He had to fight with the key; he had to shake the lever handle hard before the lock would turn. Suddenly it had snapped like a stick and they heard the echo flyaway and resound in distant rooms. Keep me here; oh God keep me here, he thought. Don't change my nature or my life; don't change the place or move the path that I'm following...
There must have been a piece of grit beneath the door for it shrieked, then stopped and Turner had to force it with his whole body, force it against the water, while Gaunt the Welshman stood back, watching and lusting but not daring to touch. At first, fumbling for the switch, he saw only the darkness; then a single window thick with cobwebs come gloomily forward and it frightened him because he hated prison. It was high in the wall and arched like a brick oven and barred for security. Through its topmost panes he glimpsed the wet gravel of the car park. While he stood there watching and swaying, the beam of a headlight groped slowly a long the ceiling, a prison spotlight searching for escapers, and the whole catacomb filled with the roar of a departing engine. An army blanket lay on the sill and he thought: you remembered to black out the window; you remembered the firewatching in London.
His hand found the light switch; it was domed like a woman's breast, and when he pressed it down it thumped like a punch against his own body and the dust rolled longingly towards him over the black concrete.
'They call it the Glory Hole,' Gaunt whispered.
The trolley was in an alcove beside the desk. Files on top, stationery below, all in varying sizes, nicely crested, with long and standard envelopes to match, all laid out ready to hand. At the centre of the desk, next to the reading light, square on its felt pad and neatly covered with a grey plastic cape, lay the missing typewriter with the long carriage and beside it three or four tins of Dutch cigars. On a separate table, a thermos and a quantity of Naafi cups; the tea machine with the clock; on the floor a small electric fan in two tones of plastic, trained conveniently upon the desk to help dispel the unfortunate effects of damp; on the new chair with the rexine seat, a pink cushion partially embroidered by Miss Aickman. All these he recognised at a glance, dully, greeting them curtly as we greet old friends, while he stared beyond them at the great archive which lined the walls from floor to ceiling; at the slim black files each with a rusted loop and a rounded thumb-hole, some grey with bloom, some wrinkled and bent with damp, column after column in their black uniforms, veterans trained and waiting to be called.
He must have asked what they were, for Gaunt was whispering. No, he couldn't suggest what they were. No. Not his place. No. They had been here longer than anyone could remember. Though some did say they were Jag files, the Judge Advocate General's Department he meant, that's what talkers said and the talkers said they came from Minden in lorries,just dumped here for living space they were, twenty years ago that must be now, all of twenty years, when the Occupation packed up. That's all he could say really, he was sure; that's all he'd happened to hear from the talkers, just overheard it by chance, for Gaunt was not a gossip, that was the one thing
they could say about him. Oh more than twenty years... the lorries
turned up one summer evening... Macmullen and someone else had spent half the night helping to unload them... Of course in those days it was thought the Embassy might need them... No, nobody had access, not these days, didn't want it really; who would? Long ago, the odd Chancery officer would ask for the key and look something up but that was long ago, Gaunt couldn't remember that at all, and no one had been down here for years, though Gaunt couldn't say for sure, of course; he had to watch his words with Turner, he'd learnt that now, he was sure... They must have kept the key separate for a while, then added it to the Duty Officer's bunch... But a while back now, Gaunt couldn't say when, he had heard them talking about it; Marcus, one of the drivers, gone now; saying they weren't Jag files at all but Group files, it was a specialist British contingent... His voice pattered on, urgent and conspiratorial, like an old woman in church. Turner was no longer listening. He had seen the map.
A plain map, printed in Polish.
It was pinned above the desk, pinned quite freshly in to the damp plaster, in the place where some might put the portraits of their children. No major towns were marked, no national borders, no scale, no pretty arrows showing the magnetic variation: just the places where the camps had been. Neuengamme and Belsen in the north, Dachau, Mauthausen to the south, to the east, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, Belzec and Auschwitz; in the centre Ravensbruck, Sachsenhausen, Kulmhof and Gross Rosen.
'They owe me,' he thought suddenly. 'They owe me.' God in Heaven what a fool, what a plain, blundering, clumsy fool I have been. Leo, you thief, you came here to forage in your own dreadful childhood.
'Go a way. If I want you I'll call you.' Turner stared at Gaunt sightlessly, his right hand pressed against a shelf. ' Don't tell anyone. Bradfield, de Lisle, Crabbe... no one, do you understand.'
'I won't,' Gaunt said.
'I'm not here. I don't exist. I never came in tonight. Do you understand.'
'You ought to see a doctor,' said Gaunt.
'Fuck off.'
Pulling back the chair, he tipped the little cushion to the floor and sat down at the desk. Resting his chin in his hand, he waited for the room to steady. He was alone. He was alone like Harting, contraband smuggled in, living like Harting on borrowed time; hunting, like Harting, for a missing truth. There was a tap beside the window and he filled the tea machine and played with the knobs until it began to hiss. As he returned to the desk he nearly tripped over a green box. It was the size of a narrow briefcase, but stiff and rectangular, made of the kind of reinforced leather-cloth used for bridgesets and shot-gun cases. It had the Queen's initials just beneath the handle and reinforced corners of thin steel; the locks had been ripped open and it was
empty. That's what we're all doing, isn't it? Looking for something that isn't there?
He was alone, with only the files for company and the stink of warm damp from the electric fire; and the pale breeze of the plastic fan and the muttering of the tea machine. Slowly he began turning the pages. Some of the files were old, taken from the shelves, half in English and half in a cruel Gothic script jagged as barbed wire. The names were set out like athletes, surname first and Christian name second, with only a couple of lines at the top and a hasty signature at the bottom to authorise their ultimate disposal. The files on the trolley were new, and the paper was rich and smooth, and the minutes signed with familiar names. And some were folders, records of mail despatched and mail received, with titles underlined and margins ruled.
He was alone, at the beginning of Harting's journey, with only his track for company, and the sullen grumbling of the water pipes in the corridor outside, like the shuffling of clogs upon a scaffold. Are they like horses? Hazel Bradfield's voice enquired.Do they sleep standing up? He was alone. And whatever he found there was the other part of coming alive. Meadowes was asleep. He would not for a moment have admitted it;and Cork would not, in charity, for a moment have accused him of it; and it is true that technically, like Hazel Bradfield's horses, his eyes were open. He was reclining in his upholstered library chair in an attitude of well-deserved retirement, while the sounds of dawn floated through the open window.