Nightfall Berlin

by Jack Grimwood

‘Sir …’ His assistant was in the doorway.

  ‘What?’ Henderson’s face darkened.

  ‘Apparently, Le Monde have a photograph of Amelia Blackburn face to face with Tom Fox, whom they’ve identified. They’re running it tomorrow. Our ambassador in East Berlin has just been asked for a quote. He’s also been asked to present himself to the GDR’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.’

  Henderson put his head in his hands.

  ‘He’s told Le Monde he knows nothing about this at all. He’s told the East Germans that the man in the photograph looks East German to him. Off the record, he wants to know if you knew.’

  ‘Knew what?’ Henderson demanded.

  ‘That Major Fox was here to kill Sir Cecil, I imagine.’

  29

  Dr Hall was old when he arrived at the school in the autumn of 1958, desiccated like a dried insect and slightly stooped as if trying to hide his height. He was the only master who ever wore a gown. He was told, the boys overheard, that gowns were no longer necessary and Irongate Hall was, in any case, not really that kind of school. It was state-funded, dedicated to providing education to children of difficult families. The kind of children who ended up here because nowhere else would take them. And he’d nodded, and smiled to show he understood, and turned up next morning for Latin in his gown just the same.

  The day he died he took Classics for a double lesson in the morning, umpired a rugger game for the under-elevens from the touchline, and stripped the carburettor on his new, very red and very shiny Austin-Healey Sprite, a sports car so small that no boy knew how Dr Hall fitted inside.

  After that, he played the organ at evensong. A wheezing bellows of a machine that gasped and thudded its way through ‘The Day Thou Gavest Lord Has Ended’ … A short while after, he retired to his room at the foot of the bell tower that had been a classroom in its day and had a heavy oak door scarred from decades of long-gone boys throwing knives.

  Inside, he made himself tea, read a little Catullus, and retired to a hot bath in the tiny bathroom next door, where he opened his wrists, having carefully placed the chrome parts of the Gillette safety razor on a shelf above his basin.

  He left Albinoni’s Adagio playing on a Bush record-player, although by the time he was found next morning the LP had long since played out and simply turned, the crackle of the needle sounding like static.

  One thing went unmentioned in the list given to the police of things Dr Hall had done that day in the hours leading up to his unexpected suicide. Between playing the organ for evensong and retiring for a bath he had made tea for two. The boy who drank the second cup, and left without saying goodbye, was eleven, already regarded as a troublemaker.

  The headmaster, a New Zealander who’d left his home country for reasons never disclosed to the board of trustees, had called the boy to his study and asked him if he had anything to say.

  ‘About what, sir?’

  ‘Why Dr Hall sent for you?’

  The eleven-year-old had looked at the headmaster and said nothing. The headmaster was aware that the police had announced their intention to speak to the boys. Something the boy had overheard or deduced for himself.

  It was rare for lambs to escape the fold.

  Rare, but not impossible.

  Looking into the dark eyes of the boy in front of him, who stood in the awkward wastelands between childhood and adolescence, the headmaster knew he’d misjudged his charge. It was the boy’s question that decided him.

  ‘When exactly are the police coming back, sir?’

  It was a dangerous moment. The boy was not aware then how dangerous. But he knew he was taking a risk and that not showing fear was his key to surviving.

  The headmaster stood slowly, pushing back his chair and edging himself round the desk, stopping to half sit on the desk, his face pushed very close to Tom’s. His bottom lip had thinned to a tight line and his eyes were murderous.

  The boy kept very still.

  He breathed through his mouth to spare himself the stink of the man’s breath, and didn’t flinch. He didn’t blink either.

  He didn’t dare.

  The two of them stared at each other, and then the headmaster sat back, his eyes lost their blackness and he waved the boy from his room.

  Both left with their questions unanswered. The day the police came back to interview Dr Hall’s class, the boy and three others were on a route march over the Downs with their Geography teacher. They camped under a beech tree by a river, ate beechnuts from the ground, smoked a Capstan each, which the master pretended not to notice, and returned next morning with sore feet, mosquito bites and woodsmoke in their hair.

