The Age of Exodus Read online

  “It’s very kind of you to bring me home,” she said. “What happened to the police?”

  They turned on the radio then, and Forrester let out a long sigh of relief when the BBC news reported that although there had been an assassination attempt on the Foreign Secretary he had escaped unscathed.

  “I don’t understand,” said Angela Shearer. “Who would want to kill Ernie Bevin?”

  “I don’t know,” said Forrester. “The Russians?”

  “The Russians?” said Angela, but before Forrester could elaborate there was the sound of a key in the lock and a third person entered the flat.

  He was a short, strongly built man with thick black hair combed back from his forehead and held in place with generous quantities of hair cream. He had full, sensuous lips and a delicate chin and his eyes blazed with alarming energy. He looked furiously at Forrester and said, “Who the hell are you?” in an accent so harshly Teutonic it reminded Forrester of a hacksaw.

  “The police sent him to look after me,” said Angela. “Charles has been murdered.”

  “Murdered?” said the man. “What for?”

  “We don’t know, Mr. Koestler,” said Forrester, standing up. “It happened at the British Museum.” He held out his hand. “My name is Duncan Forrester. Shortly before he was killed Charles came to me for advice and the police asked me to bring Angela home from the murder scene.”

  “How do you know who I am?” said Koestler suspiciously.

  “I have a copy of Darkness at Noon,” said Forrester, “and in any other circumstances it would be a great pleasure to meet you.”

  “Of course,” said Koestler. He walked over to the drinks cabinet and poured himself a large whiskey. Only then did he come back to the couch, sit down beside Angela and take her hand.

  “Well,” he said, pronouncing the word as if it began with a V, “this is a terrible thing at this moment, my dear, but you will get over it.”

  “I will never get over it,” said Angela, and the line was so beautifully delivered Forrester might almost have believed it had been rehearsed. “Charles was my life.” Koestler took a deep drink of the whiskey.

  “How can you say that?” he asked brutally. “You hardly saw the fellow during the war, and you told me yourself he was, how did you put it, frightfully dull.”

  “I never said anything of the kind,” said Angela. “I loved him to distraction.”

  “You loved me to distraction too,” said Koestler. “Or so you said.”

  “I did until I discovered how many other women you were making love to,” said Angela. “Then I realised you were a bastard.”

  “And then you loved me even more,” said Koestler, “because all women like bastards.”

  Forrester, by now acutely embarrassed, jumped in.

  “Miss Shearer, now you’ve got someone with you, perhaps this is a good time for me to go.”

  Abruptly, she took his hand.

  “No, please stay,” she said. “Arthur is just going.” Koestler remained firmly on the couch.

  “No, I am not going,” he said, stubbornly. “You had promised to see me today and I will not let you break your promise.”

  “Arthur,” said the actress, “can’t you see this is no time for that sort of thing? My husband has just been murdered.”

  “Then I will comfort you,” said Koestler, “and this man will go away.”

  “I don’t want him to go away. I want him to stay and look after me. You don’t care about anybody except yourself.”

  “Apart from the human race,” said Koestler. “I care about the future of the human race and all you care about is if your reviews are good.”

  “At least they are good,” said Angela. “What was it that George said about your play? ‘Koestler’s latest shows the difference between having a good idea and creating good drama.’”

  “Orwell is a fool. I told him to his face it was a bloody awful review,” said Koestler resentfully.

  “And he said that was because it was a bloody awful play,” replied Angela swiftly – at which Koestler rose angrily to his feet. Angela took refuge by moving uncomfortably close to Forrester, who said the first thing that came into his head to try to calm the situation down.

  “I saw the play,” he said quickly, “and liked it very much.” The first part was true. He had seen Twilight Bar, which involved aliens and long discussions about world peace, but he had found it wordy and unconvincing. “And I’ve been an admirer of yours since I first read Darkness.”

  “What about Arrival and Departure?” demanded Koestler, not yet ready to be mollified. “Did you read that, if you like my work so much?”

