She stretched forward, arm extended. Zimmermann, too, leaned towards the coffee-table, and took the sheet of notepaper. He inspected it, nodding and shaking his head in turn. Then he looked up.
"I agree. It is a poor comment on the protection we offered our guests. Yes, I'm afraid there was a great deal of time unaccounted for by SIS personnel during those weeks." He sighed. "A pity — whether we can check very much of it after so much time, I'm not sure." He pondered, then asked: "Do you detect a pattern here?"
Margaret shook her head. "Some were greater offenders than others — I've starred their names. Mostly night-times are unaccounted for." She smiled. "Might it mean anything?"
"Possibly. We must try."
"And you? Have you found anything?" Her gaze was direct, almost fierce. Guiltily, he glanced down at the heap of files balanced on his lap. He had kept Aubrey's material for his own examination — his movements, contacts, debriefing, subsequent debriefmgs of those assigned to his protection from the BfV. In it, as he had expected, he had found nothing. He shook his head gently, wisely. Margaret's features pursed at the patronising mannerism.
"No, I have not. I did not expect to," Zimmermann said coldly in response to her expression. The woman's suspicions were suddenly irritating, stupid. "What may or may not have happened in 1946 has nothing to do with 1974, or with now," he said pedantically. "I am certain of that. There is nothing here to link Aubrey with Guillaume or anyone else."
"Do you say that only because you are in his debt, Herr Zimmermann?"
"I do not," he replied angrily. "I am in his debt, greatly so. That is true. But it is not true to make it an accusation. Do you forget that you and your husband are perhaps both in danger? He certainly is. The man is here somewhere, in this maze, in all this old paper. Your father is dead — he had been dead for almost forty years… your husband is alive."
Margaret's face had reddened. She clenched her hands in her lap. "You don't have to lecture me, Herr Zimmermann."
"My apologies."
"I–I'm sorry…it — it's just that it's so hard to help the man who might have killed my father—!"
"Then help your husband!"
"Very well! What do you want me to do?"
Zimmermann stood up, clutching the sheaf of files in both hands. He threw them onto the sofa beside her. "Here! You think that man killed your father — you find something against him. I can't! The reason I can't is that there is nothing to find." Zimmermann was visibly trembling as he stood in front of her. She confronted a passion for truth as fierce as her own.
She disregarded the files on Aubrey. "I'm sorry — I'll carry on with — with my own work, here…"
"As you wish," Zimmermann observed coldly, turning away from her and walking to the window. The snow had stopped, but more threatened from the heavy sky. Zimmermann was angry with himself for losing his temper. Margaret Massinger was under a great strain.
He almost turned to apologise, but could not. Better to leave her, for the moment, to recover herself. He heard her shuffling through papers, and knew that she would not now look, even glance, at the Aubrey material. In a moment, he should get back to it—
Where was Massinger?
He prevented himself from looking once more at his watch. It was already beginning to get dark outside. The barges were like long black slugs on the grey path of the Rhine. No, there was one with washing hung out even in this dreary, freezing weather — a line of it like naval signals of greeting or distress.
Where was Massinger?
Nerves took hold of Zimmermann, unformed but gathering fears. He should have provided the man with an escort, with protection.
Margaret Massinger was speaking.
"What—?" he asked abruptly.
"I didn't realise that Andrew Babbington was in Bonn during that period," she repeated, undisturbed by his tone.
"Oh — yes, he headed the team of interrogating officers that MI5 sent over, a few days after Guillaume was arrested," Zimmermann replied absently, watching the barge, flying its signals of colourful washing, move upriver towards the Kennedybrücke.
"No, he was here before that," Margaret continued. "Some internal investigation in the Chancery section of the British embassy — misappropriation of funds, it says here."
Zimmermann turned from the window. "That is not unusual…" he began with heavy humour.
The door opened, and Paul appeared.
"Well?" Margaret asked breathlessly, almost at once. Zimmermann saw the certainty on Massinger's face, and quailed inwardly. He doubted he could help save Aubrey by helping them. Massinger believed in Aubrey's guilt, that much was evident; just as it was evident he wished to conceal that conviction from his wife. "What did you find out?" she asked ominously.
Massinger laid his raincoat across the back of a chair and sat beside her. The man seemed to have no masks left; Zimmermann could see that any effort at deception would fail miserably.
"It's no more than speculation," he began.
"What is?" Margaret snapped.
"Your father — it's a crazy, wild guess — Aubrey was wrong, I'm certain of it…"
"What?" Her tone was icy.
Zimmermann turned once more to the window. The barge with its hoisted washing was slipping beneath the Kennedybrücke now, bereft of colour. No more than another black slug on grey.
It had begun to snow once more. He remembered that Massinger's grey hair had sparkled with wetness when he came through the door. Zimmermann wished to excuse himself, he was inwardly hunched against Massinger's reply. He refused to listen to it, nonsense that it was… a fate deserved. If true, Aubrey had known, would have been sure.
"No—!" Margaret almost screamed. "No, no, no, no!" The stain was too great, the smear. What Zimmermann had divined from his own conversation with Disch had become clear to Massinger, too. Perhaps Disch himself, on reflection, had also come to believe it. Now, Margaret Massinger was trying to reject the suspicion they all shared. Not that — above all, not that… Her father could not be at one with the mass-murderers of the six million, the maniacs, the slaughterers, the deformed, the misfits, the thugs and torturers — not them! Zimmermann, as a German, could not but resent the horror in her voice, even as he sympathised with her.
She was sobbing now, he was murmuring useless comforts, having caused her distress. Zimmermann had hoped Disch might have concealed what he suspected, but had not believed he would.
"No, no, no, no…" she was murmuring.
Stop, he thought. Stop it. It was useless to suspect, more pointless to believe, most futile to know. It was almost forty years ago. She had to shake it off — both of them had to exorcise her father's ghost. It might be a matter of life and death — theirs…
Snow, snail-tracks once more on the window, long slow barges, the steely river — the barge with the washing, and her words at that point, just before the barge slipped out of sight beneath and beyond the bridge…?
Babbington. Sir Andrew Babbington. The Director-General of MI5.
Read the will, he thought. When the body is discovered in the library and the rich old lady is pronounced murdered, read the will— Who has most to gain? Who benefits? Who becomes rich?
He smiled. Margaret's sobs and the soft, coaxing words of her husband no longer impinged upon him. He felt only an impatience to study the files.
Babbington… read the will, Inspector, read the will…
Sir Kenneth Aubrey could think of nothing other than the destruction of the journal in Clara Elsenreith's possession. The idea of its continued existence was frightening and painful to him, but all other thought frightened and pained him more. Beyond the destruction of his confession to Castleford's murder lay nothing. An empty landscape. Perhaps he could hide with Clara for days, even weeks. After that, however, there was nothing. Only his disappearance, an act of willed disguise, anonymity, denial of his former self. He would have to find somewhere to skulk as Herr Jones, or Monsieur Smith or Signer Smith or Senor Jones for the rest of his life. He could never be Kenneth Aubrey again.