The Lives and Times of Bernardo Brown (30 page)

‘What for? This is not a Waifs and Strays Society. She’ll only tell me a lot of gipsyish lies about the pair of you.’

‘But with your long experience I am sure you can tell which are lies and which are not.’

‘Ha! Only seventeen, eh? She’ll be easier than the usual run.’

He rang a bell for the Petty Officer in the adjoining office.

‘Tomkins, ask the Vine Street Superintendent where he has put Mr. Scheeper’s niece and bring her here!’

‘And if she won’t come, sir?’

‘For Christ’s sake, boy, then get a constable and make her come!’

Bernardo was dismissed to a waiting room where the morning paper and the usual cup of tea were provided. When all was quiet he opened the door and looked out. A naval rating in uniform was on guard outside. The window was barred. There was nothing for it but to wait in patience.

After three-quarters of an hour the faithful Tomkins escorted him back to his chief’s office. Nadya was curled up in an arm-chair by the fire. The Admiral was in his usual position in front of it, looking down on her with indignant, paternal eyes. She smiled at Bernardo tenderly, her eyes brimming with tears. It occurred to him that he had never once seen her cry for joy or for sorrow, whatever she might do in private. She had undoubtedly been editing the truth with some emotion. He had been right ten times over to draw her in to defend himself.

‘I’m glad there is at last something to be said for you,
Brown,’ the Admiral growled. ‘The poor child! Good God!’

‘Yes, sir,’ Bernardo answered non-committally.

‘If these Belgians make any fuss, I think you have both a perfect defence to the charge. Not that it matters to you personally—well, we won’t disillusion the child. Now, I have a Captain Walinski in my department. Late of the Imperial Russian Navy. I know he and his wife will be delighted to look after Miss Andreyev till her case is settled. I’ll get him over here.’

He jiggled the telephone without any result.

‘Damn that switchboard! If I hadn’t got feet under me, we could be at war for a week and I wouldn’t know it. Come on, Miss Andreyev!’

‘And David? Mr. Mitrani?’ Nadya asked pathetically.

‘That’s in the hands of the police, my dear. A sad business. Nothing to do with Scheeper. A sad business. But there you are. These things happen.’

‘Can’t he come too? I’m frightened all alone.’

‘Well, no reason why not. Tomkins!’

The confidential clerk jumped to it as to an imaginary bosun’s pipe.

‘Tomkins, tell ’em I’ll want the car in five minutes to take this fellow home to Vine Street. You’ve no need to come back. I’ll send him down to you under guard when I’ve finished with him. Close up at your end!’

The Admiral took them out through the other door of his room into a far grander passage. He carefully locked the door behind him, put the key in his waistcoat pocket and led them down the corridor and round a corner with Nadya timorously at his side.

‘Did you drop something, my dear?’ he asked.

Nadya glanced at her bag and the floor.

‘No, I don’t think so. I expect it was the heel of my shoe. It’s so worn.’

Bernardo’s thoughts were wandering in a linked day-dream from the majesty of an Admiralty corridor to a chill Spanish
courtyard. He could not remember whether the condemned man stood with his back to the garotting post or sat. At any rate this Walinski would look after Nadya. She had always said that Russians were kind.

Nadya felt for his hand as if to comfort him. The little darling seemed to know instinctively what he was thinking. He pressed the hand and found the key of the Admiral’s office transferred to his own. That was the last straw. What the hell was he supposed to do with it? He’d have to drop it unseen if there were any trouble. But of course! That slight noise which the Admiral had heard made sense. She had covered them both.

Captain Walinski was not in his office. The Admiral left a message for him and returned to his own. Bernardo waited, deep-frozen with apprehension, while he searched his waistcoat pocket.

‘Where the bloody hell did I put that key? I beg your pardon, Miss Andreyev.’

He searched all pockets without success.

‘But it’s automatic, damn it! Same every day. When I leave the office I lock it and I put the blasted ... Oh, that must be what we heard drop!’

He trotted down the corridor and round the corner.

‘No time! No good!’ Bernardo hissed as Nadya prepared to bolt. ‘He’ll see at once it isn’t there.’

They had just time to unlock the door and stand back looking lost and lonely. The Admiral reappeared with a giant, bearded Russian who suggested George V and Nicholas II piled one on top of the other.