  “I did,” said Forrester. “I was hoping all along that the hero would join the SOE, and I was very pleased when he did. That was my outfit, you see.” Even as he said those words he was despising himself – why was he trying to placate this monstrously egotistical man instead of comforting a woman who had just lost her husband? Well, partly because Koestler was one of Europe’s foremost intellectuals, and partly because he had lived one of the most extraordinary lives Forrester had ever heard of.

  Born in Budapest, he went to university in Vienna, and then emigrated to Palestine to work on a kibbutz. Thrown out when it became clear he had no interest in manual labour, after months of destitution, he began his climb to fame by getting a job as a Middle East correspondent for a group of Berlin-based newspapers. He flew with the airship Graf Zeppelin on its epoch-making flight to the North Pole, disappeared into Central Asia to find out how communism was affecting the Muslims of the steppes, joined the Communist Party, became a prominent anti-Fascist, married a fellow party member and in 1936 went to report on the civil war in Spain. Where he was captured by the fascists and sentenced to be shot by a firing squad.

  Incredibly, just before he was offered his last cigarette, Franco agreed to exchange him for the wife of a famous fascist fighter pilot. Koestler returned to France, left the Communist Party (disillusioned by what he had seen in Spain) and began an affair with a British sculptor called Daphne Hardy. Here he began his first novel, A Matter of Circumstances, which Daphne typed in their tiny Paris apartment.

  Then came the outbreak of war, and Koestler was arrested by the French government and sent to an internment camp. Again, people lobbied for him to be freed, but by this time the Germans had invaded and as soon as he was released he was on the run. He managed to reach Marseille, joined the French Foreign Legion and was sent to North Africa. Here he deserted, entered the kind of limbo depicted in Casablanca, and finally reached Lisbon – where he heard that the ship from Bordeaux on which Daphne Hardy was travelling with the manuscript of A Matter of Circumstances had been sunk. Despairing, he bought a packet of suicide pills from a fellow exile and swallowed them all.

  But when against all odds the pills failed to work he found a way out of Portugal into Britain – where he was imprisoned once more, this time as an illegal alien.

  Only to be freed after it turned out Daphne Hardy had survived the sinking of her ship, saved the manuscript of A Matter of Circumstances and persuaded Jonathan Cape to publish it under a new title she had come up with, Darkness at Noon.

  He was then hired by the Ministry of Information to produce scripts for propaganda films, while in his spare time writing the essays which first alerted the world to the true nature of Nazi atrocities.

  In December 1944 he travelled to Palestine as a reporter for The Times and tried to persuade Menachem Begin, head of the Irgun terrorist organisation, to stop killing British soldiers.

  “You SOE people did good work during the war,” said Koestler. “I admired your courage. Unfortunately some of your methods are now being used against you.”

  “You mean in Palestine?” said Forrester.

  “And possibly here in Britain,” said Koestler. “You heard what happened today to Mr. Bevin?”

  “Yes,” said Forrester.

  “They say a young man on a motorbike drove out in front of his car
and began shooting,” said Koestler. “Bevin was very lucky not to be killed.”

  “Could it have been the same people who killed poor Charles?” said Angela. “After all, he worked for Mr. Bevin.”

  “The people who tried to kill Ernest Bevin are almost certainly Jews like me,” said Koestler, “and they did it because of Bevin’s policies on Palestine. I don’t approve of their actions, but I can understand them. Your husband’s murder sounds more like some kind of personal revenge.”

  “Revenge for what?” said Angela.

  “I can’t say,” said Koestler dismissively. “What about your other lovers? Had your husband horsewhipped any of them? It’s the sort of thing an English gentleman might do, isn’t it? An old-fashioned English gentleman.”

  “You are a pig,” said Angela furiously. “How can you even say such a thing?”

  “Because I know your nature,” said Koestler. “What about Jack Casement? He’s perfectly capable of killing anyone who gets in his way.” Forrester blinked: Casement was one of Britain’s most successful industrialists, an aviation hero and friend of Winston Churchill.

