Before he could get up Audley managed to restrain him.
'I haven't really got the time. Just tell me what it was.'
Freisler looked at him pityingly. 'What it was? Why, it was the office that grew out of the old Chiffre und Horchleitstelle, Cypher and Monitoring. What I believe you would call "passive intelligence". I knew a number of people who worked in it–good Germans, too, not Nazis. That was the remarkable thing about the Research Office: the Nazis were always trying to take it over, but they never really managed to do so.'
He smiled. 'I think it was partly because they all wanted it that they failed. Goering was nominally in charge, but all he knew was that he wasn't going to give it up. Let me see –Himmler tried, and Kaltenbrunner tried. And Diels.' He counted them off on his fingers. 'The only one who got close was Heydrich. He managed to move some of his prewar Sicherheitsdienst files into its headquarters on the Schillerstrasse. But then he was killed by the Czechs in '42, and the office was bombed out by your air force in
'43. After that nobody really knew what was happening. The dummy4
records were spread all over the place, and many of them were destroyed in the end to stop the Russians getting them.'
He looked up at Audley. 'But your clever thief wouldn't have wanted any of them. They had no great value then, and they'd have less than none today, except to the historians. As I recollect, the Forschungsamt officials were considered so innocent that they weren't even called to the de-nazification trials!'
He rose and picked his way between piles of journals and manuscripts to his bookcase.
Audley rose too, but in alarm. Once Theodore gave him the book he would be honour bound to wade through it, or he would never be able to face the old German again.
'Theodore, I really ought to be going.' He looked at his watch. 'I'm lunching with my fiancee and I mustn't be late.'
But Theodore was already thumbing through a thick volume, as unstoppable and incapable of changing direction as a rhinoceros.
'Schimpf–Schimpf was the first director. He committed suicide.
Then came Prince Christophe of Hesse. He was killed on the Italian front. Then Schnapper, I think . . . Ah! Here we have it! The office went to Klettersdorf after the 1943 air raid. Then back to Berlin when the Russians were approaching. And then to the four winds!'
He tapped the book with his finger, staring owlishly at Audley, who had reached the door.
'Some of the documents I saw in England in 1957, at Whaddon Hall. But there was nothing of interest to you in them. They would dummy4
have been from the section captured at, let me think now–at Glucksberg, of course.'
Audley made his way slowly down the staircase. Once Theodore had mentioned passive intelligence he had known that any further research into the Forschungsamt was likely to be a journey up a blind alley. It had been a wasted trip. But as he reached the street doorway he heard Theodore bellowing unintelligibly from above.
He stopped guiltily and waited impatiently as the heavy footsteps thumped after him from landing to landing.
The old German was breathing heavily when he finally appeared.
'David, forgive me! My mind was not listening to you properly. A fiancee, you said–and for a fiancee there must be a gift!'
Audley's heart sank as he saw the square, untidy parcel, a battered carrier bag lashed down with scotch tape. The famous two-decker history of the German civil service, through all the convulsions of the Empire, the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, had cornered him at last.
'Theodore, it isn't necessary.'
The great hands thrust the parcel into his and waved his protest aside. It was necessary. It was a small token of deep esteem. It humbly marked a great occasion.
It was also coals of fire on Audley's head, coals which glowed as Theodore beamed and shook his hand and became increasingly guttural, as he always did on the rare occasions when his emotions outran his vocabulary. Audley had fled in cavalier fashion from an unselfish and undemanding friend. His punishment was just and dummy4
appropriate.
As he drove away to meet Faith he resolved to invite Theodore down into the country for a week. Faith would approve of Theodore; not only because of his grave courtesy, but also because they could meet on the common ground of their own high sense of moral responsibility.
XV
But in the event Audley did not so easily extinguish the coals of fire. They glowed again even more brightly some hours later when Faith was excitedly unpacking her mountain of shopping in the bridal suite at the Bull.
'David, what on earth is this extraordinary parcel?'
She held up the carrier bag.
'It's our first present, from a very good and honourable man, my love.' He hoped desperately that she wouldn't laugh at it, and he couldn't bear to watch her undo it.
She ripped away the covering.
'How lovely! But I've read it, of course. Still, it's something you can read again and again.'
Audley looked in the mirror at his astonished face, half of it covered with shaving soap.
'It has written in it " Ein Märchen aus alten Zeiten, Das kommt mir dummy4
nicht aus dem Sinn - but may you never be sad". What does that mean?'
It would be from Heine, Theodore's idol. He turned round: Faith was sitting with the three volumes of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings on her lap–Theodore's own copies.
But before he could reply there was a light tap at the door.
Hugh Roskill entered gingerly, as though his feet hurt. Possibly his feet did hurt, if he had spent the whole day exploring the environs of the old airfield. But Audley somehow felt that it was because he had half expected to find some sort of orgy in progress. He seemed quite relieved to see Faith clothed and Audley engaged in the unexceptionable act of shaving.
But then poor Roskill had had rather a trying day, it transpired. It had been windy and cold, a return to the weather of Friday's funeral–odd, that, for it had seemed pleasant, if not exactly sunny, to Audley.
They had passed a tiring morning marking pimples and pock-marks on a large-scale ordnance survey map which Butler had brought with him. Roskill had given himself a shock on one of Farmer Warren's electric sheep fences and Butler had slipped into a ditch which was no longer wet, but still muddy.
In the afternoon Richardson returned from his assignment in Cambridge with the latest equipment for detecting buried metallic objects, the archaeological department's newest toy.
'DECCO,' explained Roskill, 'which Richardson claims is short for Decay of Eddy Currents in Conductive Objects. But it just looked dummy4
like a souped-up mine detector to me.'
Unfortunately, either Richardson had failed to master DECCO's intricacies or DECCO had developed some minor fault. Having lugged the device two miles or more across country to the most promising pimple they had had to carry it all the way back unused.
Richardson had returned with it to Cambridge and neither had been seen since.
Shortly after he had retired from the field Stocker had arrived with Panin, and Stocker had not been noticeably pleased to find that Audley was not present (though it could be simply indigestion, since the timing of his arrival suggested that he had not been able to linger over his lunch).
'I rather got the impression,' said Roskill, 'that he expected to find us at work with pick and shovel, with you standing over us with a rope's end. I'm afraid Butler was a bit short with him. We told him you'd been on the job continuously . . .' He paused fractionally as the other implications of that statement flashed through his mind, but recovered splendidly '. . . since Friday. I said you were probably chasing the Pole, anyway, and he cooled down a bit.'