The Girl in Berlin (36 page)

Kingdom seemed not to notice his companion’s agitation. He continued: ‘And then the Eberhardt business blew up at the same time. So now I had two problems. Eberhardt couldn’t be allowed to leave the country and Frieda Schröder couldn’t be allowed in. They were essentially two completely separate problems. Except that the person linking them was Harris.’

They reached the end of one field, crossed a ditch and passed into another desolate tract of land. McGovern looked all around, in the hope that he might see some other human being, but they were alone.

‘The first time I sent you it was simply to find out about Frieda Schröder and what was going on at that end. But Thomas Schröder’s no fool. He soon guessed you were up to something. He had the nerve to get in touch. He reminded me of the old days. Said his daughter would soon be coming to Britain and he’d make sure to follow. And what would have been the end result of that? Blackmail. That’s when I got the wind up. I panicked. That’s always a fatal mistake, McGovern. I’m telling you, don’t ever panic. Fatal in my line of business. Means you’ve lost your touch.’

That was what Victor Jordan had said: Kingdom must have lost his touch. The sun had sunk below the viaduct, light was fading from the sky and shadows had begun to cobweb the deserted marshes.

‘Hadn’t we better be getting back? It’s getting late.’

‘Yes, let’s turn back. Can’t drag this out indefinitely. Just putting off the inevitable. Postponing the evil moment.’

The evil moment. McGovern’s heart missed a beat.

‘But first,’ continued Kingdom, ‘you haven’t asked what was meant to be achieved by your second visit to Berlin. And
I’m afraid the answer is it was meant to be the end of you. You see, when you came back the first time, I panicked again. Something you said convinced me you knew all about the Schröders and me. I was certain you knew what had happened. All those remarks about what Jordan had said and how I wouldn’t have any truck with the black market – I read God knows what into that. I thought you were hinting you knew much more than you let on. And you did know, didn’t you? You’d found out everything.’

‘No, I didn’t know anything. That evening in the park. I couldn’t understand why you were so irritable. I thought I’d done something wrong, but I couldn’t work out what.’

‘I thought the best thing would be another Berlin visit, only this time you’d meet with an accident. It might have been simpler to get Kozko to deal with you in this country. I’ve so much on Kozko, he’d never refuse a request from me. But that would have led to an embarrassing murder enquiry.

‘So I replied to Schröder’s friendly letter. He was to fix something up with his East German friends. They were told you were a dangerous agent, up to your neck in all the stuff with Hoffmann. Then the West Germans arrested Hoffmann, but that was a bonus in a way, because it was all over the press over there, and no-one would notice you’d disappeared. Not for a while, anyway. And when they did, it could be passed off as a robbery or a hit-and-run, an unfortunate accident, that sort of thing.’

McGovern was listening, but he was also planning what to do in the next five or ten minutes. Did Kingdom have a gun? If he did, things looked desperate. If not … ‘At that point I knew nothing about the Schröders. Nothing whatsoever,’ he said. His own voice sounded toneless to him, leaden with the horrified disappointment that had gripped him. And the growing dread and fear.

‘But you do now, eh?’ Kingdom laughed. ‘Well, that’s
another irony, isn’t it. But the biggest irony of all is that now it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter one fucking bit. I suppose you got Frieda to tell you in the end. And I suppose she turned it into a tragic story. When actually she was in it up to her neck.’

McGovern’s revulsion towards Kingdom was cold because he could not understand the compulsion that drove the man, but his hatred of himself for having been so taken in was hot and shameful.

Kingdom stopped in his tracks. He smiled. McGovern’s heart lurched.

‘I’ve no regrets, you know. No-one got hurt.’

‘Frieda’s sister
died
. She was murdered.’

‘Was she? Schröder could be violent, he had a nasty temper, but I thought he told me she fell down some crater in the rubble, I don’t really remember. You know, it’s all a very long time ago now, my dear.’

McGovern quickened his pace as they traipsed over the rough grass.

‘Nothing to say, McGovern? You haven’t asked me why I’ve been suspended, why we won’t be working together any more. Too polite? Too timid? You were always a little in awe of me, I think. A little too deferential.’

‘Gorch thought you might have been involved with the diplomats after all. That you’d bungled things.’ McGovern’s voice sounded hoarse.

Kingdom laughed. ‘Oh God! That’s so amusing. No. Nothing so pukka, I’m afraid.’

