The Tightrope Men / The Enemy

‘All right.’ Denison gave Carey a level look. ‘And her name is Lyn. She’s not a bloody puppet; she’s a human being.’

Carey’s answering stare was equally unblinking. ‘That’s what I’m afraid of,’ he said.

Carey watched Denison walk away and waited until he was joined by McCready. He sighed. ‘Sometimes I have moments of quiet desperation.’

McCready suppressed a smile. ‘What is it this time?’

‘See those buildings over there?’

McCready looked across the road. ‘That scrubby lot?’

‘That’s Victoria Terrace – there’s a police station in there now. The authorities wanted to pull it down but the conservationists objected and won their case on architectural grounds.’

‘I don’t see the point.’

‘Well, you see, it was Gestapo Headquarters during the war and it still smells to a lot of Norwegians.’ He paused. ‘I had a session in there once, with a man called Dieter Brun. Not a nice chap. He was killed towards the end of the war. Someone ran him down with a car.’

McCready was quiet because Carey rarely spoke of his past service. ‘I’ve been running around Scandinavia for nearly forty years – Spitzbergen to the Danish-German border, Bergen to the Russo-Finnish border. I’ll be sixty next month,’ said Carey. ‘And the bloody world hasn’t changed, after all.’ There was a note of quiet melancholy in his voice.

Next morning they all flew to Finland.

FOURTEEN (#ulink_67b8127f-ceb3-5e25-b018-0c9c826175d7)

Lyn Meyrick was worried about her father, which was a new and unwanted experience. Her previous worries in that direction had always been for herself in relation to her father. To worry for her father was something new which gave her an odd feeling in the pit of her stomach.

She had been delighted when he suggested that she accompany him to Finland; a delight compounded by the fact that for the first time he was treating her like a grown-up person. He now asked her opinion and deferred to her wishes in a way he had never done before. Diffidently she had fallen in with his wish that she call him by his given name and she was becoming accustomed to it.

However, the delight had been qualified by the presence of Diana Hansen who somehow destroyed that adult feeling and made her feel young and gawky like a schoolgirl. The relationship between Diana and her father puzzled her. At first she had thought they were lovers and had been neither surprised nor shocked. Well, not too shocked. Her father was a man and not all that old, and her mother had not been reticent about the reasons for the divorce. And, yet, she had not thought that Diana Hansen would have been the type to appeal to her father and the relationship seemed oddly cold and almost businesslike.

And there were other things about him that were strange. He would become abstract and remote. This was nothing new because he had always had that ability to switch off in the middle of a conversation which made her feel as though he had dropped a barrier to cut her off. What was new was that he would snap out of these abstracted moments and smile at her in a way he never had before, which made her heart turn over. And he seemed deliberately to put himself out to please her.

And he was losing his memory, too. Not about anything big or important, but about minor things like … like Thread-Bear, for instance. How could a man forget a pun which had caused so much excitement in a little girl? If there was anything about her father that had annoyed her in the past it was his memory for detail – he usually remembered too much for her comfort. It was all very odd.

Anyway, she was glad he had invited her to go to the University to meet the man with the unpronounceable name. He had been hesitant about it, and she said, ‘Why are you going?’

‘It’s just that I want to find out something about my father.’

‘But that’s my grandfather,’ she said. ‘Of course I’m coming.’

It seemed strange to have a grandfather called Hannu Merikken. She sat before the mirror and contemplated herself, making sure that all was in order. I’m not bad-looking, she thought, as she regarded the straight black eyebrows and the grey eyes. Mouth too big, of course. I’m no raving beauty, but I’ll do.

She snatched up her bag and went to the door on the way to meet her father. Then she stopped in mid-pace and thought, What am I thinking of? It’s my father … not … She shook the thought from her and opened the door.

Professor Kääriänen was a jolly, chubby-faced man of about sixty, not at all the dry professorial stick Lyn had imagined. He rose from his desk to greet Denison, and shot out a spate of Finnish. Denison held up his hand in protest: ‘I’m sorry; I have no Finnish.’

