The Age of Exodus Read online

  “They say there’s going to be fog,” said Forrester, stopping beside him on his way out of the Grand Salon. Priestley started slightly, and then regained his normal sangfroid.

  “Not uncommon at this time of year,” he said, still concentrating on the little model, “but the Cunards tend to push on through regardless.” Apparently satisfied with the progress of the ship, he turned away. “I’ll leave you to enjoy the show.”

  But Forrester fell into step beside him.

  “The chap I was drinking with in the bar before I joined you was someone I worked with in Palestine, and I wondered if you’d had dealings with him. Aubrey Eban.”

  There was a slight pause before Priestley answered.

  “Yes, the chap from the Jewish Agency. Clever fellow. But then, they all are, aren’t they?”

  “All who?”

  “The Zionists. And a very tricky lot to deal with, I can tell you.”

  “I’m sure you could say the same thing about the British.”

  Priestley smiled. “I’m sure you could. Talking of tricky, by the way, what did you make of poor Charles Templar’s death? You must feel badly after he came to you for help.”

  “I do indeed,” said Forrester. “But I don’t accept for a moment that there was anything supernatural about it.”

  “Neither do I,” said Priestley promptly. “I believe it was Jack Casement. There’s a dangerous fellow if ever there was one. You know he was making love to Templar’s wife, don’t you?”

  “Which would surely be a reason for Templar to kill him, not the other way round,” said Forrester.

  “Logically, yes,” said Priestley. “But is murder ever logical?”

  “Sometimes,” said Richard Thornham, emerging from the library. “In fact, nearly always, in the mind of the murderer. The problem is that murderers’ minds are different from ours.”

  The three of them were now walking together, the ship rolling slightly under their feet as they emerged onto the outer deck. Gradually the air seemed to solidify around them, and Forrester realised the fog was rolling in.

  “Different from ours?” said Forrester. “I met plenty of murderers during the war who were just as sane as you and me.”

  “I’d take that as a compliment,” said Thornham, “if I knew exactly how sane you are.”

  Forrester laughed. “Touché,” he said.

  “By the way,” said Thornham, “I must congratulate you on that very pretty girl who asked you to take her to the pictures. She seemed rather smitten.”

  “She’s the sister of someone I knew in the war.”

  “Well, in that case I’d say you were a very lucky fellow,” said Thornham. “And speaking of women, had you heard it needed a hundred and twenty female French polishers to restore the woodwork on this fine ship after the GIs had finished carving their initials into it?”

  “I had not,” said Forrester, “but I am duly impressed.”

  “And do you know how many different types of veneer there are on board?” said Priestley.

  “So far I’ve been lucky enough to avoid that kind of conversation,” said Forrester.

  “Well your luck has run out,” said Thornham, “because Priestley has them off by heart.”

  “Ash,” said Priestley. “Beech, cherry burr…”

  “Cedar, for the cigar room…” put in Thornham.

  “Tiger oak,” added Priestley.

  “Pear wood,” said Thornham. “Ceylonese satinwood…”

  “Sycamore,” got in Priestley.

  “And lemonwood,” Thornham concluded triumphantly.

  “Well,” said Forrester, determined not to be distracted by the double act, “I’m eternally in your debt – but I wonder if either of you know an Australian diplomat called William Burke, commonly known as Billy. He’s with us too, and seems to be an old enemy of Sir Jack Casement as a result of some business deal that went wrong.”

  “Then he’s in good company,” said Thornham. “There are plenty of people who’d like nothing better, after doing business with him, than to push Sir Jack Casement off the back of the boat.”

  “I was telling Forrester,” said Priestley, “that Casement is my number one suspect for doing in poor old Charles Templar.”

  “Why, because he wants to marry his wife?” said Thornham.

  “Exactly,” said Priestley.

  “Well, she is a bit of a stunner,” said Thornham. “But you’d have thought Casement could have arranged a separation between the two without murdering the husband in the depths of the British Museum. Surely even the trickiest divorce court proceedings would have been simpler?”