  The headmaster left at the end of that term and was replaced by the Geography teacher. The reason for Dr Hall’s suicide was never explained. The letter that the boy swore to Dr Hall he’d written to the police, and posted in the village rather than having it inspected first and posted by his house tutor, was neither answered nor acted upon. It had never been written. Tom Fox told the school padre this under the seal of confession.

  30

  The two Volkspolizei guarding the door of Sir Cecil’s apartment block stopped mid-conversation as a leather-jacketed man strode towards them, his contemptuous glance already dismissing them. He was hard-faced and his hair looked recently cropped. His cheeks were hollow, and dark circles suggested he hadn’t slept in days. He wore black leather gloves, his jacket was battered and he stank of cheap vodka and even cheaper cigarettes.

  He barked a demand in Russian and when they didn’t move quickly enough strode up the steps and rattled the handle.

  ‘KGB,’ he said.

  One of them hurried forward.

  He slammed the door behind him, grateful, it seemed, to be rid of the sight of fools, and stamped up the wide staircase. A woman, still in her nightdress, looked out from a flat on the first floor, opened her mouth to ask a question, changed her mind and went inside. Tom was glad. He hoped she hadn’t got a good look at him.

  He’d woken to his name on a radio in the next room.

  Someone listening to Radio Free Berlin or whatever this year’s West German propaganda programme was called. Paranoia had taken him to the window and shown him police gathering in a car park below. Dressing faster than he’d have thought possible, he’d chosen his most anonymous clothes, and let himself out through a service door at the back, carrying a bin for disguise.

  The question was what he should do next.

  He couldn’t simply turn up at the British embassy on Unter den Linden. That would be a disaster. This wasn’t Moscow. This time round he was sans papiers, without credentials, certainly without the kind that might persuade an ambassador to spirit him out of the country rather than just hand him over.

  If Tom had been our man in East Berlin, he’d have been on to the Politburo denying responsibility. God, no, nothing to do with us.

  That was the truth of it too.

  And Tom could go that route. God, no, nothing to do with me. I just happened to stumble over the bodies. Frederika sent me a message saying we needed to talk. She didn’t say when, so I thought I’d drop by to see if she was there …

  He could really see that working.

  Would Caro’s father believe he’d done it?

  Worse still, would Caro? Tom wanted to call her to say that it wasn’t him. All that would do, though, was to help the Stasi pinpoint his location. As things stood, he couldn’t get a message to London, had little chance of the Stasi assuming he was innocent, and had no diplomatic status and so no immunity.

  Plus. He was the wrong side of the Wall.

  What really frustrated Tom was that Sir Cecil’s murder made no sense. The East Germans didn’t need to kill the man to prevent him leaving. They could simply refuse permission. And why would London kill like that? Far easier to arrange a heart attack as he was flying home.

  As for Moscow? See Berlin …

  It was the fact that the murder made no sense that dragged Tom back to the crime scene. Tha
t and the chance Cecil Blackburn might have hidden a copy of his memoir. Coming back here was a risk. A dangerous one.

  He’d need to work fast.

  Tom wished he’d had time to search properly earlier.

  Reaching the top of the stairs, he found Sir Cecil’s door fastened with a Kriminalpolizei seal, reached for his lock knife and hesitated. Get in, search the damn place, get out again. Not giving himself a chance to decide this was a bad idea, Tom cut the seal.

  Chalk circles marked blood-splatter on the walls. The Persian rug was gone, squares had been cut from brocade curtains, and fingerprint powder bloomed like spores across Sir Cecil’s desk. The fireplace was clean though. Tom wondered why. He’d taken the last page not entirely burnt and there seemed little chance forensics could do much with the ashes.

  Standing in the middle of the study, he shut his eyes and tried to reconstruct what he’d found but not had time to examine. Evgeny just inside the door; eyes scarlet where blood vessels had burst, the cord around his throat so tight it dug into flesh. Sir Cecil on his study floor; left temple crushed, the clawed hook of a crowbar in his heart. No lividity, though.