  “Jack would never hurt a fly,” said Angela firmly. “And he had no reason to kill Charles. If anything, Charles had every motivation to try and kill Jack. Not that he would. Charles wouldn’t have hurt a fly either.” And with that she began to cry again. Koestler met Forrester’s eye, making it clear he was completely unmoved by his mistress’s tears. Then he got up, took Forrester by the arm and led him over to the drinks cabinet, where he poured himself another whiskey.

  “Tell me more about how her husband met his death.”

  Forrester hesitated, his dislike of the man’s behaviour fighting with the fact that his energy made him almost impossible to resist. Briefly, he explained exactly what had happened to Charles Templar. Koestler nodded, as though the details confirmed what he had already assumed.

  “Have you any explanation for how he died? I am struck by the fact that even the police, you say, acknowledge that it would have taken a superhuman force to fling the poor fellow on top of that Assyrian idol. Do you think this is some sort of supernatural event?”

  “It’s very hard to imagine a Sumerian demon taking photographs of cuneiform tablets and sending them through the post to his intended victim.”

  “Indeed, ridiculous,” said Koestler, “but what if this was the work of someone possessed by a Sumerian demon?”

  Forrester pursed his lips. He didn’t believe in possession, but Koestler had given him an idea. Even as it formulated itself in his mind, the doorbell rang and when he opened it, there, finally, was the promised policewoman. It was with some relief that he led her over to the couch, offered Angela any assistance she might need and took his leave.

  He was now very keen to get to a certain Charing Cross Road bookshop as soon as possible.

  6

  THE GREAT BEAST

  As Forrester left Angela Shearer’s apartment, twenty feet along the carpeted hallway the lift doors opened and Sir Jack Casement stepped out, smiling to himself. As he saw Forrester closing the apartment door, his smile vanished.

  Forrester had been hearing stories about Jack Casement since he was a boy. How he had made his name as a fighter ace during the first war, barnstormed around Britain with a flying circus in the 1920s, survived numerous crashes, been a test pilot for De Havilland, gone into manufacturing, and saved the aviation industry during the Depression. How he had kept engineers and draughtsmen off the dole at his own expense when the government refused to buy the planes he knew would all too soon be needed for Britain’s defence. How after 1940 he and Ernest Bevin had worked hand in hand to draft and train the labour force that Britain’s factories needed for total war.

  And how his famously terrifying temper had bent investors, boards of directors, and the government bureaucrats to his will for thirty years.

  Now, as Casement strode towards him down the corridor, Forrester could understand why. The man was impeccably dressed, his suit perfectly tailored to show off his broad shoulders, and though he was now in his early fifties he carried himself like a prize-fighter.

  “Name?” he snapped as he neared Forrester, and as Forrester hesitated he thrust his face at him. “Come on, who the hell are you?”

  Forrester looked him in the eye and told him succinctly who he was and why he was there. He could almost see the calculations going on behind Casement’s grey eyes as the man took in the information, filed it away for later verification, and decided that Forrester was not a rival lover. Which meant, of course, he had to present his own presence here in the most favourable light.

  “I came as soon as I could,” he said briefly. “The poor kid must be in a hell of a state.”

  “She was,” said Forrester. “I think the first shock has passed now, and there’s a policewoman with her. How did you find out what happened?”

  Casement smiled. “There are plenty of people who owe me favours,” he said and reached for the door. Forrester knew he had to act.

  “I wouldn’t go in there now—” he began.

  Casement cut him off angrily.

  “Why on earth not? She needs me.”

  “Koestler is there too.”

  “What?”

  “He arrived about half an hour ago.”

  “Arthur Koestler?”

  “Yes.”

  “That damned communist?”

  “I think he left the party some time ago,” said Forrester firmly.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “If you read his books it’s perfectly clear. Darkness at Noon, The Yogi and the Commissar—”

  “I don’t give a shit about whether he’s still a communist, but if he’s hanging round Angela I’m going to tear his bloody head off.” And again he tried, in vain, to get at the door.

