful! I can’t believe it. You’re telling me it’s been found – after all these years!” and then he paused. “Are you sure?” he said. “I find it very hard to believe any librarian would entrust something as precious as that to the post. And why did they send it to you, of all people?”

  “The librarian sent it to me because I saved him from a fall. But he hasn’t, of course, sent the original, just a facsimile, which had just turned up in the stacks after having been miscatalogued in the nineteenth century. The original was stolen by the Germans shortly after they occupied Denmark in 1940.”

  “The Germans?”

  “Yes. And here’s the odd thing: this was not the only manuscript of the Heimskringla to have experienced an odd fate. A previous version was either sold or gambled away by the Norwegian Count Ernst Arnfeldt-Laurvig some time around 1937. About the time you and Peter Dorfmann were visiting Bjornsfjord.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “In Vidkun Quisling’s yacht,” said Forrester. Winters stared at him.

  “What on earth makes you think I was ever on Vidkun Quisling’s yacht?”

  “The photograph taken by the Grevinne Arnfeldt-Laurvig. The one David Lyall brought to show you.”

  “That photograph was destroyed.”

  Forrester pounced.

  “Which you know – how?” There was a moment of silence.

  “I thought it was you who said the photograph you saw in Norway was missing.”

  “I said it was missing, not destroyed. But you know it was destroyed, don’t you, Master, because you destroyed it yourself after you took it from David Lyall’s rooms.”

  “The only photograph from Lyall’s rooms that I destroyed, with your acquiescence, was a piece of Edwardian pornography.”

  “The photograph Barber extracted from the light fitting was certainly a piece of Edwardian pornography,” said Forrester evenly, “but that wasn’t the photo that was in there when we left the room that night.”

  “I fail to comprehend your meaning,” said Winters.

  “You must have been desperate, when we opened that light fitting. I’m sure you’d searched those rooms yourself, several times, and failed to find anything. You’d even taken the risk of striking Haraldson down, when he was searching them on the night of the murder – probably, I suspect, with your trusty air raid warden’s torch. And in all the times you’d searched them, you’d found nothing. That’s why you were prepared to seem so co-operative, letting us search them again. Then Harrison had his stroke of genius, unscrewed the switch plate and there it was, tucked just out of reach. The second we pulled it out, the game was up. Proof that you and Peter Dorfmann had been in Norway as guests of Vidkun Quisling. So you pulled a remarkable stunt.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “In the guise of concern for our safety, you tricked Harrison into turning off all the lights in the college. You gave yourself the perfect excuse to close the room and stop the investigation for the night. And as soon as we had gone you went back to the Lodge, carefully cut the edges of an old postcard to resemble the scalloped edges of the print we’d seen, returned
to Lyall’s room, took the photograph that was there, and substituted your own. The pornography was a neat touch, by the way: it gave you an excuse to look shocked and embarrassed, it infuriated Barber, and it made us all look ridiculous. You even, under the cover of mild disgust at the whole incident, persuaded us to let you burn the evidence in front of our eyes, so there’d be no opportunity to confirm it was a substitute.”

  “Your imagination impresses me, Forrester,” said Winters. “I just hope it doesn’t infect your historical studies; if it became known this is how your mind works, it could seriously damage your scholarly reputation.”

  “Yes, scholarly reputation,” said Forrester. “Let’s turn to that. Because the photograph of you and Peter Dorfmann on Vidkun Quisling’s yacht was only part of the problem. The other part was the manuscript you’d obtained from Count Arnfeldt-Laurvig.”

  “You have no evidence whatever that I obtained any manuscript from Count Arnfeldt-Laurvig,” said the Master.

  “I did not, Master – until I received my communication from Denmark today. The Heimskringla was lost, has been for centuries. And you had made your scholarly reputation by ingeniously reconstructing it from missing fragments and references in other Norse manuscripts. Then I began to realise how embarrassing it would have been if it had been revealed that you’d had the complete manuscript all along. That you’d had it, in fact, since 1937. That your reconstruction was no more than a transcription. That you had the original in front of you as you were supposedly making all your brilliant deductions. That you are an academic fraud.”

  “Show me it then – let me see it,” said Winters, and there was a hint of desperation in his voice now. Forrester reached into the lining of his British Warm and drew out the book he had received at the Porter’s Lodge that day. Winters’ eyes glittered in the darkness.

  “Give it to me,” he said.

  But Forrester held it away.

  “This is what David Lyall pretended he had, but didn’t. He’d learned about your visit to the Arnfeldt-Laurvig estate in the thirties, the fact that you and Dorfmann had inveigled the Heimskringla from the count, and he knew it was the perfect tool with which to blackmail you. So he created the illusion he had it, that he had the proof. That was why he questioned those Scandinavian students; that was why he wrote to Haraldson, luring him here with hints of encryptions and occult secrets hidden in the saga. He wanted you to be terrified that he could expose you as an academic fraud.”

  “This makes no sense at all.”

  “On the contrary, it makes complete sense. David Lyall was a meretricious second-rater who wouldn’t have set foot in the door of Barnard College if he hadn’t had you on his side. But you let him in because he threatened to expose you. Then, once he was in, his demands kept escalating – right up to the Rotherfield Lectureship. You knew he didn’t deserve it, you knew it should have gone to Gordon Clark, and you told him so. And that was when he brought Haraldson into the picture, threatening to show the manuscript to him.

  “And it worked, didn’t it? You believed his threat and strong-armed the committee into awarding the lectureship to Lyall. Because otherwise he might have robbed you of the greatest coup of your life.”

  “And what would that be, pray?”

