A Quest in Berlin

A Quest in Berlin

Cecilia Peartree

©Cecilia Peartree 2017

Smashwords edition

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Cover image: Dreamstime

Contents

Chapter 1 Clemency – Abandoned

Chapter 2 Andrew – In Transit

Chapter 3 Clemency – The Key

Chapter 4 Andrew – Kreuzberg

Chapter 5 Clemency – Taking Advice

Chapter 6 Andrew – Trapped

Chapter 7 Clemency – En route

Chapter 8 Andrew – On the Move Again

Chapter 9 Clemency – Back-up

Chapter 10 Andrew – On the Run

Chapter 11 Clemency – Sight-seeing

Chapter 12 Andrew – Stalinallee

Chapter 13 Clemency – In the Tiergarten

Chapter 14 Andrew – Plotting and Planning

Chapter 15 Clemency – Over the Border

Chapter 16 Andrew – Alarming News

Chapter 17 Clemency – Mission Not Exactly Accomplished

Chapter 18 Andrew – Taking Things Forward

Chapter 19 Clemency – Staying out of Trouble

Chapter 20 Andrew – A Weak Spot

Chapter 21 Clemency – Hostile Witness

Chapter 22 Andrew – Identity Crisis

Chapter 23 Clemency – A Beam of Light in the Darkness

Chapter 24 Andrew – At Their Mercy

Chapter 25 Clemency – Reunion

Chapter 26 Andrew – Getaway

Chapter 27 Clemency – So Near and Yet So Far

Chapter 28 Andrew – Unlikely Rescuers

Chapter 29 Clemency – On the Way Home

Chapter 30 Andrew – Endings and Beginnings

Chapter 31 Clemency – Keeping Secrets

Author’s note

Chapter 1 Clemency - Abandoned

‘Bother!’

I stood back and glared at the paper tape reader. It was either that or give it a good thump, and I knew Joan was watching me from over by the window. She and Bernard had been waiting patiently for me to finish so that they could have their turn on the computer. They often booked time on it late in the evening, but by doing so they ran the risk that it would have run out of steam – so to speak – after clanking its way through strings of mathematical data for hours.

I was very tempted to take off my shoe and attack it. I wondered what she would do if she saw me doing that. Joan was a placid blonde who might have stepped right out of an advertisement for soap, or gravy, or curtains. Appearances were rather deceptive, though. She wasn’t a woman who would be content in anyone’s kitchen.

‘Is there something wrong?’ she called. ‘Can we help?’

‘The dratted machine’s jammed with my paper tape in it.’

‘Oh, dear,’ said Joan. ‘Bernard, do you have your screwdriver?’

‘Of course,’ said Bernard, popping out from behind the racks. He was famous for carrying rather a small screwdriver in his top pocket, and although he was a meteorologist and not an engineer, he was always willing to use it to disassemble computer parts and put them together again.

They came over to have a look.

‘Young Neville not with you tonight?’ said Bernard, leaning down to peer at the paper tape reader. He wasn’t very much older than Andrew, but he was already middle-aged, with thinning hair and a ponderous manner.

‘Of course he isn’t, Bernard,’ said Joan. ‘We can see that for ourselves, can’t we?’ She turned her blue-eyed gaze on me. ‘You haven’t had a falling-out, have you, dear?’

‘No.’

‘Clemency and Andrew don’t have fallings-out,’ said Bernard, poking about in the tape reader with the sharp end of the screwdriver.

I opened my mouth to warn him the power was still turned on, but Joan got in first.

‘Mind you don’t give yourself a shock doing that, Bernard.’

Bernard glanced up at her, shook his head, and spoke to me instead.

‘Has he gone off somewhere, then?’

‘Of course not! I mean – he had something else to do this evening.’

‘Hmm,’ said Joan. ‘I see.’

Goodness knows what she saw, or thought she saw. My mind was in too much of a jumble to work it out.

It was all Andrew’s fault. I wished I knew where he had got to, so that I could track him down and give him a piece of my mind. That might make up for it a little. As it was, I had no real outlet for my anger. I couldn’t help feeling mildly irritated by Joan and Bernard, just because they were there and Andrew wasn’t, but it was hardly their fault.

‘There we are!’ said Bernard triumphantly. He held up a crumpled and torn piece of paper tape. I grabbed it out of his hand, wanting to throw it on the floor and stamp on it, but just capable of enough restraint not to do it in front of them.

‘Thank you,’ I said as graciously as I could manage. I felt my eyelids drooping. ‘I’d better call it a night now. It’s your turn anyway.’

‘Good idea,’ said Bernard.

‘I’m sure things will be better in the morning,’ said Joan.

They watched me benevolently as I made my way across the computer room to the door. I hung up my white coat and gave them a little wave as I went out. I didn’t think I had fooled them into thinking things were all right, but I had to try.

I hadn’t a clue where Andrew was.