  “Well, you’ll have to do it another time, Sir Jack. Her husband’s just been killed and I’m not going to let you throw a tantrum in front of her, much less start a fight with another man.”

  This time when Casement’s eyes met Forrester’s, they glinted with red rage, and Forrester recognised, as he had many times behind enemy lines, the face of someone who would gladly kill him. He knew too that he had the advantage over Casement, because he had his anger under control.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” he said. “We’re going to walk back to the lift together, go down to the ground floor, turn right out of the front door and walk one hundred yards down the road to The Prince of Bohemia, where I am going to buy you a large whiskey, and when you have finished it we will discuss the best thing for you to do next. Because I’m telling you now that having a fight with me outside Angela Shearer’s flat or having a fight with Arthur Koestler inside her flat will not do any of us any good. What do you say?”

  There was a pause as Casement regained control of himself.

  “I haven’t been in The Prince of Bohemia for years,” he said at last.

  As they walked down the hallway towards the lift Forrester felt the tension draining out of the man and as the metal doors clanged to behind them the industrialist let out a long breath.

  “There’s no fool like an old fool, is there?” he asked.

  “She’s a very beautiful woman,” said Forrester, “and you’re hardly an old man.”

  “Old enough to know better,” said Casement. “And old enough to know I’m not the only one.”

  “Do you think her husband knew?” said Forrester. “About her carrying on?”

  “What a wonderful old-fashioned phrase,” said Casement. “Carrying on. Do I take that as an implied rebuke?”

  “Take it as you will,” said Forrester. “I’ve always felt for chaps who came back from fighting overseas only to find other men had been with their wives.”

  There was a sudden silence in the tiny confines of the lift cage and Forrester felt a brief regret that he had not pressed the button to descend as soon as they had entered.

  “Fair point,” said Casement at last,
“though in this case I think the fact that she’s an actress has to be taken into consideration.”

  “In that actresses are by definition loose women?” said Forrester lightly.

  “No, in that she lives in a different moral universe from ordinary mortals.”

  “Really?” said Forrester.

  “And besides, the marriage had been over for years, except in name.”

  “She told you that, did she?”

  “Yes, she did as a matter of fact,” said Casement. “Not that it’s any business of yours.”

  “Fair enough,” said Forrester, “although it doesn’t answer my question as to whether her husband knew.”

  “It doesn’t, does it?” said Casement, and turned around awkwardly to press the button that sent the lift gliding smoothly down to the ground floor.

  Here, to his relief and probably to Casement’s, Forrester’s suggestion that they have a drink together while the industrialist calmed down became redundant. As the lift reached the ground floor they saw through the glass of the main doors half a dozen men in raincoats, several of them carrying cameras, peering at the names on the doorbells.

  “All right,” said Casement decisively. “You can do me a favour, Forrester. I’ve no desire to be seen by the gentlemen of the press, and I’d appreciate it if you could stall them while I nip out the back entrance.”

  And without waiting for Forrester’s agreement he disappeared into the shadows of the hallway. Forrester waited for a moment, slipped through the front door, shut it firmly behind him before any of the journalists could push past into the building, and allowed himself to be swamped by demands to reveal which apartment belonged to Angela Shearer. He kept them busy for a few moments pretending not to know who Angela Shearer was, and finally suggested she probably lived in the mansion block across the road, before hurrying down the steps – realising, for the first time, the priceless value of anonymity.

  * * *

  Forrester then made his way east, by bus and Tube, finally emerging into the daylight at Leicester Square Station on Charing Cross Road. The road was home to some of the ugliest structures in London, but the second-hand bookshops below those buildings were some of Forrester’s favourite places in London. Even without going inside – there were always plenty of browsers going through the boxes on tables set out on the pavement in search of a neglected treasure – one could spend a pleasant half hour distracted from the cares and pressures of the city. The heart of the Charing Cross Road book business, however, was not on Charing Cross itself, but a narrow paved alley called Cecil Court which ran eastwards to St. Martin’s Lane and had originally been created by Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster, Robert Cecil.