Simon Tolkien - Orders from Berlin

‘Yes, of course.’

‘And your marriage made Charles angry, so angry that he stopped seeing you.’

‘Yes,’ she said impatiently. ‘I already told you that.’

‘So why did Charles change his name to Seaforth too?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said, clearly taken aback. ‘He’d never do that.’

‘I can assure you he has. He’s Charles Seaforth to everyone down in London. But I agree it makes no sense, unless …’ Trave paused, and then suddenly he understood. ‘He did it to hide his connection with his past. And in a way that wouldn’t attract suspicion to anyone making background checks when he joined the Secret Service. If he has the same name as his mother, then who’s going to dig down deep enough to find out that your husband isn’t his real father? And, frankly, it wouldn’t matter even if they did, because changing his name to yours makes entire sense. That way you’re one big happy family.’

‘Except that we’re not.’

‘But no one’s to know that. And the connection between him and Alistair is buried along with his motivation for hating this country and the men he holds responsible for killing his brother. You said he couldn’t find out the names of the soldiers on the firing squad, but did he discover who was on the court-martial?’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Seaforth, suddenly turning pale. ‘There were two staff officers. I don’t remember their names, but the third judge was the colonel of Alistair’s battalion — the Sixth Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. His name was Winston Churchill.’

It was Trave’s turn to look incredulous. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

‘Believe me, I’m not making it up. He’s the hero of the hour now, isn’t he, but it wasn’t always like that. Twenty-five years ago he was in disgrace, seen as responsible for one of the biggest disasters of the last war — before the Somme, that is,’ she added wryly.

‘Gallipoli, you mean?’

‘Yes. So you know your history,’ she said with a faint smile. ‘The Gallipoli campaign was Churchill’s brainchild, and after it all ended in catastrophe, he wasn’t wanted around London any more, so he took himself off to the trenches for some soldiering, a bit of cheap redemption. Just for a few months until they wanted him back in government, but enough time to sentence my son to death for a crime he wasn’t responsible for. Oh, God, it doesn’t bear thinking of,’ she said, or rather cried out, as she finally lost her self-control and burst into tears.

It was impossible to say what had taken her past her tipping point and released the torrent of emotion that had been building inside her ever since Trave began his questions. Perhaps it was anger that had been the catalyst, but if so, then how must her son feel? Trave wondered. The mother had worked hard to move on, overcoming her bitterness and anger with the support of a loving husband. But Charles had done the opposite, immuring himself in an isolated prison of rage and hatred towards the man who was now leading the country through its hour of greatest need.

Whatever Seaforth’s plan entailed, Trave was sure it involved some sort of personal revenge on the Prime Minister. But what kind of revenge, he had no idea. Trave felt out of his depth. He needed to get back to London and talk to Thorn, assuming Thorn had recovered enough to talk. There was nothing else he was going to find out here, and even if he had more questions, Mrs Seaforth was in no state to answer them.

‘Can I get you something?’ he asked, getting to his feet.

‘No, I’ll be fine,’ she said, taking a spotless white handkerchief out of her pocket to dry her tears. ‘My husband will be home soon.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘sorry that I had to put you through all this. I had no choice.’

‘We rarely do,’ she said sadly, accompanying him into the hall. She opened the front door and shook his hand, then held on to it for a moment, looking him in the eye.

‘Make him stop, Mr Trave,’ she said. ‘There’s been enough blood spilt, enough lives ruined without any more death and destruction. Please. Make him stop.’

‘I’ll try,’ he said. ‘I promise you I’ll try.’ And he meant what he said, even if he had no idea as he walked back up the street towards his hotel how he was going to carry out his pledge.

Trave left Langholm early the next morning. He’d have far preferred to leave the night before, but the last train had left Langholm long before he got back to his hotel and found the other guests gathered round a big EKCO radio cabinet in the lounge. They were getting ready to listen to Lord Haw-Haw’s nightly propaganda broadcast from Radio Hamburg. Trave had long ago come to hate the sound of Haw-Haw’s insistent nasal drawl announcing, ‘Germany calling, Germany calling,’ on the stroke of nine o’clock. But it seemed the rest of the population couldn’t get enough of the British renegade’s tales of the destruction that the invincible Luftwaffe was inflicting on southern England. And behind Haw-Haw’s hate-filled rant, Trave now sensed the waiting presence of Heydrich. The image of the Gestapo leader in the photographs that Thorn had shown him in Albert Morrison’s book was now never far from Trave’s thoughts, and he slept badly, tossing and turning as he tried to fight off nightmares in which the sound of SS jackboots echoed on the stairs, coming for him and Vanessa and their baby boy.

The journey back to London seemed to take even longer than it had on the way up. Trave’s carriage was entirely occupied with exhausted soldiers catching up on sleep after their last nights of leave, so he had only his thoughts for company. Gazing out of the window, he recognized some of the towns and landscapes that he had passed going in the opposite direction the day before. They were the same, but he had changed. He had gone north still uncertain of whether Thorn was right about Seaforth’s guilt, but he had left his doubts behind in Langholm. His conversation with Seaforth’s mother had convinced him that Seaforth had to be the recipient of Heydrich’s enigmatic message. In one way this made no sense, given that she had been able to tell him only about events that were now twenty or more years old; but Trave had been unable to resist the conclusion that an experience as bitter as Seaforth’s had to have made him not a servant, but an enemy of his country.

Trave felt sure that Seaforth was guilty, but that didn’t mean he had the evidence to have him arrested. Far from it. All he had was a series of coincidences, and he knew without a doubt that an immediate transfer to the military police awaited him if he took his suspicions back to Quaid. No, it was Thorn he needed to see. From what the hospital had told him the day before, he felt confident that Thorn would have sufficiently recovered by now to be able to talk, and he hoped that the information he’d gleaned about Seaforth’s background, and in particular the connection to Churchill, would enable Thorn to fill in the blanks and work out what Seaforth was planning under the direction of the Gestapo leader with the pitiless eyes.

Trave drummed his fingers on his knees, frustrated by the time he was losing as the train meandered through the London suburbs. But as it rolled slowly on through small stations decorated with flowers in baskets hanging incongruously above piled-up sandbags, and chugged leisurely past gasworks and smoking factories and streets upon streets of terrace houses, he started to sense the teeming vastness of the capital — too huge to be destroyed by terror bombing, however ferocious its scale. He got out at Euston station at just after twelve o’clock with a renewed feeling of hope, went straight to a police box, and telephoned St Stephen’s Hospital.