‘What then?’ Kingdom’s taunts were getting to him. If violence was coming it might be his, not the other man’s.

‘If you must know, I’ve been charged with a serious offence and I’m lucky to have got bail.’

So the story had one more twist. McGovern had thought there were no more surprises in store. But – the truth – it landed
like a blow to his chest – the great interrogator, the great anticommunist: he must have been a double agent all along. It wasn’t just that Kingdom, in ‘losing his touch’, had made a mess of things. He’d actually been working for the Russians. There was no other reason he could have been charged. Yet if that were the case – treason – how could he have got bail?

‘You were working for the Soviets.’

Kingdom seemed to find that even more amusing. ‘You thought I was a double agent?’

‘Why else would you be arrested?’

‘You couldn’t be more wrong. It’s another case of my losing my touch, I’m afraid. Or was it that my sense of irony failed me? Irony: the perfect armour against the slings and arrows, etcetera. And irony is the perfect antidote against taking oneself too seriously. You take yourself seriously, don’t you, McGovern. Always a mistake, I feel. But when it came to Sabine the irony slipped away. Irony’s no defence against the passions. And now, again – it was just one risk too far. But she was such a sweet little girl, McGovern, you’ve no idea. If only she hadn’t told her cousin, the silly child. And the little pansy told the mother. Who I’m afraid took it rather badly. She thought I was interested in
her
, you see, when all the time it was little Judy. God, I loved her.’

And now Kingdom stopped abruptly and turned to McGovern. ‘The reason I needed to see you again was to apologise. I owe you an apology. You’re a decent policeman, McGovern. I admit I used you. I even tried to get rid of you, but you didn’t deserve to be sacrificed to my absurd loss of nerve.’

McGovern, his heart lurching, had perforce stopped when his companion had come to a halt. All he could do was be alert. The important thing was to watch for the slightest movement. Kingdom was dramatising, he was getting off on the situation, he was capable of – anything.

‘You’re my witness, McGovern. I want them to know I’m
doing the right thing. I want you to tell them that. This way there won’t be a trial.’

They faced each other in the gathering darkness. And then – it wasn’t even dramatic. One moment Kingdom was standing there, the next – he’d gone. A flash – and the sound of the shot died in the still air.

thirty-eight

O
N A GREY, HUMID SATURDAY
in early September Dinah was helping Reggie prepare for the dinner to entertain Dr Blunt. Reggie was making mayonnaise with olive oil from Boots the chemist. Elizabeth David said you could get it from some shop in Soho, but Boots was nearer. The mayonnaise was to accompany the salmon one of William’s authors had given him. (‘I think he was hoping for a bigger advance.’) Dinah sat at the kitchen table and peeled potatoes.

‘How are things?’ enquired Regine casually.

‘Oh, much better. We had a lovely holiday in Cornwall.’

Regine was trying to regulate the flow of oil into the egg yolk and beating the mixture furiously with a wooden spoon. ‘You know,’ she said as she tried to stop the bowl sliding around on the table, ‘I felt I should never have said anything to you at all.’

‘If you put a damp cloth under the bowl, it won’t slip like that.’ Dinah no longer wanted to talk about her marriage. The time for that was past. It was repaired, like a piece of china stuck together and looking almost as good as new; but Reggie was looking at her, wanting reassurance. ‘You didn’t really say anything,’ she said.

Reggie’s rueful expression was less a plea for forgiveness from Dinah than an indicator of self-forgiveness, but she
insisted: ‘I sort of hinted. There had been rumours. I didn’t know what to do. I thought it would probably all blow over and you’d be none the wiser, but then on the other hand …’

‘I think I had begun to wonder … and I’ve thought and thought about how I went wrong, you know.’

Regine groaned, ‘Oh, don’t blame yourself. That’s what women always do.’

‘But I’m going back to the Courtauld as a full-time student in the autumn, I’m really excited about that.’

‘That’s wonderful, darling, that will be fun.’

‘And he did give her up for me. So everything’s fine.’

Regine said cautiously: ‘She’s married a banker, you know. Some old man.’

‘That was quick. On the rebound, I suppose.’

‘Yes, I’m sure that’s it. William says she’s a scheming witch anyway.’