  “Unless all that supernatural malarkey was designed to throw us off the track,” said Priestley.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” said Thornham cheerfully. “My money’s on the Sumerian demon.”

  At which point the ship’s horns began to hoot mournfully an octave below middle A and suddenly the fog was impenetrable.

  * * *

  Near the rail, the vapour glowed from within where it clustered around the deck lights, like clumps of spiritualist ectoplasm in which other passengers appeared and disappeared as if they themselves were ghosts. Forrester turned to the two veneer experts and found they had vanished. Then James Mason materialised through the fog, and it was a second or two before Forrester was close enough to see it was only Toby Lanchester.

  “During the war she ran down one of her own escorts in a fog like this,” Lanchester was saying to the man beside him. “She cut the escort in two, but had to steam on because of U-boats, leaving hundreds of poor chaps in the water to die.”

  “I heard that Churchill was aboard,” said the other man, “under the name of Colonel Warden.”

  “I trust your charge is safely tucked away in his suite?” said Forrester.

  “I wish he was,” said Lanchester, “but he’s playing gin rummy with the Aga Khan.” And then the fog swallowed him up.

  “I heard that twelve thousand GI brides went to America on the Queen Mary last year,” said a woman’s voice. “Isn’t that romantic?” But before Forrester could identify the speaker she had vanished. Then Forrester saw Billy Burke in conversation with – he was almost certain – Richard Thornham. He moved towards them – as Casement passed by, inches away but apparently oblivious to his presence. Then the military man from Forrester’s table was beside him.

  “She nearly rolled completely over one night in forty-three,” the colonel was saying. “Sixteen thousand GIs aboard. They were in a gale seven hundred miles from Scotland when a rogue wave hit them. One moment the top deck was at the normal height and then, whoosh, she was rolling right into the ocean. They say if she’d gone another three degrees over she’d never have righted herself.”

  “Duncan?” said another, lighter voice: Gillian. Damn! What was she doing out here? He’d thought she was safely inside with some of the other girls from the UN.

  “Over here,” called Forrester, peering into the mist.

  “Duncan!” said the voice again, with more urgency, but further away.

  “Gillian!” said Forrester. “I’m right here.”

  “Where are you?” came her voice from the far side of the deck now, but it might have been from the far side of the world. She sounded scared. His stomach knotted, Forrester strode towards where the sound appeared to be coming from.

  “Dr. Forrester!” said a woman’s voice, and Forrester saw Theresa Palmer, droplets of moisture gathered in her hair. “You must go to her at once.” And then she too was gone. Without warning his way was barred by a bulkhead and his fingers were wrapping themselves around the cold metal stanchions of a ladder. Unthinking, he began to climb it, his feet slipping on the moisture-laden steps. And then he was on an upper deck, with the lifeboats directly above his head.

  “Duncan!” came a faint voice from ahead, and he began to run, blindly, the foghorn deafening him, the massive funnels rising like prehistoric monuments into the greyness on his left. And then his fe
et were on an oil slick and shooting out from under him and he was face down, sliding helplessly along the smooth, wet wood.

  Straight toward the rail.

  As he reached it a hand came out of the mist, slid out the restraining pin that held the hinged section in place, and swung the gate open. For a split second he was plunging straight down at the churning sea two hundred feet below, and then his right foot caught on a metal upright and he jerked to a halt, hanging upside down over the water.

  For a moment he was simply too stunned by the speed of events to take action, and then a boot slammed into his ankle. It was a big boot, an army boot, and he cried out in pain, and his assailant kicked again, so hard he seemed to feel the bones crack, and he knew that any second now he would be dislodged, and he’d be swallowed forever in the darkness of the Atlantic.

  With every ounce of his will he ignored the pain and jack-knifed himself upwards, grasping the lowest of the rail’s wires with his left hand. Freeing his agonised foot from the stanchion and hanging there, he looked up at the monstrously misshapen head looming above him in the fog as his assailant moved far enough back to kick Forrester’s fingers agonisingly into the wire.

