Chapter Fifteen

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DR. GARSTANG walked down the garden path which led from Sally’s front door to the gate, and paused a moment when he reached the pavement. Something about the set of his head and shoulders denoted both weariness and defeat; two men were watching him (though Garstang noticed neither of them) and both thought, in their own particular idiom, the equivalent of: “He looks as though he’s had it.”

It was just as the psychiatrist was about to cross the road (with singularly little attention to the traffic which roared unceasingly along the Maida Vale) that he felt a hand on his arm, and a man’s voice spoke close beside him.

“It’s Dr. Garstang, isn’t it? You probably don’t remember me, but I’ve just been to call on you.”

Garstang shook the other’s hand off impatiently and took a step back, and the two men stood and looked at each other in the light of the street lamp which shone down on them.

“Yes. I remember you. I’m not likely ever to forget you,” said Garstang. “Your name is James---or it was once---and you were a stooge in M.I.5. You were wrong in every supposition you made so far as I was concerned.”

“We all make mistakes sometimes,” said James, and his voice was quite good-tempered. “I’m still a stooge in M.I.5, which means that my mistakes haven’t been essential ones. The one mistake which is never forgiven in our job is to give a chap the benefit of the doubt if doubt there is. Now I realise that it gives you no pleasure to see me---but a job’s a job. Chief Inspector Macdonald has asked me to get in touch with you about this story young Salcombe told you today---the Cologne story.”

Garstang stood very still, with his hands thrust down into his pockets. “Why not ask Salcombe about it, and get your facts at first hand?” he asked. “Presumably you know where he is.”

“Yes, I know where he is, all right,” rejoined James. “That’s why I’m here. I was going in to see him, but it’d be more satisfactory to have a word with you first, if you’ll be good enough to answer a few questions. I can see Salcombe later. My car’s just across the road---can I run you home? Talking on the pavement’s a cold job.”

“And if I don’t care to be driven home in your car?” enquired Garstang.

“That’s up to you, sir. You can go by bus or tube or taxi if you’d rather, but you’ll still find me waiting on the doorstep when you get home. That’s how it is. I’ve no wish to be more tiresome than I’ve got to be, but I’m on duty, and that’s all there is to it.”

“Oh, very well. I’ll come with you,” said Garstang, “but don’t expect me to forget the part you played when last we met.”

He turned with James, and they crossed the road to the waiting car. Like all police cars, it was a beautifully serviced vehicle and James handled it like an expert, so that they slid off smoothly and silently, gliding between buses and taxis as though the traffic opened up to allow their passing. They turned left, off the main road, slid through St. John’s Wood and into the quiet curve of the Outer Circle to York Gate and so across the Marylebone Road and into Wimpole Street.

“Well---you can drive: I’ll say that for you,” said Garstang. “I respect real skill when I meet it.”

“I daresay that’s a backhanded compliment,” said James dryly; “I’ve driven all over Europe in my time and my life’s depended on being able to drive---just a bit better than the chap who was after me.”

Garstang opened the front door with his latchkey, and James followed him into the hall.

“Come upstairs to my flat,” said Garstang. “You’re on duty, I’m not. I’ve had enough of my consulting room today. There are over fifty stairs, but I don’t suppose you mind that.”

He switched the lights on and went ahead up the carpeted stairs: the dignified house was very quiet: James wondered if the caretakers were in, far below in their basement, but there wasn’t a sound to indicate that there was anybody in the house but themselves. They went right up to the top floor, which was enclosed as a self-contained flat, and again Garstang opened a door with a latchkey, and led James across a narrow passage into a sitting room.

It was a comfortable room, though very plain: there were big modern chairs, a deep plain-pile carpet, a great number of books on built-in shelves, and no pictures, photographs, or ornaments. Carpet, upholstery, and curtains were a warm greyish colour, and the walls and ceiling were a lighter tone of the same colour. It was a markedly restful room, and James said:

“You’re nice and peaceful, all on your own up here.”

“Yes. It’s as quiet a spot as you could find in London,” said Garstang. “When you’ve been listening to interminable expressions of other people’s confusions all day, you want to come back to a room which poses no problems. You’d better take your coat off---it’s warm in here. Sit down. I’m going to have a drink. If you’d like to join me, help yourself.”

He opened a cupboard, produced whisky, syphon, and glasses, and mixed himself a whisky and soda: his movements were deft and very quiet: there was no rattle of glasses or indication of tremor in his competent hands, for all the weariness of his face. Putting the glasses and drinks on a low table between their two chairs, he lit a cigarette and said:

“Well? What do you want to know?”

“First, about the house in Cologne young Greville recognised, sir.”