‘Some ass must have picked it up,’ he exclaimed and introduced Walinski to Nadya.

‘Are you sure you locked the door, sir?’ Bernardo asked. ‘I don’t remember you doing so.’

The Admiral roared that of course he did, violently turned the door handle and nearly pitched head first into his room. Walinski followed him in and was at once overwhelmed by
an embarrassed, incoherent explanation of keys and waistcoats and down the passage. Both had their backs to the door. Bernardo quietly shut and locked it.

They ran, stopping at the head of a fine, curving staircase. One floor down they could see a hall, a door to the outside and a glass box with a porter in it.

‘We have to walk this whatever happens,’ Bernardo said. ‘Innocence—dignity—only chance.’

Before they reached the bottom he could hear the distant thunder as the Royal and Imperial Navies attacked the door. He hoped to heaven that the Admiralty switchboard was living up to its reputation.

‘Pass, sir?’

‘We were told to look for Tomkins who has the car ready.’

‘Other side of the courtyard, sir.’

As they passed through the door and hesitated a taxi drew up. Bernardo waited in agony till it was paid off, then threw Nadya and himself into it. The racket upstairs had stopped, showing that the prisoners had broken out or been released. He told the driver loudly to go to the House of Lords. The porter who was walking towards them returned to his box.

‘We can’t have more than a minute,’ he said as the taxi moved off. ‘Got any English money?’

‘Yes, I changed some.’

‘We must get out before the Lords.’

‘Why did you choose it?’

‘The only swell place I could think of. And who but a lord would wear this coat?’

At the bottom of Whitehall he spotted the Westminster Underground Station, paid off the taxi and vanished into it. There was no time at all for thought. He was obsessed by an impulse to get clear of London. That ancient shooting jacket of Pozharski’s made him as distinctive as if he were walking around waving a flag, and no coat at all would be nearly as bad. He grabbed tickets to Charing Cross, the nearest railway station, and three minutes later was back in the open
air on the Embankment. But he had forgotten that the mainline terminus was a fairish walk from the underground station and that both were far too close to Whitehall. If the Admiralty porter had taken the number of the taxi it could have been traced already. He dragged Nadya back into the Underground and glanced at the map in the booking hall.

‘Two to Marylebone.’

They were away again and perhaps safe, for at Charing Cross Underground one had a choice of all four points of the compass. The ticket clerk could not fail to remember so odd a pair and would remember their destination if the police got on to him soon enough. But would they? Say that they spotted at once the dash from Westminster to Charing Cross. Then the search would be concentrated on the Strand, the Embankment, the mainline terminus and adjoining streets. It might be an hour or more before it occurred to somebody that the fugitives had bounced straight back into the Underground.

Marylebone. A station of modest size and far too empty. As they ran up the steps into the open, Bernardo saw a constable coming out of the Gents Lavatory and another wandering loose. Both had the professional far-away look in their eyes calculated to assure the innocent public that it was not being watched and the criminal that he was. Both came to life and stared at them. He told himself that naturally they would stare; it didn’t mean that Marylebone Station had been alerted yet.

A train for Rugby was leaving in a minute. He dashed into the booking office and bought tickets for Brackley, the first stop. They might not have enough money for the fare to Rugby and anyway it did not matter where they went. They drew still more attention to themselves by running for the train and jumping into the last carriage as it pulled out.

Walking up the train they found a compartment to themselves and drew breath.

‘We’ve done it, David! We’re safe!’

‘Safe? With the Admiral roaring his head off? What did you tell him?’

‘It was wonderful. God put the words straight into my mouth.’

‘Good for him! It’s this damned coat which will sink us. You’re all right. There are lots of little, fat girls about.’

‘I am not fat or little, David.’

‘Well, you know what I mean. I’ve made a mess of it. They’ll be telephoning every damned station you can get to quickly from Charing Cross. Those cops at Marylebone will get a medal for putting them on to us and there’ll be more of them waiting at Brackley.’

‘I can go back to Captain Walinski if you like.’

Bernardo recovered calm and said it was what she ought to do.

‘You’ve got the old boy in your pocket and he told you himself that there was nothing against you. You have only to swear I lifted the key off him and you didn’t know till it was too late. Nadya, little darling, take that line and you can’t go wrong!’