  Tom stopped to think about that.

  Blood pooled in the lower edges of a body thirty minutes after the heart stopped beating. So Tom’s visit had to be inside that time frame. The two men had been killed no more than half an hour before he came looking for Frederika.

  Tom checked the flat door, finding the frame crushed where a crowbar had been pushed in below the lock. How could the people below have heard nothing? How could those inside …?

  Sir Cecil’s record-player had been hissing noisily, its needle endlessly jumping a final groove. Could Beethoven have covered the break-in? God knows, the music had been loud enough the first time Tom came.

  Taking a closer look, he wondered if the bruising to the frame was deep enough. What if it had been damaged later to throw the police off the scent? Maybe no murderer had smashed his way in. The reason Evgeny didn’t fire through the door was that the killer was already inside.

  Far from trying to keep him out, perhaps Evgeny had been the one to invite him in? Tom filed that thought for later.

  He searched Sir Cecil’s desk first, but it had been emptied, and anything deemed not to matter – which included HB pencils and a bottle of Quink – loaded on to a wooden tray by someone who liked neat parallel lines. A collection of Corgi toys had been tossed into a cardboard box at the side.

  Someone else had done that.

  The effect was too chaotic for the pencil arranger. Two crime scene technicians working together but with different approaches perhaps. Tom removed each drawer in turn, examining its back and underside. Nothing had been taped to the wood. Dragging the heavy desk away from the wall, he found nothing taped to the back either. The preciseness of the dents in the rug said the police hadn’t bothered to move the desk. That was good for Tom.

  If they hadn’t bothered to do that they might have been too slack to check other places properly too. They’d taken down two oil paintings, however, revealing patches of slightly less faded paint. Looking for a safe probably.

  A mahogany sideboard revealed bottles of Scotch, their shoulders dusted with fingerprint powder. Those searching hadn’t realized the trove they’d found. How did Sir Cecil, in disgrace and effectively in exile, paid by his new masters in a soft currency, come by whisky this good?

  Friends back home seemed the obvious answer. Rich ones.

  Tom checked the top of a dresser, moving tankards and finding dead spiders, desiccated flies and an old George V halfpenny, dark with age. It was propping up a pewter tankard that was engraved on one side.

  Cecil Blackburn. Captain, 1st XI. Summer 1924.

  Tom pocketed the coin and was about to put the tankard back when he saw a photograph, face out and so dark that it blended against the pewter.

  A boy holding a cricket bat, standing beside a man Tom vaguely recognized. The man wore an old-fashioned frock coat and celluloid collar. On the back of the photograph, in elegant script, was written: Quid datur a divis felici optatius hora?

  What is there given by the gods more desirable than a happy hour?

  Tom had enough Latin to recognize it as Catullus, a Roman poet best known for versifying the death of his mistress’s pet bird, when he wasn’t writing limericks later judged too pornographic to translate.

  A grown man quoting Catullus at an eleven-year-old?

  Going to the window, Tom scanned the river walk below. The longer he remained here the greater the risk. He’d given himself ten minutes and was already over that. Knowing he should be gone, he stripped books from the shelves, flipping them open to see if they were hollow or hid anything between their pages.

  Halfway along the second shelf a small buff-coloured notebook fell from a paperback guide to forest walks. It was filled with names written in tiny crabbed writing. HMSO was printed on the front.

  Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.

  Blackburn claims to have a list of everybody implicated.

  Lord Eddington’s words came back to him.

  Tom had just started skimming the names when steps pounded up the stairs and the flat door crashed open. A police officer he hadn’t seen before stood in the doorway. He was holding a Tokarev and panting from the climb.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Tom demanded.

  The Volkspolizei officer looked suddenly uncertain.

  ‘This is a crime scene,’ Tom said, his Russian heavy. ‘Who said you could come in? Who authorized this?’

