Gavin Lyall - The Conduct of Major Maxim

"How do you know that?"

Blast. That was tiredness making him careless. Blastand damn.

"An Army friend rang up for me. That wouldn't make anybody suspicious. "

"How can you be sure?" Sims was suddenly all bristles, up on his feet and prowling, stabbing out one cigarette and lighting another.

"It was less risk than me going out to Dornhausen again."

"It is my job to decide the risks. Always you must tell me, if we are to work together properly. I thought I was getting you trained."

That was either quite an insult or quite a compliment, and probably Sims was giving him the choice.

"All right," Maxim said mildly. "I'm sorry. But your Mrs Howard got in just in time. Next month she wouldn't have had any choice but to ask for a copy. "

"Yes." Sims was still prowling, instinctively suspicious of all the hiding places in the room. He picked up the wad of certificates and put them down again.

Maxim remembered. "Something Bruno said – before the photographs; were you listening? Something he hadn't done to the certificate, something Blagg must have done… what the hell was he talking about? Something he'd noticed…"

He got up and went to the certificates and picked up the Schickert one. It looked just as it had before.

Sims said: "He could have meant another one."

"We don't care about the other ones." Maxim held the old paper up against the light, but that did nothing. He put it down, quite near Sims's ultra-violet lamp. There had been one of those in Bruno's room, too.

Now hedid remember something from the Ashford course. "Turn off the lights, will you?" He fumbled around with the sun-tan lamp's lead.

The lamp came on with its searing brilliance as the last of the room lights went out. Sims held up a hand to shade his face. "There are some glasses to use…"

Maxim ignored him, tilting the certificate at the edge of the glare, so that it glowed faintly, fluorescing as almost anything does under ultra-violet. Two lines of the certificate glowed more brightly than the rest. Maxim held it down so that Sims could see the lines: istam…15. April 1945…um…11…Uhr…30…Minuten in…Dornhausen…verstorben.

"That was the only part we were interested in. " He gave the certificate to Sims and went to switch on the room lights again. "Bruno would know something about altered documents, looking for signs of chemical eraser under ultra-violet. With a mind like his, the first thing he'd think about an official document is to see if somebody's faked it. And for once he was right."

Sims was still twisting the certificate under the lamp; Maxim turned it off. "Only it wasn't Blagg who did it: it was Mrs Howard. We thought she was collecting those certificates, that night. No: she was giving them back. And in a month they would have been microfilmed and thrown away, the forgery would never show on the film and Gustavwould be immortalised as a liar. Neat. That was really why she wanted the whole batch: so that Hochhauserwouldn't notice she'd been fiddling just one of them."

"What do you believe it said?" Sims's voice was toneless.

"The same as you do: that she died in the Karls Hospital some time in the afternoon or evening, just like the others whodid die. And it means the hospital records can't matter even if they're still around. He'd never have named the hospital if there'd been anything to show shedidn't die there. "

Very slowly, Sims put the certificate down on top of the rest. At the last moment his hand trembled and almost clenched, as if he were about to crumple the thin paper. But he didn't. He walked back and sipped his whisky.

"I suppose," he said, "she had decided she could not find any true proof, so she decided to make some. Perhaps I was pushing her too hard. We needed Plainsong. All of us."

All of us. The unit Sims had created, had rescued from the whirlpool of the Verfassungschutzonly to land it in Guy Husband's uncertain hands. They needed one big success to make themselves secure, but in her desperation to achieve it, Mrs Howard had turned to methods which could destroy the unit itself-just as her forgery had effectively destroyed Brigitte Schickert'sdeath certificate.

Maxim finished his whisky and put the glass down. "She's still not buried in that cemetery. "

"The sister," Sims said softly. "Mina. She must know.'Shemust know."

"I'll go to Dornhausen tomorrow morning," Maxim promised, but he wasn't sure Sims heard him.

In the morning, Sims was gone.

Maxim hauled his hangover back from the telephone box by the barracks gate through a barrage of stamping feet and troops answering their names in ringing shouts. There was an atmosphere of rich self-satisfaction around; whatever ACE thought, the regiment was convinced it had done very well on its Agile Blade call-out and was flaunting it noisily. Maxim found himself having Civilian Thoughts as he escaped back into the officer's mess.

There was, he told himself, no point in ringing George at Army dawn – particularly by German time, an hour ahead of Britain. The politest thing he'd get told would be to come home immediately, and however much he wanted to, he had promised Sims that second visit to Dornhausen. He went to ask advice on hiring another car.

Just on eleven, he parked in the shade of Dornhausen's great linden tree and walked back to the little inn. The woman was sitting in there alone, drinking coffee and reading a newspaper. She instinctively got up as he went in, recognised him, and smiled perfunctorily.

"Do you want coffee, or beer?"

"Coffee, please."

The floor was still damp from her mop and a cool evaporating smell contrasted with the sudden bitter tang of the coffee she put down in front of him. She wore the same dress as the day before, the same lined, tired expression.

"Did you find out any more about Frau Schickert?"

"I don't think so. Except for this…" He spread the Focus on Germany. "Is that picture still here?"

"That old thing. I haven't seen it in ages."

"It says it used to hang in here…"

"I remember. On the wall, there." She pointed to a faded nude from a tyre calendar, tacked up just to the right of the front door. "But the glass got broken and somebody took it to be repaired and they lost it. "

"Lost it?"

"Yes." She met his look boldly. Too boldly?

"Oh." He sipped the coffee; somewhere outside, a tractor worked in erratic surges of power. "When did that happen?"

"Soon after they printed the picture there. A few people came in to see, becauseofthatarticle. I think one of them took it down, dropped it. "

"Oh," Maxim said again.

She wiped the table, an unnecessary but instinctive movement. "Does it matter where she's buried?"

"Not to me."

"Do you know what happened to the baby, little Manfred?"

He looked up. Little Manfred, the one you gave the bottle to? Oh yes, I heard something about him. He hasn't quite grown up yet – some childish game he played with a chap in his office. Just boyish high spirits.

"No," he said. "I don't know what happened to him." He put too much money on the table. "Thank you for the coffee. "

First he had to ring George, then probably catch the Güter-sloh flight. He paused at the door, taking the last sniff at the country air: the rest would be busy roads, airports, Whitehall. Agnes had been right about needing to get out into the countryside, and it didn't matter much whose country.

Behind him, she asked: "Are you going back to England?"

"Yes."

She paused. "The glass didn't get broken. It was borrowed, somebody wanted to make a copy of it, just like the people from the magazine had done. He didn't give it back. "

"Hecame back. Gu-Rainer Schickert. He came back. "

"Yes." She put the empty cup on the bar. "I was a fool to lend it him, he said it was the only picture of her at that time. He didn't even have one from the wedding. He said he was in shipping, I think, in Hamburg, but I couldn't find him in the directory."