“Yes,” confirmed Charlie, hopefully.
“Went to Hamburg on May sixth. Got back into Berlin on the twenty-eighth.” He looked up, smiling with what looked to be natural teeth. “And here it is!” He looked down again, to quote verbatim “‘May 2. Simon. Goering. Strong Louvre possibility.’”
“That’s all?” pressed Charlie, disappointed.
“No!” said the man, triumphantly, “‘May 5. Goering unsubstantiated. Squad back.’”
“Squad back?” echoed Charlie. “What about Simon Norrington?”
Mason offered the sepia-brown pages. “I didn’t make a note. Doesn’t look to have been my decision. I usually put in a lot more detail, for my fuller reports later.”
“Colonel Parnell issued the order. Just before he went to Munich,” confirmed Charlie. “So both of you were away?”
“There was still a support staff running the office,” stressed Mason. “Organized it myself. Anything that came in while we were away would have been automatically and immediately passed on to headquarters. Parnell was a stickler for records; insisted that we were trying to restore the art heritage of Europe. Which we were, of course. Had every damned telephone call logged.” He waved the leather-covered diary again. “That’s why I kept this. Parnell had to know where everyone was, what they were doing, every minute of the day.” He smiled again, confidently. “So you don’t have a problem! You go to War Office records and you’ll get every scrap of paperwork that ever passed through our unit. Including any message from Norrington, even if it was telephoned. You’ll know exactly what happened-or was supposed to be happening-to the man.”
“We’ve already done that, sir,” disclosed Charlie. “There are no records covering Norrington during May. Not until his body was returned.”
For a very long time Sir Peter Mason regarded Charlie over the huge desk. Then he said, “Do you know what I did, after the war?”
“I understand you were a permanent secretary at the Foreign Office,” ventured Charlie.
“The permanent secretary, to the foreign secretary, for fifteen years. I know about government files.”
“Then you’ll know that these have been destroyed,” said Charlie, bluntly.
“That is impossible. It cannot be done.”
“It has been done. So it is possible.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“I don’t know enough to suggest anything,” admitted Charlie, honestly. “All I can tell you is that files that should still be in existence-as you believe they should still exist-have disappeared.”
“Government files go automatically into the Public Records Office at Kew after a prescribed period of time,” insisted the expert. “Even if the release time is extended beyond the normal fifty-year period, it is noted at Kew. Has there been the proper check?”
“I understand so,” said Charlie, who truly didn’t.
“An illegal act has been committed, if they’ve been tampered with. Or unless a special exclusion or extension-of-release order has been imposed.”
“They no longer exist,” insisted Charlie. He really was wasting his time. There wasn’t any reason to delay his Moscow return.
Sir Peter Mason lapsed into renewed silence. “Do you imagine you’ll ever fully get to the bottom of it all?”
“At this precise moment I doubt it,” admitted Charlie, honest again and hating the admission. “Everything has been dispersed between too many separate departments here in England and is compounded by supposedly shared but in fact quite separate and conflicting investigations by America and Russia.”
“In May 1945, we received a body with Simon Norrington’s identification from the Russian authorities in Berlin,” stated Mason, more to himself than to Charlie. “The three in Yakutsk-and whoever it was in Berlin-were killed by Russians. Who else could it have been?”
“The Russians have evidence of another British officer having been present,” declared Charlie, flatly.
“The present British government knows this?”
“Yes.”
“What evidence?”
“A bullet from a British gun. A button forensically proven to be from a British battle-dress uniform.”
“That, potentially, is appalling! Unthinkable! You should have told me about this last night …. I still have friends in government: people I could have spoken to … got a better understanding …”
Careless of his desperation showing, Charlie said, “Don’t you rememberanything about Norrington around that month?”
“His death, that’s all. Suddenly being told by the Russians that they had his body and were returning it.”
“Wasn’t any inquiry made about the circumstances? Colonel Parnell says your unit only ever lost two people during its entire existence.”
“Of course,” said the older man. “I do recall discussing that very fully with Parnell, obviously. It went higher, to headquarters, for them to use their authority to demand an explanation. All we got back was that his body had been found, by a Russian patrol, with no evidence of how he’d been killed.”
What, Charlie wondered, had been the explanation given to the Americans for the death of the man they’d believed to be George Timpson? “Is it conceivable Norrington would have gone to Russia without telling anyone?”
“Totally inconceivable!” insisted the other man. “Okay, we were an irregular unit and maybe did things in an irregular way. But as I said, Parnell was a stickler and everyone followed his rules if they didn’t necessarily strictly follow army regulations to the letter. For Norrington to have decided, off his own bat, to go to Yakutsk would have amounted to desertion! And how could he have gone, of his own accord? There were only military flights, in and out of both Berlin airports. And those flights were checked, by nationals of whichever country the plane belonged to. The one fact I am positive about is that the only way Norrington and Timpson would have got to Yakutsk would have been as prisoners of the Russians. Who were then prepared to murder to cover up what they had done ….” The man paused at a new awareness. “Is there a phony grave in Berlin for Timpson?”
“An American war cemetery in the Netherlands.”
“Why on earth isn’t the government-America, too-demanding an explanation?”
“The possible embarrassment of a second involved Briton.”
“Rubbish. Preposterous rubbish,” rejected the man. “By 1945 there were millions of British handguns all over the place. And tens of millions of uniform bits and pieces. And it doesn’t matter whether there were one or two British officers. The unalterable, unchallengeable fact has to be they were prisoners of the Russians, withoutwhom they wouldn’t have been there in the first place ….” He paused, close to being breathless. “Instead of inventing conspiracies and spying missions and possible international embarrassments, has anyone thought that even if there was a second British officer his body might be somewhere else in another unmarked, unknown grave?”
“I don’t believe they have,” conceded Charlie. He certainly hadn’t, until now. Which he should have. A second body in a second grave would make nonsense of a lot of his theories and arguments so far. It could even, he further conceded, refute a Russian accusation.
“Suggest it!” insisted Mason. “At the same time as suggesting an explanation is demanded from the Russians for what’s clearly cold-blooded murder!”
Charlie said, “I appreciate the time you’ve given me. It’s been very usefuclass="underline" put forward different perspectives.”
“I don’t at all like the sound of how this is being handled,” said the other man. “You’ve got my number. Anything else comes up you think I might be able to help you with, you let me know. You’ve no idea what the Russians were like in Berlin.”
“Colonel Parnell tried to give me some idea.”
Mason shook his head dismissively. “You had to be there, truly to believe it.” There was a further, more vehement head shake. “And I can’t believe how this is being treated now.”
When Charlie phoned from a public kiosk in the center of East Dereham, Sir Rupert Dean insisted it should be a full meeting, not confined just to the two of them.