  Luckily, the newcomer’s Russian was bad. His main concern not getting himself into trouble and, having sheepishly holstered his sidearm, he happily passed the buck up the line, giving Tom his boss’s name and rank.

  ‘Don’t touch anything,’ Tom warned him.

  The young officer shook his head.

  ‘Wait … Why did your captain send you?’

  ‘One of the men on the door said you were here and he sent me along in case you needed help.’ To see who you were, he meant.

  Tom sighed. ‘I’ll talk to them on my way out. Shut the door when you go. Have it resealed.’ Pocketing the notebook, he headed downstairs without looking back.

  31

  Hide in plain sight.

  Tom had Belfast to thank for his experience doing that. It was a good rule; not infallible but, in his opinion, often safer than going to ground. All the same, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched. And if he was being watched, why didn’t the East Germans make their move?

  Two teenage girls sat smoking cigarettes beside the fountain in front of the Palasthotel. One wore a red jacket, black jeans and red shoes, the other a sweatshirt and patterned skirt that reached her ankles.

  Sitting himself on the far side, Tom unfolded a Neues Deutschland and lit a papirosa; then hoping his newly cropped hair and cheap East German shades would be enough to help him blend in, he began watching the hotel door.

  Frederika or Amelia Blackburn?

  He’d had a quick tussle with himself as to which he should try to talk to first. Amelia won. She might not be the only person who’d know if Sir Cecil had made a copy of his memoirs, she might not even know herself, but she was probably the only person who’d tell him if she did.

  She also needed to know that Tom hadn’t killed her father.

  In front of Tom, bolted to a plinth, three bronze girls and a boy sat back-to-back, realistic enough to have been cast from life. One of the teenagers opposite saw Tom admiring the figures and sneered.

  A group of men at a table out front were holding some kind of business meeting. They had their jackets off, shirt sleeves unbuttoned and folded up. All of them smoked and one was talking while the others nodded.

  None of them seemed interested in Tom.

  When Tom looked back the girl was watching.

  Because he’d noticed her? She scowled and pointedly looked away. Seventeen probably, maybe eighteen. About the same age as the nude sta
tues. About the same age as … Tom took a deep breath.

  You have to stop doing this.

  Other families got over children dying. Pulling Sir Cecil’s notebook from his pocket, he folded it back so no one would see HMSO on its cover.

  Reinickendorf-Tegelerforst 1945–46.

  The names listed were mostly English, possibly American, a few French, fewer still Russian. Only in the early days of the Occupation could forces have mixed like this. Tom recognized people from the cast list he’d found.

  Cecil Blackburn, James Foley, Robby Croft, Anthony Willes-Wakefield, Henry Petty … All five had been in The Importance of being Lady Windermere. Someone had ticked their names in pencil. In ink, in the original hand, beside each was an α.

  Other names had beta, β. A few γ, gamma.

  Tom realized in shock that Sir Edward Masterton, Her Majesty’s ambassador to the Soviet Union, and the father of the kidnapped girl he’d helped rescue in Moscow, was there. He was down as Eddie Masterton though. The alpha beside his name was crossed out and replaced with beta. The Russian on the line below had his name crossed out entirely.

  Caro’s father was there. Lieutenant Charles Eddington. He had a gamma. The real shock came a page after that.

  Milov … He’d been a colonel back then.

  A tank commander and a genuine Soviet hero. These days he was a Marshal of the Soviet Union, a member of the Politburo, and éminence grise behind Gorbachev’s throne. Tom had made friends with the man, if that was the right term, after Edward Masterton’s daughter went missing.

  Tom owed Milov his life. And Milov owed Tom for the fact that a coup against Gorbachev by the Soviet old guard had been thwarted.

  Milov had been with the Red Army that took Berlin. Edward Masterton had arrived shortly afterwards, as had Cecil Blackburn and Caro’s father. Tom would put good money on the list being drawn from people stationed here. The other thing Tom noticed was that the notebook had staples where it had once been stitched. He counted the pages and there were still sixty-four, as claimed in tiny type on the back. So, if pages had been removed they’d been returned later.