‘When you say “little darling” do you mean
dragutsica
?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘The sort of little you used to call Despina?’

‘Damn Despina! Will you listen? It’s all in character. Just look at my history of violence; Bobo—Nepamuk—that pinstriped sod. And the bleeding barge, which is bound to come out. And now I’ve locked the head of the British Security Service in his office. Oh, my God!’

‘Yes, David. Do you think that was what he was?’

‘Well, it would be just like them to have their dirty work done by Rule Britannia in this blasted country.’

‘It’s a beautiful country. Look at that!’

The wide valley spread out like a river of green as it flowed down into the Vale of Aylesbury. In Bernardo’s mood of resentment he saw it as a self-satisfied land with its cattle and fat sheep placed exactly where a child with a toy farm
would place them, all segmented by pretty hedges rising in a blaze of white hawthorn to the orderly stands of beeches on the skyline. And where was the water rushing down through the woods and narrow meadows of Vizcaya or silvering the Romanian plain? Water in this country ran tidily underground.

‘It’s all so loved,’ Nadya said.

But of course it was. Everyone loved the country in which his eyes were born. Even the Russian refugees ached for their birches and rolling lowlands. He sulkily said something of the sort.

‘But this
looks
as if it were loved. Like an animal.’

She had gone deep there. Tame it was, but tame as some glossy, splendid animal conscious of love and answering it. She went on to say that her first impression of his country was its peacefulness.

‘Peaceful? But there’s a chap wandering round every half acre all day. Nobody can feel alone.’

‘Not that kind of peace, David. That’s for explorers and monks and sometimes you. This is peace for everyone. Did you notice the gardens?’

Yes, he had noticed the gardens, and the English half of him had inevitably longed for one of its own. But safety was what he wanted first, and there was none.

They had crossed the Vale of Aylesbury when the brakes went on and the train pulled up in a cutting. The sudden silence was absolute except for the faint voices of travellers in the next-door compartments. Dense scrub covered the thirty-foot slope. The new shoots and new leaves made it appear thicker and taller than Mediterranean maquis. Turned soil left alone for sixty or more years had recreated a primeval England.

‘Why don’t we jump out and run for it?’ Nadya suggested.

She gave him no time to protest again that she herself was in no danger if she played her cards right. She had the door half open already turning to him with a smile of invitation
as if to get out and pick cowslips. Another of those unaccountable feline pounces from a nothing to a possible something. At any rate the result could not be worse than meeting police on Brackley station or, if they were not there yet, exhibiting themselves in a small market town and sticking in the memory of every passer-by.

She had already slid into cover when he hit the ground. They heard the guard shout at them, but they had vanished. The train slowly clanked into life again and left silence and the scent of hawthorn behind. Nadya actually did pick cowslips—one for him and one for herself.

On the level ground above the cutting was open grassland with no adequate cover. Speed in getting away was more important than any half-hearted attempt at concealment, so they stepped out boldly, crossed a road and followed a green track up to high ground until they came to a junction of footpaths in a desolate space between hedges.

Till then Bernardo had only known that he was half an hour by train from Brackley, which was far from helpful. From the high ground he could see what sort of country lay below and make a vague mental map of it. To the south-east was the Vale of Aylesbury; to the north miles and miles of the rolling Midlands, so full of tall, hedgerow elms that Nadya thought she looked down on forest. He had seen enough of England to know that there was none, but all the same this toy landscape could be safer than Hungary or Romania for anyone who needed to avoid the public. While he had been dreaming of wild distances, Nadya had instinctively recognised the privacies of an utterly foreign land though she had only a short railway journey to go on.

But even assuming they could disappear into those privacies, where then? His mind ran as usual to a port for himself, provided some sort of refuge could be found for Nadya. The longer she stayed with him, the more she was going to be tarred with the same brush. The Admiral might be no longer well-disposed, furiously suspicious of that sob
story and fuming because he had let one suspect and one established criminal slip through his fingers in the most humiliating way when the police had only passed them over to him as a favour. Money was going to be their worst problem. Apart from a few foreign notes which could not be changed in a country bank without attracting curiosity they had only fifteen shillings and some coppers.