I walked home very quickly, almost silently in my soft-soled shoes. They wouldn’t have made much impact on the recalcitrant tape reader, after all.

It wasn’t like him to stand me up like this. He would at least have sent a message, no matter what had held him up. He wouldn’t have left me waiting on the bench outside the computer lab and failed to appear even when it was past time for us to have our turn to run our programs. Unless...

I stopped dead in the middle of Jesus Green, where Andrew had told me never to walk on my own after dark. At least he wasn’t here to see me disregard his instructions.

What if something had happened to him? An accident – or worse. My mind jumped to the day he had been abducted and had eventually woken up in a coal bunker in Haslingfield. Surely that couldn’t happen again, though. It had been far-fetched enough the first time.

A couple of youths passed me, almost close enough to brush my sleeve. I hurried on towards home, which at the moment was rather a nice bed-sitting-room just at the other side of the river

As I opened the door, my foot brushed against a couple of letters lying just behind it in the porch. For one reason or another I hadn’t been home since first thing that morning, so I had missed the second post. I bent to pick them up. One was for one of the others who lived in the house, and I put it aside on the ledge for her to find later. The other…

I rushed into my room, fumbling with the key in my haste. I would know Andrew’s small, neat handwriting anywhere. I just might decide to forgive him after all.

Five minutes later, I was still staring at the letter. It hardly told me anything.

‘I have to go away for a few days. I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone. Sorry to do this without any warning – hope this evening goes all right.’

It was more of a note than a proper letter. He didn’t say where he was going, or why. I threw it on the floor, relented and picked it up again. I propped it up so that I could see it while I made myself some comforting cocoa, which didn’t entirely help.

It was my own fault, I realised later, lying awake and wretched in the early hours of the morning. I knew the man had secrets. I should have persuaded him to divulge them by now, or given up on him altogether.

That last thought was no comfort.

I wanted to stay in bed and sulk the next morning, but I had promised to go to the lab and help one of the post-graduate students with their trials. I had been hoping Andrew might be able to join us in case I got it all wrong. I wasn’t really at the level where I was comfortable with supervising students, especially the post-graduates. I always felt as if they knew more than I did and were laughing up their sleeves as I explained things about EDSAC in words of one syllable. I could do without adding worry over Andrew to my various shortcomings.

Oddly enough, it was Ivy who gave me the first clue about where he had got to.

I bumped into her at lunch-time in Petty Cury, just outside one of my favourite tea-rooms. When Andrew was about I usually lunched with him, often in his study on the ground floor of the building or, weather permitting, down by the nearest stretch of river or in a quiet corner of Christ’s Pieces. We had a sort of informal rota for bringing the sandwiches, with cake appearing occasionally as a treat. But with him away I hadn’t the heart to make myself any lunch, so I was reduced to wandering the streets like a lost soul, looking for something to tempt my appetite.

‘Hello there! Clemency!’ called Ivy from the other side of the lane. She ran up to me like an over-excited puppy. ‘We don’t often see you around here at this time of day. Do you fancy something to eat? I go in here quite often. It isn’t bad at all. And not too dear. Come along, it’s ages since I saw you.’

She more or less ushered me inside the tea-shop, her hand on my arm, without pausing long enough for me to protest, or indeed get a word in edgeways.

The waitress had hardly left the table after taking our order when Ivy leaned across and said, in what passed in her case for a confidential undertone, ‘So where was Andrew off to, then?’

‘Off to?’ I said, trying for a nonchalant manner.

‘And who was the woman?’ she added.

‘The woman?’

This time the nonchalance was even harder to achieve, but at least the words hadn’t come out as a strangled squeak. I congratulated myself on that.

‘On the train,’ said Ivy impatiently. ‘I thought perhaps it might be a cousin of his, or a sister. Does he have a sister?’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. I realised Andrew had never said anything about a sister. But then, there were quite a lot of things he hadn’t said anything about. Probably far more than I imagined.

‘So where was he going?’ Ivy persisted. She must have seen the blankness in my eyes, even though I had forced my lips to curve into a half-smile, because she gasped, put her hand over mine on the table and said, ‘You didn’t know!’

Oh, well, it was better to get it all out in the open, I supposed.

‘No, I have no idea where he is,’ I confessed. ‘He didn’t say anything about going with anyone. He just said he’d be away for a few days.’

‘At least he told you something, then,’ she said. It must have been meant to be comforting, but it didn’t quite work like that. ‘He didn’t just swan off into the blue with his lady-friend – I mean, his cousin – without saying a word.’

‘He didn’t actually say a word. He wrote me a letter.’

Her face fell.

‘It must have been something urgent,’ I added, experiencing a bizarre urge to cheer her up. ‘It sounded as if he had been called away.’

‘Or the woman came to fetch him,’ said Ivy thoughtfully. ‘Did he say where he was going?’

‘Not really.’

‘They caught the London train,’ she told me. ‘The express.’

‘But once they got to London, they could have gone on somewhere else,’ I said hopelessly.