  “Control of MI6.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “That was why Charles Calthrop was here that night, wasn’t it? To discuss the prospect of you becoming the next ‘C’. But what an irony that the very person he brought with him, a possible future leader of democratic Germany, was your old comrade in arms, Peter Dorfmann.”

  “Dorfmann and I were on different sides in the late hostilities, Forrester, or had you forgotten?”

  “Ah, but were you? Or were you both working for the victory of Adolf Hitler – each using your own copy of the Heimskringla. Yours from the Arnfeldt-Laurvig estate, his looted from the library at Kronborg Castle.”

  “Using them how?”

  “To construct an unbreakable code by which you and Dorfmann could communicate from the very heart of British intelligence about things like the Murmansk convoys.”

  Winters stared at him, saying nothing, and Forrester went on. “Think of it: you and Dorfmann, old friends from before the war, each possessed a book which the rest of the world believed did not exist. With a single word or numeral you could direct your friend in Berlin to a line or passage which meant whatever the two of you had agreed it would mean. It was the ultimate unbreakable code. It was the perfect arrangement. So perfect you were never detected. So perfect that even now the mandarins in Whitehall think you’re a suitable person to be in charge of Britain’s anti-Soviet spy network.”

  Forrester heard the sound of Winters swallowing. It sounded unnaturally loud in the silence on the tower.

  “No wonder you danced to whatever tune Lyall played,” said Forrester. “With what he’d discovered on the Arnfeldt-Laurvig estate it wasn’t just your reputation he held in his hands – it was your life.”

  Winters had found his voice.

  “All this rests on your assumption that I would betray my country. What on earth makes you think I would do such a thing?”

  “You didn’t believe you were betraying your country. You believed you were ensuring its future by ensuring what you referred to as ‘the triumph of the Aryan race’.”

  Winters stared at him, frankly astonished. “Where on earth did you get that from?” he said.

  “From certain articles in a magazine called Clear Skies, for which you wrote, between 1930 and 1933, under the name ‘Hiberno’.”

  Forrester paused, but this time Winters said nothing.

  “It was pure chance,” said Forrester. “The day after Lyall was killed I found myself on a train going to London with the man who used to edit the magazine. You may remember him: Roger Glastonbury. Not a political man at all, indeed a very unworldly one; I don’t think he realised the significance of what you were writing at all.” Winters was watching him intently now.

  “But I did, when I went through the back issues in the vicarage yesterday. What was it you wrote? ‘Nietzsche was right. Salvation lies only through the advent of the Superman. Where is he to be found? In the uplifting glow of the Nordic past; in the unsullied purity of our Aryan heritage, cleansed of all the accretions of lesser breeds.’ Paraphrasing, perhaps, but not totally inaccurate. I’m sure if any of your intelligence colleagues had come across that and realised who Hiberno was, you wouldn’t have been allowed within a mile of British intelligence. But they didn’t, did they? And you found yourself in a perfect position to help give that Superman victory over your own country.”

  “The real enemy was Bolshevism,” said Winters unexpectedly. “I was there, you know, not long after the revolution. Part of the British mission. I saw the Bolshevik massacres, the starvation, the destruction of culture. Do I plead guilty to wanting to protect my country from all that? Yes, I plead guilty. Do I plead guilty for wanting to save my race from the pollution of lesser breeds? Yes, I do. I risked my neck for Britain, Forrester. And I am about to be rewarded for it, by being put in charge of the fight against Bolshevism in its most dangerous form. Calthrop knows how much I hate Moscow and all it stands for; he knows I am the perfect man to wield the sword of intelligence against our foes. And if David Lyall was endangering that, he deserved to die.”

  And without warning Winters seized the Heimskringla from Forrester’s hands and struck him a crushing blow across the temple, sending him staggering backwards.

  “As do you, damn you!” he said, and too late Forrester saw the blade glitter as Winters brought it down into his chest.

  Where half an inch of the lapel of Forrester’s British Warm slowed the knife sufficiently for his fingers to close around the Master’s wrist. He pulled the older man close to him, and spoke almost in a whisper.

  “I realised, by the way, why you had to hurry up to Gordon’s room as soon as we found the body: to scoop up the extra glass. Because if Lyall had really be
en propelled out through the window, there shouldn’t have been much glass on the inside, and of course there was. That was why your hand was bleeding. You were covering your tracks.” And then, as his unarmed combat instructor had taught him long ago, Forrester swung himself upright again, so he and Winters were face to face – and the knife fell from Winters’ paralysed fingers and skittered along the stones into the shadows.

  “I saw what your pure Aryans did to men, women and children all across Europe,” said Forrester. “I saw what your treachery cost this country in young lives that need never have been lost. You are a rotten, rotten man and I will make sure you hang for it.” And then he heard the step behind him where the knife had fallen and knew he had miscalculated. Everything he had done and said had been on the assumption that they were alone on the tower – and suddenly he knew they were not.

  “My husband is a good man,” said Lady Hilary, “and you will not hurt him,” and she brought Winters’ knife slashing down at Forrester’s unprotected neck.

  Without a conscious thought, Forrester swung Winters around to take the blow.

  For a moment he was looking beyond Winters’ face, wide-eyed with pain and astonishment, into Lady Hilary’s, as she realised what she had done.

  And then Winters collapsed like a rag doll onto the chute that had brought him so close to the perfect murder, and slid out into the night, through the crenellations and over the edge of the tower, curving in a perfect arc until he thudded into the snow in the middle of the quad.

  “Oh, God,” said Lady Hilary. “Oh, God.”

  The tower door slammed back against the stonework and Barber came rushing towards Forrester, the headphones still on his head, Harrison close behind him still holding the army surplus recording equipment they had installed earlier in the day, with MacLean on his heels.