  For a moment Forrester felt an atavistic fear, before his rational mind forced him to recognise that his attacker had simply pulled a burlap sack over his head and was looking at him through a slit in the material. Fighting down the pain, Forrester brought his right hand up to grasp the stanchion on the far side of the gap before his left lost its grip. Then he hauled himself higher and as his head came up the man’s knee slammed into his face, sending him swinging away from the rail again, his vision blurring, blood pouring from his nose, with a single hand keeping him from falling away into the waves.

  It was then that the knife came out and Forrester cried out uselessly as it sliced down towards his fingers. He tried to swing himself back towards the rail and found the momentum of the ship made it impossible. This was it, then. The blade would sever every tendon and he would fall and never know who had done it to him.

  And then, in mid-descent, the knife stopped, and Forrester was looking at Gillian, white-faced, as she swung the deckchair at the sack-hidden head and the wood splintered against it and the big boots were thudding away down the deck and the man was gone. She reached out her hand to pull him back in.

  “Oh, God,” said Gillian Lytton. “I thought I was going to lose you.”

  * * *

  It had been neatly done, Forrester had to admit, and beautifully simple. Olive oil, taken from one of the dining rooms and poured onto the deck by whomever he had been lured into following, at the exact place a fall would bring him closest to a hinged section of the rail. If it had all gone according to plan, if Gillian had not seen and followed him, he would have vanished into the Atlantic and never been seen again.

  “Whoever did it,” said Forrester, staunching the blood flowing from his nose. “They’re good.”

  “Shut up,” said Gillian, all her fear turning, without warning, to fury, “it’s not a bloody game. He was going to kill you.” And suddenly she was in his arms, sobbing against his chest as the fog swirled around them. As he held her, Forrester suddenly remembered the terrified little man in Watkins Books, talking about Aleister Crowley’s mythical creature, Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith of the big boots and the misshapen head.

  Had he been aboard the Queen Mary with them all along, waiting for his chance?

  “You look as if you’ve been through a meat-grinder,” said Gillian. “Let’s get you to the doctor.” But at that moment the ship’s alarm bells began to ring, the rhythm of the engines changed dramatically, and over the loudspeakers came the announcement:

  “Would all passengers please return to their cabins, and all crew report to their mustering stations. Please be assured there is no danger to the ship, but we have a man overboard.”

  * * *

  The Queen Mary turned then, and for several hours criss-crossed the sea along the path it had been taking, but no one was found. During the rest of the night stewards searched the public rooms and visited each cabin, checking the passengers off on a long list. It was only at breakfast the following morning that word went round that the lost man had been identified.

  It was Billy Burke, of the Australian diplomatic mission to the United Nations. He would never again, thought Forrester, see his beloved Blue Mountains, or watch his model aeroplanes ride the thermals to the words of “The Man from Snowy River”.

  11

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  Two days later the Queen Mary approached The Narrows emitting a thin sliver of steam from her funnels. She had picked the pilot up at Sandy Hook, together with a detective from the New York City Police. Even while the search for Burke had been going on Forrester had briefed the Foreign Office security man on the attempt to kill him, and Lanchester had listened intently.

  “But you couldn’t identify him?”

  “He had a sack over his head, but I’d recognise those damn boots if I saw them again. And the knife too.”

  “I’m quite certain the sack, the knife and the boots went overboard within minutes of him failing to kill you,” said Lanchester.

  “Or perhaps of him succeeding in killing Billy Burke,” said Forrester.

  “If it was the same man.”

  “You know there was bad blood between Burke and Jack Casement, don’t you?” said Forrester.

  Lanchester shook his head decisively. “I’m quite certain Jack Casement has nothing to do with this,” he said. “He’s got bigger fish to fry than some tuppence-ha’penny Australian.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Jack Casement is now Britain’s biggest aircraft manufacturer. Without the planes he makes, our trade balance would be about twenty per cent worse than it is, and he’s come here to make deals to sell more. We’re not going to let anything get in the way of that.”