“Yes. You probably know it. You know Cologne as well as I do---or very nearly. If you drive out of the city towards Bonn, past the Severin, and through the Lindenthal area, you pass the municipal offices, which were built in the late twenties----”

“Yes: German sham Gothic, running to height and spires and pinnacles and suchlike extravagances,” put in James.

“That’s it, and a hundred yards further on there’s a crossroads: if you turn left---eastwards, that is, towards the Rhine, there are some older houses.”

“Yes. Wait a minute. Lindenstrasse,” said James. “A wealthy Jewish family named Nanheim owned the big house behind the lime trees: it was confiscated and presented to one of Himmler’s stooges---we hoofed him out in ’46.”

“Yes, but before you reach that, there’s a less pretentious little house, with a fine cedar of Lebanon on the lawn, and some copper beech trees: that’s the house Greville remembered. It was a school for small boys---what we should call a prep school, and Pastor Baumgarten had run it for years. Greville must have been at school there, of course. The pastor made a point of taking English boys if he could get them.”

“That’s quite a point,” said James. “Accepting your assumption that Greville was at school there, how do you work out the rest of the story?”

“Either of us could work it out,” said Garstang wearily, “though we’d have to guess our way along. The boy was between seven and nine years old at the time. It’s to be supposed his parents were living in Germany: they were English-speaking, because the boy spoke English when he recovered his speech. He didn’t utter a word of German so far as I can gather, and that leads me to believe that he hadn’t been at the school very long. If his parents were English, they’d have tried to get him---and presumably themselves---out of Germany before war was declared. On the other hand there’s the chance that they sent the boy out of Germany, but stayed themselves.”

“The Grevilles found the boy in March ’41,” said James, “nearly twenty months after war was declared.”

Garstang nodded. “There’s more than one way of explaining what happened in the interval,” he said. “The boy might have been sent into France, or the Netherlands, and have eventually arrived in England as a refugee. Hundreds of them got over here, you know that, months after the fall of France. It seems consistent with the rest of the story: if the boy had been living the life of a fugitive, with people who were always on the run, cut off from his own parents, and had arrived in England during the blitz, the bombing might have been the last straw: it didn’t ‘turn his brain,’ to use the common phrase, it drove his memory underground, as it were. It doesn’t often happen---but it can.”

“That’s your pigeon---the loss of memory,” said James, “but I’m interested in your earlier point, that the boy’s parents may have sent him out of Germany, but stayed too long themselves and got caught there. That’d explain why nobody ever claimed him: if the boy were brought over as a refugee, and the folks who brought him were killed in the bombing, there wouldn’t have been anybody left to claim him.”

“That was my own assumption,” replied Garstang.

“But why Plymouth?” argued James. “They wouldn’t have kept refugees there: they were sent to reception camps inland.”

“Admittedly: but fishing craft from Europe did get to this country: they made port all along the Cornwall-Devon coast, from Falmouth to Brixham. If a skipper had risked bringing his craft over, he’d have landed at the first inlet he could make---running up to Devonport through the shelter of Cawsand Bay, likely enough, and if he did it on the night of the Plymouth blitz, the upshot wasn’t so surprising after all.” Garstang paused a moment, and then added: “What followed can never be proved. I gather that the child’s clothes were half burnt off him: there was nothing in his pockets, nothing to prove identity---that fits in with the refugee idea, to my mind. Of course if he’d been found on any other night than that one, half the police of the county would have got busy analysing his charred rags. As it happened the police had their hands full with more urgent matters just then.”

“My God, they had,” agreed James. “You’ve given a lot of thought to this, sir. How do you connect up the boy’s appearance on Roborough Down with what happened to him at Paddington Station?”

“At the moment I don’t, because I’m not being given the chance to connect up anything,” said Garstang. “As I see it, there are two lines of approach: one is the police method, to work backwards from ascertained facts: the other is to go back and investigate from the earliest known event---Greville’s recognition of Pastor Baumgarten’s house. Salcombe said: ‘They’re all dead.’ It’s very improbable, you know. Someone in that household will have survived---nurse, teacher, servant---and that someone could tell us who the boy was, and who his parents were.” He broke off for a moment and James waited for him to go on. “You see, as a psychiatrist, I’m bound to take into consideration that the boy’s memory was coming back. We don’t know what he did, what enquiries he set going, what he remembered. Macdonald accepts---as he’s bound to accept---that Greville came up to London to consult me. What we don’t know is who else he came to consult: who met him when he arrived. . . .”

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“You’ve made a very interesting reconstruction, sir,” said James, “but there’s another interpretation of the same facts. You say that Greville was English, because he spoke English. Hadn’t it occurred to you that he might have been American? You see, U.S.A. wasn’t in the war at that period, and Americans were still persona grata in Germany. They could go in and get out.”

“Quite true,” said Garstang, “but how do you account for the disappearance of the parents? United States citizens weren’t allowed to vanish off the map without some sort of pother being made. If the child had been American, enquiries would have been made about him.”

