Simon Tolkien - Simon Tolkien Inspector Trave Trilogy - Orders From Berlin, The Inheritance, The King of Diamonds

Trave didn’t know why he cared so much. He looked at his pale reflection in the cracked mirror over the sink as he began to shave and felt he could make no sense of the thin, hollow-cheeked man staring back at him out of the glass. Hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of innocent people were dying in the city every night. Blown to pieces by high-explosive bombs so that sometimes there was not even a trace left of their bodies; or trapped underground, drowning in water or gas leaking from ruptured pipes. Why, then, should he spend his days worrying over whether Quaid had charged the wrong man with a crime? All he was doing was making Quaid hate him and pushing for the day he’d be kicked off the force and sent off to join the Army or what was left of it after the disaster at Dunkirk. Unless, of course, that was what he really wanted and his constant questioning of orders was no more than a protracted form of professional suicide.

When he was a boy, Trave had never had any doubts about what he wanted to be when he grew up. Other kids in his class at the local grammar school had fantasized about becoming fighter pilots or emigrating on a steamship to America like Charlie Chaplin and becoming stars of the silver screen. But as far back as he could remember, he had always known that he was going to be a policeman. Looking back, he supposed that his ambition was rooted in some ideal of fighting for the right side, making sense of a senseless world by bringing it order and justice; but where that idea had originated he could only speculate – perhaps in his vicarious experience of the First War, the one his father had fought in on the Ypres Salient twenty-five years before. Harold Trave had disappeared down the front garden path in his bright new khaki uniform with a smile and a wave of the hand one autumn day in 1915 and had come back three years later utterly changed. And from then on, it was as if he were somewhere else all the time, even when he was physically present in the house, living in a terrible unseen world entirely outside the boundaries of his family’s experience. Trave remembered as if it were yesterday looking up from his schoolbooks in the front parlour one afternoon in 1920 and seeing his father gazing sightlessly into the middle distance with tears rolling down his cheeks.

And he recalled how in the evenings after the Armistice his father would go to bed with the rest of the family but then get up quietly in the middle of the night, put on his shoes by the door, and go out God knows where until morning. Trave asked his mother about it once or twice, but she was harsh with him, telling him in that quick scolding voice of hers that she didn’t know where his father went – it was none of their business; something they had to accept; something his father needed to do. And now Trave thought that Harold had probably just walked and walked as so many other soldiers did in those years after they were demobbed, silently wearing out their shoes on the city streets, alone in the darkness with their memories until morning brought an end to their wanderings.

Once, in the summer of 1916, Trave’s mother had taken him down to Brighton for the day. He’d built sandcastles on the beach and paddled in the cold surf, but his heart hadn’t been in it. Over the sound of the waves, he could faintly hear the boom of the guns on the other side of the Channel and had known without asking that it was the war that was making the noise; it was where his father was. And now they were back where they had started – the war to end wars had kept the peace for barely twenty years.

Trave closed his eyes and was back in Oxford with Vanessa, listening to Neville Chamberlain’s sad, reedy voice coming over the radio from 10 Downing Street that hot summer’s day the year before: ‘This morning the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by eleven a.m. that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.’ At war with Germany. Trave had stood outside the railway station and watched the soldiers going off to fight and had seen them a year later coming back on the troop trains from the coast after Dunkirk with that same hollow, faraway look in their eyes that his father had had when he came home. And he had felt, still felt, that he should have been there with them.

Churchill was right: the civilized world stood balanced on the brink of an abyss, ready to fall into a new dark age. This new Germany was a terrible, frightening creation – all-powerful, all-conquering, certain of victory. Trave still found it hard to comprehend how easily France had crumbled. Hitler had accomplished in six short weeks what the German army had failed to achieve in four years of ceaseless fighting a quarter of a century earlier, so that now England stood alone with the panzer divisions massed on the other side of the Channel, ready to cross on the next good tide. Tracking down criminals on the London streets didn’t seem very important or worthwhile or even honourable when the destiny of the world hung in the balance, yet he didn’t know how to do anything else.

Trave gritted his teeth, forcing the negative thoughts out of his mind. He might doubt the value of his work, but it was not in his nature to simply go through the motions, and he needed to know where Albert Morrison had gone in the taxi on the last afternoon of his life. The words on the note that Trave had found in the dead man’s pocket kept echoing in the recesses of his mind: ‘Provide detailed written report. What are the chances of success? C,’ and then the name written underneath followed by the question mark – Hayrich or Hayrick. Quaid might not be interested, but Trave needed to know what the message meant and whom the strange name referred to and why Albert Morrison had written it down in such a hurry. First the careful, spidery handwriting and then the name scrawled almost illegibly. Why? It was as if Albert had written down the line, copied it from the note he’d received, maybe, and then suddenly realized what it all meant. Was it Hayrick he’d rushed off to visit in the cab, and if so, had he found him or had he met someone else, someone who’d followed him home?

Trave had questions aplenty but no answers, and if he was to find any, then the obvious place to start was at the cab office in Chelsea that Ava had phoned for her father’s taxi. It was still early, and if he was quick, he wouldn’t need any excuse for getting into work late. Or maybe he would turn up something interesting, in which case punctuality wouldn’t even be an issue. Whatever happened, Trave had worked hard to become a detective and he wasn’t prepared to just be Quaid’s errand boy. The job was too interesting for that.

Trave was in luck. The driver he was looking for came into the office only a few minutes after Trave had asked for him. He acknowledged Trave’s warrant card with a grunt, poured himself tea from a battered tin urn in the corner, stirred in sugar until his spoon stood up almost vertical in the cup, and then drank down the concoction noisily while warming his hands at a paraffin heater positioned under an army recruitment poster on the back wall that had begun to fray at the edges. It was cold, and Trave felt grateful for the warmth of his greatcoat.

‘Yes, I remember him. Of course I do. Old bloke in a mackintosh with no hair on the top and a lot on the sides. Looked like he was a mad scientist or something. And worked up something terrible, he was – I couldn’t go the quickest way because there was an unexploded on Horseferry Road and your lot had all the streets roped off round there. But he couldn’t sit still; kept tapping me on the shoulder, wanting to know how much longer it would take to get there.’