  “Unless he’s a murderer.”

  “I’m telling you, he’s not a murderer. He had no reason to attack you, and Mr. William Burke probably drank too much beer, as Australians tend to do, and fell off the back of the boat. No, what happened to you has to do with the fact that you’re here to help protect Ernest Bevin, it’s as simple as that.”

  “I’m not sure it is,” said Forrester.

  “Well, I am,” said Lanchester decisively. “Whoever has it in for Mr. Bevin has spotted you and decided to get rid of you because you found something out, something that could help identify him. And the question is, what?”

  And for the next half an hour he and Forrester compiled a list of pretty much every encounter he had had since he came on board, including the brief glimpses of people in the fog before he had been lured onto the upper deck. Together, they cross-questioned the purser and his staff, but none of them had seen anything useful, or anyone resembling either Smith or Crowley. As they left the purser’s office, Lanchester lowered his voice.

  “Listen, Forrester, I’d like you to keep quiet about both this attack on you and the animosity between Jack Casement and Burke. The captain is sure to have reported Burke’s disappearance to the authorities in New York, which is why the detective is aboard, and if he talks to you I want to make sure he has no reason to think there’s any connection between you and the Foreign Secretary or Billy Burke and Jack Casement.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because whatever they say about confidentiality, if the New York police know about it, the American press will find out too, and there’s enough bad feeling in New York about Mr. Bevin without giving them a lot of sensational guff.”

  “You mean Palestine?”

  “New York’s full of Jews and the newspapers are all on their side,” said Lanchester. “Let’s not give any more grist to their mill with talk of Aleister Crowley and his imaginary bogeymen. Or cramp Jack Casement’s style by having him dogged by a lot of false accusations. The country needs him to do deals for us, Forrester. Don’t get in the way of that.”

  * * *

  Fo
rrester found himself on the back foot with Detective Terence O’Connell the minute he limped into the cabin the detective was using for his interviews. O’Connell reminded Forrester irresistibly of a New York fireplug, but a smart, shrewd and observant fireplug.

  “Trip over something?” he said, looking at Forrester’s swollen nose.

  “Bar stool,” said Forrester.

  O’Connell nodded. “Tough break,” he said. “And how did you hurt your hand?”

  Forrester smiled wryly. “Trying to stop myself from hitting the floor,” he said. “And I promise you, the three whiskies had nothing to do with it.”

  O’Connell did not smile. “Bourbon?” he said, and Forrester cursed himself for making the elementary mistake. Don’t elaborate. Never provide more details than they demand. “The whiskey you were drinking, was it bourbon?”

  “Johnnie Walker,” said Forrester, smoothly enough, but he was certain O’Connell had seen the microsecond of uncertainty in his eyes as he came up with the answer. He thought he was on safer ground as he answered the questions about the archaeology conference and his reason for visiting New York, but he had failed to take account of the fact that when a story hit the papers in London it didn’t stay in London.

  “I heard about that thing at the British Museum,” said O’Connell. “That guy being offed by some kind of demon. That must have had all you archaeologists in a tizzy.”

  Forrester forced himself to smile easily. “It would have done if the newspapers had got it right,” he said. “But it was all nonsense, just journalists getting carried away.”

  “Which you know because…?” said O’Connell, and Forrester realised the detective had lured him neatly into another trap. He decided to play the stuffy academic.

  “Because I am a historian, Detective O’Connell, not Edgar Rice Burroughs. I know about ancient Mesopotamian mythology, but that’s all it is, mythology. I’ve no idea who killed Charles Templar or why, but I can tell you the supernatural had nothing to do with it, because the supernatural does not exist.”

  “Yeah, it’s lucky nobody believes in that stuff anymore,” said O’Connell, “otherwise you’d have people going to church at Easter and claiming to believe in the Resurrection. But I guess you Oxford guys are beyond all that.”