“Where?” asked James. “The answer is obviously ‘in Germany,’ if the boy and his parents were in Germany. The enquiries would have gone through the American consulate, which was still functioning until U.S.A. declared war on the Axis after Pearl Harbour. As to whether any such records were salvaged, or whether anybody would remember anything about them is a different story. But leave that out for the moment: I’m suggesting that it would have been possible for an American businessman, or diplomat, or consular employe, to get from Germany to Britain in the spring of 1941. It would probably have been a long trek, through Switzerland, France, and Spain, to Lisbon---unless the passengers concerned were important enough to be given seats in a German aircraft and get to Lisbon that way: and from Lisbon they could have come by sea---as you did yourself, sir.”

“I might remind you that I didn’t reach England until July ’41,” put in Garstang, “some months after Dick Greville had been found on Roborough Down.” Suddenly he cried out in exasperation: “Am I to be haunted by you all my life? Weren’t you satisfied with the facts you collected about me during the war? Didn’t you go on long enough then?”

“I don’t know, sir. I never have known,” rejoined James. “As you know, the high-ups were satisfied and I was told to leave it alone. If you want me to be perfectly honest, I was sorry I wasn’t allowed to go on a bit longer and get the issue cut and dried: it would have been more satisfactory for me and more satisfactory for you. The sight of me gives you a nasty taste in your mouth, I know that---all because we didn’t get things tidied up after you left Dijon.”

“And now you’re trying to involve me in this story,” said Garstang bitterly, “all because a perfectly honest army doctor thought I could help a boy who’d lost his memory.”

“Who was regaining his memory,” put in James. “You yourself insisted on the importance of that point. Why?”

“You can answer your own questions,” retorted Garstang. “Don’t expect me to help you.”

“Very well,” went on James placidly. “As we see it---Macdonald and myself---the evidence seems to show that it was visual impressions which were the first to return when Greville’s memory came to the surface again. He recognised German script when he saw it: he recognised that house when he saw it. It seems reasonable to me. A small boy doesn’t read much, and words make less impression on him than things seen. So when he began to remember, it was through the medium of sight. He didn’t remember names or facts, but he began to recognise places. And if that’s so, he would be able to recognise faces.” He broke off: “Is there anything inherently improbable in that, sir?”

Garstang shrugged his shoulders. “No. Not inherently. You can never tell how memory will behave, but the point you’ve made about a child retaining visual impressions is sound enough. But you can’t give a simple explanation of the behaviour of memory,” he added, speaking with a new emphasis. “Memory isn’t a concrete thing. There’s no seat of memory in the brain that’s known to surgeons or research workers. Memory is more like a chain reaction, or a wave movement: break a link in the chain, disrupt the wave---and it goes. And when it returns, it’s often activated by some apparently extraneous cause. You forget a name, a word, a face---and something can recall them, some association, not in itself relevant.” Again he broke off. “It’s no use trying to explain anything as complex as memory in a few words, but I’d hazard this opinion: a memory which has been disrupted or suppressed can be brought to the surface again by a combination of associations---sight, hearing, even taste and smell can be the associating factor.”

“Thank you for that exposition, sir,” said James. “It’s very helpful, for both Macdonald and I are off our beat on this subject. Getting back to my idea of the boy remembering things he once saw. Twelve years ago,” he went on slowly: “to men of our age that’s nothing. I can remember the first time I saw you, sir, twelve years ago. You had got a bus ticket in your hands, and you folded it up, into a narrower and narrower strip. . . . To a boy of twenty-one or so, twelve years is a very long time, but I think he might remember faces---or a face which had made a great impression on him, once.”

“Possibly---but what has all this to do with me?” asked Garstang.

“You’ve been thinking all this over,” said James obstinately: “you have your own particular skill, which gives you greater accuracy in assessing what might have happened inside that boy’s mind. You have all the facts of the case that are known to us, and you’ve lived in Germany, first as a child, then, years later during the war, as a British agent, when you not only survived---against all the probabilities---but escaped. What I’m saying, in effect, is that you’re better qualified to help me in this business than anybody else could be . . . if you want to help us.”

“What do you expect me to do?” asked Garstang.

“I suppose I’m asking you to use your imagination, in the light of what you know,” said James slowly.

Garstang lit another cigarette, and took his time before he replied. At length he said: “I should find it easier to debate possibilities if I weren’t aware that you believe I’m tied up in this somehow. You will be assessing everything that I say in the light of that belief, waiting for me to slip up. I remember you of old. First of all, let me give you a professional opinion about Richard Greville himself. He’s going to recover, and the probability is that his brain will be normal and his physique and nervous system undamaged. That’s a matter of physical probabilities, which his surgeon can assess. But from the point of view of my own science---the study of mind and all that mind implies---I think it’s very improbable he will remember anything that happened immediately prior to being knocked out.”

