‘They call it the Glory Hole,’ Gaunt whispered.
The trolley was in an alcove beside the desk. Files on top, stationery below, all in varying sizes, nicely crested, with long and standard envelopes to match, all laid out ready to hand. At the centre of the desk, next to the reading light, square on its felt pad and neatly covered with a grey plastic cape, lay the missing typewriter with the long carriage and beside it three or four tins of Dutch cigars. On a separate table, a thermos and a quantity of Naafi cups; the tea machine with the clock; on the floor a small electric fan in two tones of plastic, trained conveniently upon the desk to help dispel the unfortunate effects of damp; on the new chair with the rexine seat, a pink cushion partially embroidered by Miss Aickman. All these he recognised at a glance, dully, greeting them curtly as we greet old friends, while he stared beyond them at the great archive which lined the walls from floor to ceiling; at the slim black files each with a rusted loop and a rounded thumb-hole, some grey with bloom, some wrinkled and bent with damp, column after column in their black uniforms, veterans trained and waiting to be called.
He must have asked what they were, for Gaunt was whispering. No, he couldn’t suggest what they were. No. Not his place. No. They had been here longer than anyone could remember. Though some did say they were Jag files, the Judge Advocate General’s Department he meant, that’s what talkers said and the talkers said they came from Minden in lorries,just dumped here for living space they were, twenty years ago that must be now, all of twenty years, when the Occupation packed up. That’s all he could say really, he was sure; that’s all he’d happened to hear from the talkers, just overheard it by chance, for Gaunt was not a gossip, that was the one thing they could say about him. Oh more than twenty years… the lorries turned up one summer evening… Macmullen and someone else had spent half the night helping to unload them… Of course in those days it was thought the Embassy might need them… No, nobody had access, not these days, didn’t want it really; who would? Long ago, the odd Chancery officer would ask for the key and look something up but that was long ago, Gaunt couldn’t remember that at all, and no one had been down here for years, though Gaunt couldn’t say for sure, of course; he had to watch his words with Turner, he’d learnt that now, he was sure… They must have kept the key separate for a while, then added it to the Duty Officer’s bunch… But a while back now, Gaunt couldn’t say when, he had heard them talking about it; Marcus, one of the drivers, gone now; saying they weren’t Jag files at all but Group files, it was a specialist British contingent… His voice pattered on, urgent and conspiratorial, like an old woman in church. Turner was no longer listening. He had seen the map.
A plain map, printed in Polish.
It was pinned above the desk, pinned quite freshly into the damp plaster, in the place where some might put the portraits of their children. No major towns were marked, no national borders, no scale, no pretty arrows showing the magnetic variation: just the places where the camps had been. Neuengamme and Belsen in the north, Dachau, Mauthausen to the south, to the east, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, Belzec and Auschwitz; in the centre Ravensbruck, Sachsenhausen, Kulmhof and Gross Rosen.
‘They owe me,’ he thought suddenly. ‘They owe me.’ God in Heaven what a fool, what a plain, blundering, clumsy fool I have been. Leo, you thief, you came here to forage in your own dreadful childhood.
‘Go away. If I want you I’ll call you.’ Turner stared at Gaunt sightlessly, his right hand pressed against a shelf. ‘ Don’t tell anyone. Bradfield, de Lisle, Crabbe… no one, do you understand.’
‘I won’t,’ Gaunt said.
‘I’m not here. I don’t exist. I never came in tonight. Do you understand.’
‘You ought to see a doctor,’ said Gaunt.