The journey back to London seemed to take even longer than it had on the way up. Trave’s carriage was entirely occupied with exhausted soldiers catching up on sleep after their last nights of leave, so he had only his thoughts for company. Gazing out of the window, he recognized some of the towns and landscapes that he had passed going in the opposite direction the day before. They were the same, but he had changed. He had gone north still uncertain of whether Thorn was right about Seaforth’s guilt, but he had left his doubts behind in Langholm. His conversation with Seaforth’s mother had convinced him that Seaforth had to be the recipient of Heydrich’s enigmatic message. In one way this made no sense, given that she had been able to tell him only about events that were now twenty or more years old; but Trave had been unable to resist the conclusion that an experience as bitter as Seaforth’s had to have made him not a servant, but an enemy of his country.
Trave felt sure that Seaforth was guilty, but that didn’t mean he had the evidence to have him arrested. Far from it. All he had was a series of coincidences, and he knew without a doubt that an immediate transfer to the military police awaited him if he took his suspicions back to Quaid. No, it was Thorn he needed to see. From what the hospital had told him the day before, he felt confident that Thorn would have sufficiently recovered by now to be able to talk, and he hoped that the information he’d gleaned about Seaforth’s background, and in particular the connection to Churchill, would enable Thorn to fill in the blanks and work out what Seaforth was planning under the direction of the Gestapo leader with the pitiless eyes.
Trave drummed his fingers on his knees, frustrated by the time he was losing as the train meandered through the London suburbs. But as it rolled slowly on through small stations decorated with flowers in baskets hanging incongruously above piled-up sandbags, and chugged leisurely past gasworks and smoking factories and streets upon streets of terrace houses, he started to sense the teeming vastness of the capital — too huge to be destroyed by terror bombing, however ferocious its scale. He got out at Euston station at just after twelve o’clock with a renewed feeling of hope, went straight to a police box, and telephoned St Stephen’s Hospital.
It was obviously a bad time of day to call. Nobody Trave spoke to seemed to know where Alec Thorn was or what was happening to him. Eventually he gave up, banging the receiver against the wall several times to vent his irritation as he realized that his only option was to go to the hospital and find Thorn for himself. But when he finally got to Fulham Road almost an hour later, he learnt that Thorn had insisted on discharging himself. It didn’t help to be told that they’d missed each other by no more than a few minutes.
Trave cursed his bad luck, wondering where to go next. Perhaps Thorn had gone home, but if so, Trave couldn’t follow him there. There was no listing in the hospital’s telephone directory for an Alec Thorn, and a call to the operator provided Trave with no further information. Frustrated, Trave followed the last lead left to him and took the Underground to St James’s Park, hoping against hope that he might find Thorn at 59 Broadway.
The caretaker, Jarvis, opened the door, wearing the same grey overall as on Trave’s last visit and looking even more unhelpful than he had then.
‘You remember me,’ said Trave. ‘Detective Trave — I was here before.’
Jarvis gave no indication about whether he remembered Trave or not. He just stood in the doorway, waiting to hear what was coming next.
‘I’m looking for Alec Thorn,’ said Trave, dispensing with further preliminaries. ‘Is he here?’
‘No,’ said Jarvis, pronouncing his favourite one-syllable word with relish.
‘I was at the hospital,’ said Trave, refusing to be put off. ‘They said he’s been discharged and so I wondered if he’d come here or if you’d heard from him?’
‘No,’ Jarvis said with finality this time, and was about to close the door when a voice forestalled him, coming from behind Jarvis’s shoulder.
‘Wait, Mr Jarvis. Let’s not be quite so hasty, shall we?’
Trave didn’t recognize the voice, but he immediately recognized its owner when he appeared behind Jarvis in the doorway. It was Seaforth, wearing an expensive tailor-made suit that made him look like some kind of Hollywood film star.
‘’E was ’ere before; ’e talked to Thorn. Said ’e was a policeman,’ said Jarvis, taking a step backwards and addressing his remarks to Seaforth as if Trave weren’t there. ‘Now ’e says Thorn’s been discharged. I told you ’e would be.’
‘So you did, Mr Jarvis. So you did,’ said Seaforth, clapping the caretaker lightly on his bony shoulder. ‘And I’m sure we’re very glad to hear that Alec is back in the land of the living,’ he added, which seemed to Trave to be an entirely truthful statement at least as far as Seaforth was concerned, although Jarvis seemed less enthusiastic. Seaforth in fact looked delighted at the news, which puzzled Trave, knowing as he did from Thorn that they were sworn enemies.
Seaforth smiled at Trave over Jarvis’s shoulder as he spoke to the caretaker, as if inviting the visitor to join in a conspiracy of shared amusement about Jarvis’s rudeness and dropped aitches. Yet Trave had also picked up on a warmth, almost a deference, in the way the surly old janitor spoke to Seaforth that had been entirely lacking in his interaction with Thorn when Trave had last been at 59 Broadway.
‘Thank you, Mr Jarvis. I can take this from here,’ said Seaforth. The caretaker gave a last baleful look at Trave and retreated back into the interior of the building.
‘I’m Charles Seaforth. Maybe I can help you?’ said Seaforth as soon as he and Trave were on their own. He held out his hand to Trave in a friendly way, as if meeting him for the first time, even though Trave was sure this was a charade. He would have been willing to bet his meagre savings that Seaforth remembered the face of everyone he’d followed or had been followed by since he’d begun his career as a secret agent — whenever that may have been.
‘No, I’m afraid not. It’s Alec Thorn I need to see,’ said Trave, shaking Seaforth’s hand but avoiding his eyes. He remembered the contemptuous ease with which Seaforth had given him the slip in the Underground station on the day of Bertram’s arrest and sensed instinctively that Seaforth would get the better of him again if he was forced into a conversation.
‘May I ask what about?’ asked Seaforth, refusing to take no for an answer.
‘I’m sorry, I can’t tell you that. It’s a police matter,’ said Trave, turning to go.
‘Relating to the murder of our late lamented colleague Albert Morrison?’ asked Seaforth.
‘Yes,’ said Trave, caught off guard.
‘I thought so,’ said Seaforth, smiling. ‘So you must be Detective Trave?’
Trave nodded. He had no choice.
‘You may wonder how I know who you are. It was your superior, Inspector …’ Seaforth made a show of trying to remember the name, even though Trave was sure that he knew it already, and then came up with it: ‘Quaid — that’s it — who told me about you when he telephoned us to discuss the case following your visit to Mr Thorn. If you don’t mind me asking, are you here on Inspector Quaid’s instructions?’
‘Like I said, it’s a police matter,’ said Trave. ‘I can’t really discuss it.’
‘So you won’t mind if I call Inspector Quaid and tell him about your visit here?’ asked Seaforth with a smile.