“He’ll never be able to tell us who did it?” asked James.

“That’s my opinion. Time will prove. But you---the police---aren’t only out to find who attacked Greville: it’s your job to find who murdered the other two men who were on that same train.”

“Obviously---but they’re all tied up,” said James.

Again Garstang fell silent, then he went on: “You asked me to use my imagination, to hazard a reconstruction in the light of my own specialised information, and your implication was that my knowledge of Germany should help me to do so. I suppose that you’re arguing that what one man could do, another man could do.”

James made no reply, and Garstang went on: “As you know, I found a method which enabled me to live unsuspected in wartime Germany. I exchanged personalities, as it were, with another doctor shortly before the war. I, of course, was a qualified medical man before I studied psychiatry. I took over the running of a clinic to which another man had recently been appointed and I was accepted as that man. The only reason I ever came under suspicion was because suspected persons consulted me---as their medical adviser.”

“Yes,” said James.

“What I did in Germany a German could have done in England, if he had organised his ‘exchange’ well before the war,” went on Garstang. “Once he had been accepted, as I was accepted, there was no reason for suspicion to arise unless extraneous circumstances prompted suspicion. It would have been so much easier in England---no Gestapo, no paid informers, no everlasting fear of your next-door neighbour. And the odd thing is, that a man who pulled off a substitution like that could have gone on living in England. During the war, he couldn’t have got out. After the war, he wouldn’t have wanted to. What would he have been---a nazi agent?”

“Yes,” said James.

“Well, there’s the supposition,” said Garstang, “and don’t tell me that you and Macdonald didn’t think it out before I did. The boy’s memory began to come back in Germany. When he returned to England he saw---or remembered---a face or a name which was once familiar to him. And the owner of that face or name said: ‘It’s the end for one of us---and you rather than me.’ ”

Garstang stubbed his cigarette out. “And what proof have I that mine wasn’t the face he recognised? I know that’s in your mind. And there’s this to it. I’ve seen Greville’s face. I was at the hospital when they changed his dressings. You haven’t seen him, but I can tell you his face has a lot of character in it: the bony structure, brows, jaw, cheekbones: the angle of his nose, the colour of his hair---they’re not only characters which would have been dominant in childhood, they’re probably characters inherited from his own father. Whoever studied Richard Greville’s face may well have seen the father in the son.”

“That’s a very interesting point,” said James. “If the idea you have outlined has any substance---and I admit that Macdonald and I debated a similar possibility---it explains a lot. It was a case not only of recognising but being recognised.” He paused a moment, and then went on: “I’m very grateful to you for your patience, sir. I know how you feel about me. When I was checking up on you, I was only doing the job I was set to do. It was a job that had to be done and you knew it.”

“Yes. I knew it: but after the life I’d lived for nearly two mortal years, it wasn’t easy to be philosophic in the face of suspicion . . . and it’s no easier now. I offered to go to Cologne because I believe I could find out who the boy is---but no. I suppose you’ll go there, and if you make a mess of it you’ll learn nothing.”

“I’ll do my best,” said James, and his voice sounded the voice of a very commonplace man, a bit diffident, a bit complacent. He went on in just the same tone: “Do you remember the name Dorward, sir? Does it convey anything to you?”

Garstang sat perfectly still, then he said: “Can you tell me why you ask---give me an ‘associating factor,’ as it were?”

“I just wondered if the name conveyed anything to you,” said James.

Garstang reached out to a rack which held newspapers and found a copy of the Times. He handed it to James. “Dorward. Cartoffel. Freedman,” he quoted, “here in the Personal Column. I suppose you put this notice in. I read it, in the casual way that one does read that column, and the name Dorward seemed familiar. I looked through my files, to see if I had ever had a patient of that name---but I hadn’t. I may be quite mistaken, just imagining the name was familiar.”

“Could you have treated a patient of that name when you were practising in Germany?” asked James.

Garstang took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes wearily: it didn’t take any very acute powers of observation to note how strained and tired his face was.

“I can’t tell you,” he said. “I haven’t a clue. The only thing I can say is that I’ll think it over. If I think over the names I can remember in 1940 I may arrive at something. But it’s pretty improbable. It isn’t a German name---unless you’ve got it spelt wrong.”

“No. It’s spelt all right,” said James. “Dorward was an American. He disappeared in 1941.”

“Then I never knew him,” said Garstang.

James got up. “Well, I won’t trouble you any more now, sir. You’re tired. I can see that.”

“I’m dog-tired,” said the other, “but if I can rake up any recollection of where I heard the name ‘Dorward’ I’ll let you know.”

And with that, James left him.