Dinah was touched that Reggie had arranged the dinner especially, really, for her. It was a small one. The guests, apart from Dinah herself and Alan, were an art historian in his forties and his wife, a singer, and a youth whose presence was unexplained and who stood locked in indifference or shyness.

‘You remember Charles Hallam, don’t you, Dinah. He used to come to my Sunday afternoons. He’s going up to Oxford in the autumn. Which college was it, Charles?’

‘Magdalen.’ He said it with a modest smile, which somehow despite itself confirmed his distinction, his effortless superiority.

Dr Blunt couldn’t take his eyes off the boy.

Almost the only topic of conversation, the gossip that trumped all the other scandals they might have discussed – Burgess and Maclean (rather stale by now), William’s lady author who’d run off with a man in a circus, Elizabeth David’s wonderful new cookery book, the
extraordinary
way Georgina Garfield was behaving and Vivien Leigh’s disastrous
performance as Lady Macbeth – was Miles Kingdom’s suicide, that appalling event in some sinister region of East London, the result, as everyone knew, but only whispered, of his arrest for an unmentionable crime.

Charles assumed that was why he’d been invited.

To begin with his father had tried to keep him out of any further involvement, but he’d heard the agonised conversations, Aunt Elfie’s distraught accusations and his father’s attempts to calm her down. Judy had been sent to stay with friends in the country to help her get over what had happened, with instructions to mention ‘the incident’ to no-one. She’d hugged Charles very hard as he said goodbye and muttered, almost sobbing, ‘Oh Charles, I feel so awful, I should never have said anything at all.’

And all he could think of to murmur had been, ‘It’ll be all right, Judy, you haven’t done anything wrong. It’s not your fault, really it isn’t.’

His father had pleaded with Aunt Elfie not to go to the police. Charles had listened to the terrible arguments and in the end when his father tried to get him to leave the room had said: ‘It’s better if I know, Dad, everyone’ll be talking – I won’t blab, I swear, and anyway it was me she told.’

They raged to and fro. ‘It would only be worse for the child,’ said Dr Hallam, ‘it’s far better not to go to court, Miles Kingdom is very distinguished, they probably won’t believe her anyway and—’

‘He has to be punished.’ Aunt Elfie sat rigid as a stone. ‘I can’t let him get away with it. To think he asked me to marry him – why, the
cheek
—’ And she’d burst into tears.

‘Don’t do it out of revenge, Elfrida.’

‘How dare you! How
dare
you suggest – how could you accuse me of that, John?’

‘I’ll see the girl gets to see a good psychiatrist – better by far in the long run.’

Charles hadn’t been able to restrain himself then. ‘You mean like it’s been better for Mummy, I suppose.’ He hadn’t meant to shout, but his father had looked at him, stricken. There was a dreadful silence, an awful stretched-out moment before Dr Hallam returned to the fray. ‘You can’t ruin a man’s career, Elfrida, for a – a lapse.’

‘You call it a lapse to rape a twelve-year-old girl.’

Rape … and his father had flustered and prevaricated and fallen silent.

Now Charles relived the scene as the adults of whom he wasn’t quite yet one discussed it voraciously around him. Regine knew that Judy was his cousin, but was too tactful to mention it. She looked at him now and again as if hopeful he’d contribute, but he lounged back in his chair, ate masses of salmon, cheese and lemon soufflé and drank quantities of wine while watching Dr Blunt.

Dr Blunt raised his fastidious eyebrows when Alan said: ‘Didn’t he talk to you when Burgess and Maclean disappeared?’

‘But of course, he had to, everyone knows I knew Guy very well indeed. And Kingdom was a brilliant interrogator. I’m sure if I’d had anything to hide he’d have wormed it out of me in the end.’ Dr Blunt smiled at them all serenely.

‘And to think all along, it was little girls,’ murmured Reggie. ‘His wife committed suicide, didn’t she? Perhaps that was why.’

Afterwards they drifted into the drawing room. It was a warm, close night. The French windows were open and some of the guests stood in the darkening garden, glasses in hand, smoking. Charles found himself alone with Dr Blunt, who bent over him solicitously from his great height to ask: ‘And what are you going to read at Oxford?’

‘Greats.’ Charles hesitated. Then: ‘You knew Miles Kingdom quite well, did you? You see – I met him a couple of times
– actually, you probably know this, anyway, but my cousin was actually the girl …’

‘No, no … I had no idea, really dreadful,’ murmured Dr Blunt.