she had the right not to stay buried in the rubble.
‘Just to talk, that’s all. It doesn’t have to mean anything,’ he said, leaning his head to one side, trying to catch her eye.
‘Everything means something,’ she said with a wan smile, meeting his look. He was so confident and self- possessed, which was what made him so attractive. Yet he was detached too, as if he were a cinema-goer, watching events unfold like films from behind his bright blue eyes. There was something opaque about them, she thought, as if they gave no clue to the man inside.
She remembered how he’d seemed to enjoy provoking Thorn in the flat, as if he were a matador playing with a crazed bull, and she remembered the other things that Thorn had said about her father’s death. Coincidences happen, but it did seem strange that her father’s visit to St James’s Park should have had nothing to do with his murder, and in Bertram’s absence she felt a little less sure of her husband’s guilt. She didn’t believe it, but Seaforth could have put the cuff link in the desk drawer.
And why had he shown up out of the blue and shown such an interest in her these last few days? That was the question she kept coming back to. Was it just concern for her well-being, as he had told the inspector, or was it something more? People did things for a reason, and she needed to find out what made Seaforth tick. And the only way to do that was to see him again; the fact that she found him attractive had nothing to do with it. There would be no risk if she was careful, and she might learn something.
‘Well?’ he asked. ‘Will you?’
‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘Call me.’ And then she turned away and went back inside the flat to await her husband’s return.
Seaforth crossed to the other side of the street, and after checking back to see that no one was watching from the window of Ava’s flat, he slipped into an overgrown, disused garden and took up position behind a thick ash tree that he had previously selected as an observation point. The windows of the house behind him were boarded up, and the garden had descended into rack and ruin since the owners’ departure. Brambles and vines choked the tree’s branches, providing a natural tent through which he quickly hollowed out a gap, giving him a perfect view of Ava’s building.
An hour passed and then another, but he showed no signs of losing patience. Quaid’s big black police car sat empty by the kerb, with the morning sunlight glittering on its silver headlamps. Seaforth smiled as he pictured the scene inside the flat, with the two policemen going meticulously through Bertram’s desk, building a case against the ridiculous doctor for a crime he didn’t commit.
Seaforth wasn’t proud of the murder, not because he regretted the taking of Albert Morrison’s life, but because he’d made such a mess of it. He’d done a better job of cleaning up afterwards, but that didn’t justify his earlier ineptitude.
It had been a bad day. Not that that was any excuse. He’d been thrown off balance by the shock of hearing at the morning conference at HQ that the communications boffins had decoded Heydrich’s radio message to him about the assassination plan. And then he’d stayed later than usual at work, worrying about whether his own messages were secure — unnecessarily, as it turned out, as he’d used a different code to his spymaster in Berlin.
It was pure luck that he ran into Albert as the ex-chief of MI6 came hurrying up Broadway that evening, and it didn’t take him long to put two and two together and realize that Thorn must have taken Albert the decoded message. Albert had been Thorn’s mentor, and if anyone was going to know the identity of the mysterious German C who’d signed the message, then it was going to be Albert. And it was pretty obvious from the old man’s excitement that he’d worked out the answer. C was Heydrich, and once that information got out, finding the Gestapo chief’s agent in England would become a national priority. Seaforth couldn’t let that happen.
‘I have to see Alec Thorn. It’s extremely important,’ Albert declared in the doorway of HQ, making it sound like an order, as if he were still in charge.
‘He’s been called away out of London for the night. He’ll be back tomorrow,’ Seaforth lied. ‘Is it something I can help you with?’
‘You? No, of course not. Just tell Alec I need to see him urgently. You can do that much, can’t you?’
Seaforth nodded, amused by the old man’s rudeness. There was nothing more to say, so he walked away round the corner and watched Albert jumping anxiously from one foot to another at the bus stop, until he finally gave up and went into the Tube station, where Seaforth followed him down onto the westbound Circle Line platform. In retrospect, Seaforth realized that much the best solution would have been to push Albert under the train when it came in or, better still, to throw him in the river when he stopped on Chelsea Bridge on his way home and stood gazing down into the water, lost in some kind of old man’s daydream. That would have saved a lot of trouble, but Seaforth had wanted to find out what Albert knew, so he’d followed him back to Battersea and forced him up the stairs of his apartment building at gunpoint. It was against the law to carry a concealed weapon, but it was a law that Seaforth broke every day. He had no intention of being taken alive if Thorn and his friends ever caught up with him.
‘You! All the time it was you!’ Seaforth remembered how Albert had seemed more interested in his discovery of Seaforth’s treachery than frightened of what Seaforth was going to do to him. He was courageous — Seaforth would at least say that for the old fool.
‘Yes, me. Sorry to disappoint you. And now I’m going to need you to tell me everything you know about that radio message,’ Seaforth said politely as he released the safety catch on his gun.
‘What radio message?’
‘You know what I’m talking about. Thorn brought it here, didn’t he — earlier today, to ask your opinion about what it meant? Come on, there’s no point in denying it.’
But Albert hadn’t tried to. He went quiet instead, refusing to answer any of Seaforth’s questions, watching mutely but intently while Seaforth threatened him with the gun and started to lose his temper, sweeping the papers off the desk onto the floor in angry frustration. And then suddenly, without warning, he made a run for it, dashing out through the door and slamming it shut behind him.
He’d been surprisingly quick on his feet and had got as far as the outside landing before Seaforth caught up with him and started hurting him properly, pulling his arm behind his back and pushing him up against the iron balustrade. But still he refused to talk, preferring to fight, until he finally went tumbling over the barrier and fell head over heels to his death with an unholy scream. He hit the ground right at the feet of his daughter, whom Seaforth could dimly see below, looking up at him out of the shadows at the foot of the staircase.
It had been a mess, which could so easily have turned into a total disaster. But instead Seaforth’s luck had held. There hadn’t been enough light on the landing for Ava to get a good look at him, and two days later he just happened to be the ranking officer on duty at HQ when Quaid, the police inspector in charge of the murder case, rang up to ask about the dead man’s connection to 59 Broadway.
‘Do you know an Albert Morrison?’ the inspector asked after introducing himself. ‘He’s the subject of a murder inquiry I’m conducting.’
‘Yes, he used to work here,’ Seaforth admitted. He had no choice not to. ‘But he retired several years ago,’ he added quickly.
‘We’ve found out that he took a taxi from his flat in Battersea over to St James’s Park on the day of his death. It seems reasonable to assume he was coming to visit your office.’
‘I don’t know anything about that.’
‘Yes, my assistant, Detective Trave, was at your office yesterday and was told that there was no record of any visit. I’m just following up to see if you can shed any light on why Mr Morrison should have gone there. That’s all.’
‘I’m afraid not,’ Seaforth said. And that might have been the end of the conversation, except that there was something in the inspector’s tone that Seaforth had picked up on — a sense that Quaid was just going through the motions, almost as if he were looking for a way to cross 59 Broadway off his list of leads.
‘Can I speak to you confidentially?’ Seaforth asked, testing the waters.
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Thank you. Well, it may help you to know that this office is a top-secret department of the War Office, and I think that I can speak on behalf of the Minister when I say that we would appreciate anything you can do to keep us out of your inquiry, unless it’s absolutely necessary, of course. You obviously have experience in these matters, and I’m sure I can count on your discretion.’
‘You can rely on me,’ Quaid said enthusiastically, responding immediately to the appeal to his vanity.
