Josh Mantle, back in the familiar suit, the old shirt and the poorer shoes, walked across the hallway of the court with the partner.
‘And getting those louts bound over to keep the peace – some hope – was a second triumph for humanity, eh, Josh?’
‘There are serious tensions in the Sikh and Muslim communities. The youths are bound to reflect those tensions in their homes.’
‘You have a sympathetic eye, Josh. You know, Mr Greatorex did a run-through, last week, of the firm’s legal-aid earnings, criminal cases. Bit over a year you’ve been with us? Legal aid’s up for the firm more than twenty per cent. You’ve a good way in the police cells, drumming up business. Heh, God, you must need a damn good scrub when you get home at night, some of the scum you meet. I’m not complaining. .. but very sympathetic.’
‘As long as you’re not complaining, Mr Protheroe.’ Most nights he was on call, or down at the police station at Slough beside the court, to argue for bail, to sit in on the interviews, to take statements from inarticulate and hostile youths. ‘What about this afternoon?’
‘There’s a problem, Josh. The bottle-slashing, yes? It’s a remand in custody, no question of letting him out. I’d rather thought it was for this morning, up and down. The problem is, I’m on the golf course this afternoon, a charity job, good cause. Look after it, will you, Josh? We’re not arguing with a remand. I’m going to dash.’ He was away, hurrying up the street.
She must have seen him with Mr Protheroe, and she must have waited, diffident.
‘Afternoon, Mrs Barnes.’
‘They told me you’d be here – at your work they said you would.’
‘How can I help, Mrs Barnes?’
‘It’s my Tracy..
She was breathing hard. He wondered how far she had walked to come to the court. There were bag lines at her eyes, as if she had been crying. She seemed to him so tired and so frail.
‘Hold it there, Mrs Barnes. Let’s go and find somewhere we can sit down.’
He took her arm, led her into a deserted court-room and sat her on the polished bench where the public could sit when the court was in session. He saw the fear on her face. He touched her hand. ‘Now, Mrs Barnes, what about Tracy?’
‘She’s gone.’
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Barnes, where has she gone?’ He was trying to concentrate, trying to focus, and she was difficult to hear even in the hush of the empty court-room. ‘Where has she gone?’
From her handbag she took a small piece of paper. It had been crumpled, squashed in a fist and discarded as rubbish, then carefully smoothed out. ‘God forbid, I’d ever spy on her. I went to bed early. I’d got her back – you’d brought her back. I suppose it was the relief. Slept solid. I woke this morning, to go to work. I made my usual cup of tea and one for her. She wasn’t there, her bed wasn’t slept in. It was on the floor, like it’d been dropped.’
She passed him the slip of paper. He did not have to be a solicitor’s clerk, or a former staff sergeant in I Corps, or a one-time captain in the Royal Military Police to register what was on the paper. There were columns of figures, written precisely. He read them as arrival and departure times. Above the figures was the single word ‘Victoria’ and below them ‘Bahnhof Zoo’.
‘What’s it mean, Mr Mantle?’
It meant that she had kicked him in the teeth. It meant that she had taken the boat train from Victoria to Folkestone or Dover, then a ferry, then a train across Europe to the station in Berlin for trans-European trains.
‘She’s gone to Berlin.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s about what’s happened to her.’
‘Please, Mr Mantle, because I’m frightened for her.’
‘I really don’t see what I can do.’
‘I don’t suppose there is anything.’
‘You want me to find her, bring her home… I’ve a very busy workload at the moment, Mrs Barnes.’
She was into her handbag. The purse of worn leather was out of it. Her fingers, thin, dried out, took the roll of banknotes from the purse and unfolded them. She held them out for him to take. There would have been a biscuit tin under the bed, or at the back of a drawer, or under the spare blankets in a cupboard. The money would have been her savings. A few coins and the odd banknote would have been put by each week and each month… Her voice shouted in scorn at him, ‘It was murder. Murder is murder. Or do you compromise’… She would have saved the money over many years. He put his hand over hers, pushed it back towards the purse.
She said, accusingly, ‘What’s wrong with my money? Good enough, isn’t it?’
‘It won’t be necessary.’
Tracy Barnes walked out of the Bahnhof Zoo. It was seven years since she had been in Berlin. There were men doing the hard stuff outside the station, small swarthy men against the wall of the station, protected by their dogs. Seven years ago there had been men here doing hard drugs. She heard the music against the traffic hum. She had always liked the music on the plaza by the ruined Nikolaikirche. She carried the wrapped gift and idled towards the church, which had been firebombed more than half a century before and was kept as a monument to war’s ravage. She watched the band. They might have been from Peru, or perhaps from Costa Rica.
She was another youngster come to the city of history. She was unnoticed. She was small and overwhelmed by her rucksack and unremarkable, just another kid who had travelled to the heartbeat, the core, the junction point of Europe.
She walked boldly towards the east, a fine strong stride, as if she were not intimidated by the city, as if she were not cowed by the history of Berlin. Past the funfair, where she remembered it. Through the Tiergarten, the trees bared by winter and snow powdered on the ground. She came to the Brandenburger Tor. At the great gate of grey-brown stone old history had been renovated and new history had been destroyed. She paused on the pavement corner and faced it: the cars swarmed between the columns over which was the victory chariot.
Either side of the gate was emptiness, where the Wall had been seven years before. The Wall had been her life. Through it she had carried the equipment, the unexposed films and the instructions for Hansie, and she had brought back the equipment, the exposed films and the reports he had made. The Wall had gone. In place of the Wall were cranes. She had never seen so many in one place. Huge, lofty, caterpillar-driven cranes replaced the Wall… She was about to cross the wide road, green light showing, when she saw the crosses. Fifteen white plastic crosses were tied to a fence between the pavement and the Tiergarten. They had been there seven years before, but prominent and confronting the Wall. Now, they were tied to a fence. Behind them was an advertisement board for a museum and they were ignored. The young men and women who had died on the Wall were forgotten, their memory consigned to plastic crosses pinned in obscurity against a fence, hard to see.
She crossed the road. She walked past the emptiness where the cranes gathered, where the Wall had been.
She went by the stalls where the Romanians or Poles or Turks sold military souvenirs of the Soviet Army and the NazionalVolksArmee, the caps and camouflage uniforms, the binoculars and flags, the gear of the men who had killed those remembered by the white plastic crosses, who had murdered her Hansie.
She reached the small garden. It was on the junction of Prenzlauer and Saarbrucker in the hinterland of the Unter den Linden. A long time ago, she had stood on the pavement beside the garden, and Hansie had given the camera to a stranger. They had posed. One snapshot, a boy and a girl. One picture with which to remember him. For many hours, in the chill wind, Tracy Barnes sat on a bench in the garden. The leaves were no longer swept away, as she remembered they had been. On a crude shaped stone in the garden was the relief portrait of Karl Liebknecht, revolutionary, tortured and killed in the Tiergarten in 1919, on a day as cold as this one. Hansie had told her about the life and death of Karl Liebknecht. His face was marked with bird droppings. Who remembered him? Who remembered Hans Becker? Twice a snow shower came. When it had passed over she brushed the frozen flakes from her chest and shoulders.