"I was in the UK at the time," Maxim reassured him.
Apgood pinched his nose like an airline passenger trying to clear his eardrums, and looked Maxim over carefully. Then he let out his breath in a puff. "We-ell… Has all that been cleared up? I seem to recall some mystery woman…"
"I think the police are treating the case as closed."
"Look – my first responsibility is to Division -"
"Of course. I just wanted an opinion. And I won't quoteyou.
Still looking wary, Apgood walked over to the washbasin, tapped the ash from his cigar and washed it away. "I can see why you might not want to go near Bad Schwärzendem. Shall I ring up?"
"If you can do it without…" then Maxim remembered that Apgood's whole life was devoted to doing things 'without'. He changed tack. "So you don't think there's any chanceof anybody having put a fake certificate into the files? – years after the event?"
Apgood instinctively picked up a certificate and glanced through it, then shook his head. "No. I don't mean just the forgery, and that's a hell of a job, trying to fake something that's aged as badly as these – it's the numbering. It wouldn't fit into the sequence, it wouldn't match up with the ledger. Anyway, why should somebody want to do that?"
He really looked so absurdly young and guileless, so like a starry-eyed subaltern about to go over the top into the machine-guns of the Somme, that Maxim almost answered. Just in time, he remembered he was talking to a thirty-year-old Captain from Int Corps who was deeply interested in anything that might be happening on his patch.
"I really wouldn't know, " he said carefully.
"Okay. But I can take some of these back to the office and have a look at them under the funny lights – ultra-violet, infra-red – to see if anything shows up. Having a whole batch together should make an odd one stick out like a sore thumb. That's another reason why you wouldn't try forging one."
"Thanks, but… if you could just print up the photos for me…"
"Will do. And you aren't asking for help to get the other stuff back into the files at Bad Schwärzendem."
Thankfully, Maxim reflected that that was entirely Sims's problem. "I suppose they do belong there."
"If anybody wants them to prove anything, they do. Floating about loose, all they prove is that whoever's got them is more or less of a crook. Present company excepted, of course."
"Thank you. Do you want me to come and hold the stopwatch?"
"No need. You stay and have lovely din-dins with the Sappers and I'll be back before lights-out. "
Maxim didn't argue. In barracks he was where Sims could find him and while he didn't expect much from Sunday dinner in a near-deserted mess, just being back with the Army was sauce enough for the moment.
The dinner, Maxim decided, would be best remembered as 'nourishing', and he went back to the ante-room to do something about the taste of it. A few more officers were drifting in from their various weekends, and the chatter turned to the likelihood of their being called out on an 'Agile Blade' exercise in the next few days. This was a test of how fast the regiment could pack up and move out to its battle positions, and was supposed to come as a big surprise, but Maxim knew how easy it was to predict. Most units were usually too busy to go to war: dispersed on training schemes, preparing for some grand parade, absorbing new equipment, training for a tour of Northern Ireland or retraining back from it. So on the rare occasions they did report themselves in a State of Readiness they knew an Agile Blade was likely. To the younger officers, Maxim's presence proved that tomorrow would be The Day and – by reverse logic – that he must be a spy from Allied Command Europe come to report on their morale and even sobriety. It became a joke to ply him with half-pints of beer and fantasies about each other's unfitness for battle.
The mess sergeant arrived with a brief respite: Captain Apgood was at the back door.
They sat on stubby pillars at the bottom of a short flight of steps leading to the parade square. The security officer handed over a bunch of small prints and lit a cigar. "Not very exciting, I'm afraid. Looks likejust a test strip. It's flash, you can tell by the shadows. Must be infra-red, the thing you don't notice unless you're looking straight at it."
The pictures showed various angles of a small room that was furnished with little more than a big couch, a hi-fi and a table of drinks.
"Like going to the pictures, isn't it?" Apgood said. "Always seems there's something better coming next week. Oh, by the way, I ran off copies for myself, I hope you don't mind. It's just conceivable that room might pop up in some other picture some day."
Maxim didn't mind, although he had a vague sense Apgood was seeing something he'd missed himself. Then he remembered the magazine, Focus on Germany.
"If you could dig up a back copy -" he gave the date, nineyears before; " – If the worst comes to the worst, just lift one from the Liaison Officer's back room."
"Dear me. What strange morality one learns in high places. "
Chapter18
Maxim woke with a slightly tender head – those blasted lieutenants and their silly jokes – and the sombre feeling that he must be getting truly old if he could no longer sleep through a normal wakey-wakey in barracks. He lay for some minutes listening to the clatter of boots, slamming of doors and distant shouts before the snorts and squeals of armoured personnel carriers below his window made him realise this was far from normal and was, in fact, an Agile Blade.
He was just wrapping himself in a garish Hong Kong dressing-gown when the door burst open and a hulking first lieutenant in combat dress, his helmet stuffed with leaves and his face already smeared with camouflage cream, stood staring at him. Maxim was about to explain when the lieutenant obviously came to a snap judgment on his military value and slammed out again. So he stood for ten minutes at the window watching soldiers tossing bundles of equipment into the gurgling FV 4325 parked around the parade ground and feeling the deep contentment of seeing other people working very hard very early in the day. Then he dressed and went down for what would now be a vulture's breakfast.
At nine o'clock he and the transient education officer were still sitting in the ante-room reading old copies of Country Life when the mess sergeant came in to say Mr Sims was on the phone.
He was all business. "I think you have all the papers? -good. Can you meet me at the parking place outside the cathedral in half an hour? I will come past in a dark blue Audi 100. Is that all right?"
"Make it a quarter to ten. I don't know how quickly I can get into town."
"Okay then, 0945."
Maxim got the film and certificates from his room, then stood for a moment at the top of the front steps, looking across the parade ground. It was another hot windless day, and they were living in a bowl of milky haze and smog, so that the blue only began perhaps twenty degrees above the horizon. It would be murder out in the field, digging in, and the soldiers knew it. They were all slumped in the shade of the vehicles, blurred by patches of cigarette smoke.
Then whistles started blowing and the scene shattered into movement. The mess sergeant appeared at Maxim's elbow, offering a key. "I don't know how long we'll be out, sir, but this is for the drinks cupboard. Write out a chit for whatever you use, as usual. And there'll be a sort of lunch in the cookhouse, nothing here. "
"Thank you, Sergeant."
The sergeant saluted and then, because Maxim wasn't wearing uniform, couldn't resist asking: "Are you really from Command, sir?"
Slightly surprised at a mess sergeant who didn't know all about every officer, Maxim was about to deny it when he realised that, by chance, he had found a great cover story. So he just smiled as enigmatically as he knew how, and pocketed the drinks key. The first personnel carriers rumbled out of the main gate, blocking the workday traffic, and he watched them now with envy because they were off to play soldiers and he hadn't been invited.