No olive branch could be more fairly offered.
'Let's eat first,' he said, absurdly relieved that she was not going to pack her bags.
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As they ate she chattered unselfconsciously about her day — a strange day among strangers in a strange house. It was curious they had all accepted her, the postman, the Co-op milkman and Mrs Clark. Did people take it for granted now that bachelors would have girls around the house from time to time, or was it that she was unselfconscious? Audley found it soothing except that his first false impression of her haughtiness outside Asham churchyard niggled at his sense of contentment. He wasn't usually so far wide of the mark.
There was a dreamlike quality about the meal. It wasn't just that she was so different from Liz–though without her glasses she was probably as pretty, if considerably less well endowed physically. It was rather that behind this normality, behind the milkman's attempt to sell her double cream and Mrs Clark's assumption of her role as Liz's long-delayed successor, was the cold reality.
They were not friends, or even chance acquaintances: they were links in a chain of events going back half a lifetime, joined by a man long dead–and now by a man newly dead. The tranquillity of small talk and washing up on the draining board was false.
Somewhere out there in the growing darkness skilled men were still taking the Dakota to bits. An hour away Morrison was on a slab and Roskill would be waiting for the police surgeon's report; across the Channel Butler was hunting the Belgian who had been scared out of his wits all those years ago. And beyond all of them was Panin.
They were the real world. This was a gentle illusion.
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In the end it was the telephone bell which shattered that illusion.
He caught Faith's eye on him as he sat willing it to stop, and was startled by the hint of understanding. He shook his head to dispel the idea. Dreams could not be shared so easily. She had more reason to be nervous about any step towards the truth, however much she desired to know it.
The calm, well-bred and rather bored voice on the phone finally snapped him out of his introspection. Dr Audley wished for particulars of G Tower . . .
'A bomb-proof anti-aircraft complex in Berlin, sir. They started building it in the winter of '41. In the Zoological Gardens — south of the Tiergarten, across the Landwehr Canal. Just beside the zoo's aviaries–nice piece of Teutonic town planning.'
A flak tower. He remembered a monster towering above the ruins of Hamburg in 1948.
'Much bigger than that one, sir. More like a fortress than a flak tower. Every mod con–internal power generators, water supplies, the lot. . .
'Main battery on the roof–eight heavy guns and four light batteries.
Under them the garrison quarters, with ammunition hoists. Then a military hospital, fully equipped, staff of 60. Under that the cream of the Staatliche Museum collections, safe as the Bank of England.
And then two floors of air raid shelters, with room for 15,000–
though they got twice as many in towards the end. Plus 2,000 dead and wounded. It was safe right up to the end–eight-foot of reinforced concrete and steel shutters–but
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Audley tried to envisage 30,000 panic-stricken civilians crammed into a concrete box with Russian shells and bombs smashing against its sides.
'But quite safe, as I said. It's even thought that Goebbels planned at one time to direct the defence from there–there was an emergency broadcasting station on the ground floor, and the main communications centre–L Tower, that was–was just nearby. But in the end he stayed at the other end of the Tiergarten.
Audley was no longer listening. Instead his mind was racing back over the previous thirty-six hours, to the one assumption he had been at least reasonably sure of, but which was suddenly crumbling before his eyes.
'. . . also at Friedrichshain, smaller of course. G Tower was by far the biggest. About 130 feet high.'
It had been a preconception, of course. And even if it didn't fit the facts any more, it still rang true.
'And there were animals in the zoo right up to the end.'
The boredom was replaced by incredulity. 'Bloody lions and hippos mixing it with the Russians, I shouldn't wonder.'
Abstractedly he thanked the man, who seemed quite taken with the Wagnerian last hours of the Thousand Year Reich as it affected the unfortunate beasts in Berlin zoo, and replaced the receiver.
He began to reach down towards his brief-case, but stopped midway. He knew perfectly well what was in the Panin file, which reposed there entirely against regulations. And it was no use pretending that there wasn't a possible link here between Panin and dummy4
Steerforth, even if it wasn't the sort of link he had envisaged.
Indeed, if it made sense in 1945 it made nonsense in 1969.
But it would have to be checked.
Theodore Freisler might well know the answer. But there was one man who would certainly know it. He took his address book from its drawer and looked at the grandfather clock, weighing the lateness of the time against the slightness of his acquaintance with Sir Kenneth Allen. Their meeting in Rome had been strictly social, but nonetheless daunting; Audley had felt intellectually laundered after half an hour's conversation, then weighed up and courteously dismissed as a middle-weight.
But the great man had been on occasion consulted by the department, and whatever he might think of Audley he would never turn him away. Moreover, if the bored voice was now passing on his G Tower information, then Stocker might come to the same conclusion, and he wouldn't hesitate to haul Sir Kenneth from his high table or senior common room. And if Stocker's was the second call — that rewarding possibility was enough to decide him.