‘It’ll be all right, Clemency.’

The waitress arrived with our order, and Ivy managed to stop talking for long enough to eat.

Although I didn’t like the idea of Andrew swanning off with a woman, as Ivy had put it, I felt a little better by the time we left the tea-shop. At least now I knew which direction he had headed in, and perhaps the fact that he was travelling with a woman might make it easier to find him, in some way.

‘What did she look like?’ I said, just before we parted.

Ivy made a face. ‘I’m no use at that kind of thing.’

‘Well, did she have dark or fair hair? Was she tall or short?’

‘Sort of brown. She wasn’t as tall as Andrew, but I think she was taller than me. Sorry, that doesn’t help much, does it?’

‘It’s a start,’ I said. As I returned to the lab, I wondered why I was thinking in terms of tracking Andrew down. Surely he would just re-appear in a few days’ time and everything would go back to normal. It wasn’t as if he could possibly be a spy who had been spirited away behind the Iron Curtain or anything.

As the next few days passed, very slowly, I became less and less sure of that – or of anything else. I had imagined Andrew and I were close friends. More than that. Was it all in my imagination?

I was only vaguely reassured, at least about my own sanity, by something Bernard said when I encountered him with Joan again, this time as I was on my way out of the building, having failed to persuade my program to run. It was a wonder I was still able to get dressed and eat my breakfast in the morning and get to the lab, never mind conjuring up working algorithms. My mind felt fuzzy and I was disoriented, as if my whole world had tilted sideways and I couldn’t adjust to the change in angle.

‘Still no sign of young Neville?’ said Bernard by way of greeting.

Joan tugged at his sleeve. ‘I’m sure Clemency doesn’t want you sticking your nose in.’

Bernard stared at me solemnly, weighing his words. At last he pronounced, ‘There’s something wrong. Have you been to the police?’

‘The police?’

‘He wouldn’t just disappear for this length of time – how long has he been gone? Two days? Three days?’

‘This is the fourth day,’ I replied. I could probably have told him how many hours it was since I last saw Andrew, but that seemed a little pathetic, so I didn’t go into any unnecessary detail.

Bernard shook his head. ‘He would have been in touch with you if he’d been able... with you, of all people. Better get busy tracking him down. He probably needs you.’

This was comforting in some ways and rather alarming in others. If something had happened to Andrew and I was his lifeline, I was very afraid of failing him. On the other hand, at least Bernard’s words had restored my confidence in my friendship with Andrew. He was quite right: I had waited too long for news.

It wasn’t until I had thanked them and set off towards home that I realised I didn’t know where to start looking. I thought about the secret code Andrew and I had solved together only a few months before. It had been so much easier and so much more fun working on it with him. I heaved a huge sigh as I opened the front door.

‘What’s the matter?’ said one of the girls from upstairs, arriving in the porch at the same time.

‘Oh, nothing. I just wish I knew what to do.’

She was on the way out when she turned and said, ‘There’s a letter for you. Well, more of a package really. It’s on the ledge. Just in case you don’t see it there.’

She gave a wave and left. I picked up the packet. There was something hard inside. Rather than stand around in the hall trying to guess what it could be, I took it into my room and put it on the table for further consideration. Andrew’s handwriting was on the envelope. I experienced a feeling of excitement – or was it impending doom?

After a moment I picked it up again and tore open the flap. He had wrapped whatever it was in newspaper before stuffing the whole lot in an envelope, so it was quite bulky. I delved into the layers of paper and fished out a key.

There was nothing to say which door the key might fit. Was it the key to the lab that he was entrusting to my care while he was away? Or to his room on the ground floor of the building? Or even to his flat? I turned it over in my hand, almost as if I were hoping to divine the answer just by touching the metal that he had touched.

Of course, I didn’t believe in the power of divination and neither did Andrew. He must have sent me the key knowing I would work it all out by the sheer power of reason. I only hoped his confidence wasn’t misplaced.

My mission of discovery would have to wait until tomorrow, in any case. I wasn’t going to trek back over Jesus Green again in the dark. I would be sensible for once and make my cocoa and get a good night’s sleep.

I was folding the newspaper into a neat rectangle when I caught sight of the crossword section. He had started to fill in the puzzle. I frowned. Andrew had told me he thought crosswords were a waste of time. Presumably he preferred conundrums with a more practical application.

I smoothed out the sheet and stared down at the words that were filled in, and then at the clues underneath. I wasn’t actually a lover of crosswords myself – the good ones took too long to complete, and the easy ones were too easy – but I didn’t think the words he had written matched the clues. Either Andrew had been distracted or he had chosen this way of sending me a message.

I found a piece of scrap paper and copied the words from the crossword grid on to it, using a separate line for each.

‘Tempelhof’.

‘Bahnhof Zoo’.

‘Alex’.

I frowned at the short list. The name Tempelhof rang a bell. Wasn’t it an airfield? Alex could