David Gibbins - The Mask of Troy

Dillen pursed his lips. ‘It’s there in his papers, only it isn’t. It’s like a void. It’s everything he should have said, but didn’t. All the odd reasons he gave for going to those other places. To Egypt, to search for Alexander the Great’s tomb? Not likely. Why does someone on the cusp of revealing the truth about the Trojan War, the greatest discovery ever in archaeology, suddenly veer off and search for something completely different? I believe he was on a trail of clues that only he and Sophia knew about, one that began and ended at Troy.’

Hugh moved from the fireplace and sat down in the battered leather armchair opposite them, putting his mug on the floor and leaning forward on his elbows. ‘So,’ he said quietly. ‘Why have you really come to see me, James? You could have e-mailed me those scans of the ancient text.’ He looked at Rebecca. ‘And a Howard doesn’t pay a social visit in the middle of an excavation campaign. Not one producing finds like you’ve had in the past few days.’

Dillen gestured at the table. ‘Your other project. The one I encouraged you to start. Those pages I can see with the National Archives symbol at the top. Scans of hand-written British army unit diaries from the war.’

‘So that is it.’ Hugh sat back. ‘I’d guessed it when you started talking about Schliemann. All those years ago, that story I told you boys in your first Latin lesson. That’s it, isn’t it? About something I found during the war, a clue to the greatest treasure ever concealed?’

‘And then you clammed up on us.’

‘I thought you might have forgotten, or thought it was just a story to get unruly boys interested in translating Latin. I should have known better. For a long time I wished I’d never told you. I wanted to forget the war, you know. I’ve tried to, for more than sixty years. But as you get older I suppose the defences drop, and it’s all there again as if it were yesterday.’

Rebecca undid her backpack and took out a bundle wrapped in a sweater. She carefully extracted the copy of Alexander Pope’s The Iliad of Homer that Dillen had given her the day before and handed it to Hugh, who took it and stared at it for a moment, then put one palm gently on the cover. ‘How nice to hold this again. When did I give this to you, James? Your graduation, wasn’t it?’

Dillen nodded. ‘And now I’ve passed it on to Rebecca. I thought you’d approve.’

Hugh smiled. ‘Of course.’

‘I’ve seen the dedication,’ Rebecca said cautiously.

‘Ah.’ Hugh swallowed hard. ‘And you want to know about Peter.’

‘He’s tied in with this story, isn’t he? James told me something on the plane, about a sketch he’d found. The girl with the harp.’

‘ The girl with the harp,’ Hugh whispered. ‘How do you know about that?’

‘My guesswork,’ Dillen said. ‘Once when I was a boy you let me use one of your old sketchbooks, and there was a page with those words written in pencil at the bottom. You’d tried to rub it out. The girl with the harp. You’d pencilled in some outlines above, a drawing, a sketch of her perhaps, but you’d abandoned it. I guessed it was something to do with the war. I’d seen your face whenever you heard harp music. I knew you were one of the first troops into Belsen, and I just guessed.’

‘She was in a camp, a small camp near there,’ Hugh said quietly. He paused, picked up his mug, then put it down again. Dillen saw that his hand was trembling. He wondered whether this was right, whether they should have asked him after all, but then Hugh continued. ‘The guards had gone. We’d seen to that. My chaps and I. We were in there before the liberating troops arrived, but there was already a Red Cross contingent. A nurse with the children, named Helen. Always remember her. She’d got a German living nearby to bring a harp. And there she was, the girl, sitting with the harp amidst all that death and squalor. I tried drawing it years later. It should have been Peter doing that. He was the artist, not me. I just couldn’t finish it. It was a mistake even trying. I thought it might help, but it didn’t.’

‘You mentioned the Ardennes,’ Rebecca said gently. ‘That was the Battle of the Bulge, wasn’t it? We did that at school. James told me you were in the SAS.’

Hugh stared at the fire, picked up and cradled his mug, then looked back at Rebecca, his eyes steely again. ‘There was no glamour in it then, you know. No mystique. Nobody knew about the SAS. That was the whole point of it. I always thought the acronym was a bit silly, actually. Special Air Service. The only time I ever jumped was from a practice tower in the desert. Our job was to go behind enemy lines and kill. In North Africa, we crept into airfields at night and bombed and shot up sleeping men. In France before D-Day, we knifed and strangled. In Germany, after the Rhine crossings, we ambushed remnant SS and Wehrmacht, and old men of the Volkssturm, and Hitler Youth, boys as young as twelve. We didn’t take prisoners, unless we were ordered to. We gave as good as we got.’

‘Hitler’s commando decree,’ Dillen murmured.

Hugh nodded. ‘All captured commandos were to be executed. I lost most of my stick – my patrol – that way, in France. They should never have surrendered. Didn’t drum that into them well enough. New chaps mostly, hadn’t been with us long. Always felt guilty about surviving. But sometimes they were handed over to the Gestapo first. That’s why we went to Belsen, to this other camp. We were looking for one of our chaps. We didn’t find him, but we did find some SS who tried to surrender to us. Those guards I mentioned. Gave them pretty short shrift. That was when I saw the girl with the harp. She’d made a drawing, and I saw it, saw something extraordinary in it, and asked Helen if I could take it. The girl had done others, but not that image. Intelligence at Corps HQ were pretty interested too. And that was the last day I ever saw Peter.’

‘Was he in the SAS too?’ Rebecca asked.

Hugh shook his head. ‘We’d served together early in the war in North Africa, in the Long Range Desert Group.’ He gestured at the photo on the mantelpiece. ‘That’s when I took that picture. After the LRDG wound down, he went back to his infantry battalion, and I volunteered for the SAS. But Peter went into another outfit after he was wounded in Italy. Another silly acronym for a tough unit, 30 AU.’

‘I know about that,’ Rebecca said. ‘It kept coming up when I was researching that painting, the art stolen by the Nazis. They operated behind enemy lines too, didn’t they? Not ambushing, but searching for intelligence. Sometimes they linked up with the Monuments and Fine Arts men, the MFAA, whenever they came across stolen art and antiquities.’

Hugh nodded. ‘That’s exactly what happened that day. I was the one who fed the intelligence back. The place where I was given the drawing was a kind of satellite of Belsen, a small labour camp in a forest clearing. We had our suspicions that there was something in the forest and I passed them on to VIII Corps HQ, who had arranged a ceasefire to clear out the camp. Peter’s unit happened to be the one operating in the area, and he was sent to the camp with his driver and an American officer, one of the Monuments Men. And of course these covert ops were never just about stolen art. Those places could conceal more sinister secrets. It was the possibility of chemical and biological weapons that was so terrifying. By then we knew what the Nazis were capable of doing. We’d heard about the death camps in the east, Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, about Zyklon B gas. A pesticide, for God’s sake. My biggest fear was disease, epidemic. What they might have bottled up, what they could unleash.’

‘And what might still be out there, still hidden away,’ Dillen said.