"I did object on occasion, yes… it would seem I possessed remarkable foresight in being wary of him, considering my present situation."
Eldon did not smile. Aubrey's attempt at nonchalance irritated him.
"You immediately disliked, and resented, Robert Castleford?"
"No—"
"Sir Kenneth," Eldon breathed with evident, malicious irony. "That, too, is a matter of record. There were other complications later, but your antipathy towards Castleford was evident to colleagues from the very first. You complained, time after time, of the manner in which the civilian authorities presumed to override what you considered to be important intelligence work. You seemed to consider your work of more significance than the huge task of getting Germany back on its feet once more. Catching ex-Nazis and spiking the Russians' guns seemed of more importance to you than the rebuilding of Germany?"
"If you say so…"
Aubrey gripped his hands more tightly together in his lap, and averted his gaze. Castleford's dead face had presented itself to his imagination in hideous close-up, the blue eyes going blank and glazed, the head beginning to tilt backwards. The noise of the revolver was in Aubrey's ears. As his eyes found the carpet near his feet, Castleford's face, too, fell sideways and the man's body was vividly before him, stretched on his carpet — so vividly that he was afraid that Eldon, too, would see it; see the flow of blood from his temple staining the white shirt-front. He shook his head and the image retreated.
"Something wrong, Sir Kenneth?" Eldon asked.
"Tiredness," Aubrey managed to say.
"You wanted, from the very beginning, to fulfil your own ambitions in Berlin," Eldon pursued. "You were building your own career, and you would brook no interference from outside your service. Your ambitions dictated that even a very senior member of the Commission such as Castleford was not to be tolerated if he interfered with your work." None of the observations were interrogative. For Eldon, they were merely statements of fact.
"If you say so…" Aubrey replied wearily.
"You went about establishing your own network, did you not, within weeks of arriving in Berlin?"
"Yes."
"Setting out thereby to prove your superiority to brother officers in SIS? You were not the senior officer there, I take it?"
"Of course not!" Aubrey snapped.
"Then why did you begin to behave in this — cavalier fashion?" Eldon's hands moved apart in a shrug. "Towards officers more senior and experienced than yourself," he added darkly.
"Because their networks were suffering from rigor mortis. Most of them were established during the early days of the occupation of Berlin. We were finding out less and less, we were catching fewer and fewer Nazis — we had no real access in the Russian sector…"
"You're suggesting that you had all the right answers — only you, no one else?"
"Not that — simply a fresh mind, fresh links." Aubrey looked up at Eldon. There was only sunlight on the carpet now. "Surely you can understand how networks become moribund?"
"Perhaps. But you spared no one's feelings, no one's pride, as you went about this fresh approach of yours. You made yourself deeply unpopular in intelligence circles at the time."
Aubrey shrugged. "All that summer we were afraid that the Russians would try something like a blockade of Berlin — we had to pull out all the stops to try to discover what they meant to do. In fact, they postponed their intention for two years, until '48."
"And your new networks began to produce results?"
"Not at once. But, slowly — yes, they did."
"Castleford objected, on many occasions, to your high-handed, even illegal treatment of German nationals, did he not?"
"Yes, he did," Aubrey sighed. "There were a number of cases—"
"Where he reprimanded you for over-zealous behaviour? Such as detaining German nationals without charge — or blackmailing German nationals into assisting you? Bribery, black-market goods supplied for favours and information. Castleford objected most strenuously to most of the methods you used, did he not?"
"He did."
"Increasing the antipathy between you?"
"Naturally. He — got in my way on every possible occasion. I was looking for Nazis and for Russian agents being funnelled into the other sectors of the city, then to the West, under the guise of displaced persons and even German soldiers. There was — little time for niceties."
Eldon's lips pursed in contempt. "Perhaps Castleford thought that the war was over by the summer of 1946?" he said with heavy irony.
"Perhaps. We simply did not agree as to priorities."
"You were caught by the NKVD in the Russian sector of Berlin in December of '46?"
"Yes."
"Why were you there?"
Aubrey hesitated for an instant. Stick to your original debriefing, he instructed himself. Eldon will have seen the reports. Give him what he expects. He said: "Following a lead — a suspected double in one of the new networks. Not a very spectacular operation. The double knew I was coming, apparently, and proved his real loyalties by turning me over to the NKVD."
Aubrey sat back in his chair. The sunlight on the carpet had reached the round toes of his black, old-fashioned shoes, lapping at them like water. A hateful vision of himself as an old man at the seashore who has slept too long in a deckchair, unaware of the incoming tide, occurred to him. He dismissed it.
"You were interrogated, of course?"
"Yes — for three or four days."
"And released?"
"I escaped."
"During your interrogation — which could not have been gentle, by any standards — you supplied information to the NKVD."
"I did not." Aubrey was suddenly too weary and dispirited to inject any force into his denial.
"But — you did…"
Aubrey, sensing the clear anticipation in Eldon's voice, the knowledge of surprise, narrowed his eyes and steeled himself. What—?
"What do you mean?"
"Castleford disappeared the very day you — escaped — back to the British sector," Eldon said. "No one ever saw him again. He vanished from the face of the earth — utterly and completely. His remains were eventually found in 1951, during the digging of the foundations for a new office block, and finally identified by a ring, his dental record, and a fracture of the leg sustained in a rugby match at Oxford. Remember, Sir Kenneth?"
Aubrey could not disguise a shudder.
"There was a bullet hole in the skull. His remains were brought home, and honourably interred. And that was the end of the story — was the end…"
"Was?" The skull grinned up from the carpet, from the spot where Aubrey had seen the dead face minutes earlier. His hands were shaking.
"We now know what happened."
"You know?"
"Read this if you would, Sir Kenneth."
Eldon removed a number of enlarged photographs from his briefcase and passed them to Aubrey. They goldened in the sunlight, as did Eldon's hand. Aubrey took them with a premonitory shiver.
"Perhaps you would confirm that this is your signature, Sir Kenneth?" Eldon murmured.
Aubrey turned to the final print. What kind of transcript had been photographed? Old, certainly… yes, that was his writing, his signature. He flicked back through the sheaf of prints, rapidly reading the faded Russian, the badly-aligned, inexpert typing — question, answer, question-answer, answer answer answer—
It was an account of his interrogation by the NKVD — and it purported to be signed by himself as being supplied voluntarily and freely, for use in evidence at some unspecified future trial.
Fake, fake—!
"It is, isn't it?" Eldon prompted. There was almost a purr of satisfaction in his voice. "That, of course, is part of the Teardrop file, supplied by our friends in Washington." He smiled wintrily beneath the moustache, "Your file. Experts have confirmed the genuineness of the signature. If your Russian is still as expert as it once was, you will see that you are represented in the text as having supplied Castleford's name and his current whereabouts in Berlin to your interrogator."