The Waiting Time by Gerald Seymour

part of Josh Mantle’s history.
    She went up the stairs and he saw where the carpet had been prised up and tacked back badly onto the steps. Adie Barnes shook his hand, grasping it in her small calloused fist. She let go to take a purse from her handbag.
    ‘There’s no charge,’ Josh said. ‘Let’s say I enjoyed a ride out in the country. She’s a lovely girl, Mrs Barnes.’
    Adie Barnes busied herself in the kitchen.
    He stood, awkward, and feeling like an intruder in the small front room. He thought she must have skipped work that day and laboured to remake her home. Someone must have been in to help her refit the units and shelves to the walls. The room was a shrine in photographs of her daughter.
    ‘It’s everything to her. They’ll take her back? It’ll be all right?’
    He took the cup and saucer, and the plate with the cake. He wanted to be gentle. ‘She’ll need your patience and a long rest. Most of all she’s going to need love.’
    He drank the tea and ate the cake. He heard the footsteps fast on the stairs, the opening and closing of the door and the clatter of the little front gate. The photographs were of Tracy Barnes as a recruit, sitting with the team at Brigade in Berlin, at Templer, in uniform, smiling, and crouched with a black dog. Josh hadn’t the courage for honesty.
    He let himself out.
    He drove away. He felt no achievement, no pleasure.
    It was only a few minutes’ drive from the street to the car park close to the offices of Greatorex, Wilkins & Protheroe.
    She was in a telephone box. There was a car down the road, two men in the car, one smoking and one talking into a mobile telephone. He saw the lustre of her hair, caught by a street lamp. He didn’t stop and shout at her, ‘Go home, stay there, he’s an asset and protected. Go home or you can be hurt. Forget it ever happened.’ He was used to marching into people’s lives and then walking away from them.
    A bad taste of failure in his mouth, Julius Goldstein telephoned Raub. The file of Hauptman Dieter Krause showed no evidence of criminal activity in human rights. He reported, also, that pages of the file concerned with Hauptman Krause’s relationship with the Soviet officer, Major Pyotr Rykov, were not present, and a part of the separate file dealing with the military base at Wustrow. He told Raub that it was not possible from the files to find evidence of murder. He was authorized to return to Cologne on the late flight.
    The most senior of the researchers escorted him from the basements. ‘You should not take it personally. If you wanted to know which teacher in a school in Saxony-Anhalt informed on his colleagues, then I could find you the answer. Which environment activist was beaten up because his wife betrayed him, which student reported on his colleagues, which poet infiltrated an arts group. I can tell you, names and dates and contact officers. Here, there is only the chaff of human misery, and that does not reach to the level of murder. They were busy in those last days, sanitizing the files, sterilizing the past. That is why, today, they swagger on the streets, certain of their safety. From what you looked for, from what is missing, I can tell you that the link between Hauptman Krause and Major Pyotr Rykov was sensitive in this matter of murder. If there was not guilt then the files would not have been cleansed. Is it important to you, this question of guilt?’
    He stepped into the chilly floodlit yard. Julius Goldstein said, ‘The possibility of guilt is important because it can obstruct an advantage that we seek. My thanks to you, goodnight. The advantage is in the man, Rykov.’
    ‘Is that him?’
    ‘That’s our boy.’
    The Briton and the American stood against the wall, a little apart from the guests in the salon where the Americans always entertained.
    ‘In the shadow of his man.’
    ‘I get the impression that the big shot doesn’t go to the toilet without the say-so of Rykov.’ The eyes of the