Kääriänen raised his eyebrows and said in English, ‘Remarkable!’

Denison shrugged. ‘Is it? I left when I was seventeen. I suppose I spoke Finnish for fifteen years – and I haven’t spoken it for nearly thirty.’ He smiled. ‘You might say my Finnish language muscle has atrophied.’

Kääriänen nodded understandably. ‘Yes, yes; my own German was once quite fluent – but now?’ He spread his hands. ‘So you are Hannu Merikken’s son.’

‘Allow me to introduce my daughter, Lyn.’

Kääriänen came forward, his hands outstretched. ‘And his granddaughter – a great honour. But sit down, please. Would you like coffee?’

‘Thank you; that would be very nice.’

Kääriänen went to the door, spoke to the girl in the other office, and then came back. ‘Your father was a great man, Dr … er … Meyrick.’

Denison nodded. ‘That is my name now. I reverted to the old family name.’

The professor laughed. ‘Ah, yes; I well remember Hannu telling me the story. He made it sound so romantic. And what are you doing here in Finland, Dr Meyrick?’

‘I don’t really know,’ said Denison cautiously. ‘Perhaps it’s a need to get back to my origins. A delayed homesickness, if you like.’

‘I understand,’ said Kääriänen. ‘And you want to know something about your father – that’s why you’ve come to me?’

‘I understand you worked with him – before the war.’

‘I did, much to my own profit. Your father was not only a great research worker – he was also a great teacher. But I was not the only one. There were four of us, as I remember. You should remember that.’

‘I was very young before the war,’ said Denison defensively. ‘Not even into my teens.’

‘And you don’t remember me,’ said Kääriänen, his eyes twinkling. His hand patted his plump belly. ‘I’m not surprised; I’ve changed quite a lot. But I remember you. You were a young rascal – you upset one of my experiments.’

Denison smiled. ‘If guilty I plead sorrow.’

‘Yes,’ said Kääriänen reminiscently. ‘There were four of us with your father in those days. We made a good team.’ He frowned. ‘You know; I think I am the only one left.’ He ticked them off with his fingers. ‘Olavi Koivisto joined the army and was killed. Liisa Linnankivi – she was also killed in the bombing of Viipuri; that was just before your father died, of course. Kaj Salojärvi survived the war; he died three years ago – cancer, poor fellow. Yes, there is only me left of the old team.’

‘Did you all work together on the same projects?’

‘Sometimes yes, sometimes no.’ Kääriänen leaned forward. ‘Sometimes we worked on our own projects with Hannu giving advice. As a scientist yourself, Dr Meyrick, you will understand the work of the laboratory.’

Denison nodded. ‘What was the main trend of my father’s thought in those days before the war?’

Kääriänen spread his hands. ‘What else but the atom? We were all thinking about the atom. Those were the great pioneering days, you know; it was very exciting.’ He paused, and added drily, ‘Not long after that, of course, it became too exciting, but by that time no one in Finland had time to think about the atom.’

He clasped his hands across his belly. ‘I well remember the time Hannu showed me a paper written by Meitner and Frisch interpreting Hahn’s experiments. The paper showed clearly that a chain reaction could take place and that the generation of atomic energy was clearly possible. We were all excited – you cannot imagine the excitement – and all our work was put aside to concentrate on this new thing.’ He shrugged heavily. ‘But that was 1939 – the year of the Winter War. No time for frivolities like atoms.’ His tone was sardonic.

‘What was my father working on when this happened?’

‘Ah – here is the coffee,’ said Kääriänen. He fussed about with the coffee, and offered small cakes to Lyn. ‘And what do you do, young lady? Are you a scientist like your father and your grandfather?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ said Lyn politely. ‘I’m a teacher.’

‘We must have the teachers, too,’ said Kääriänen. ‘What was that you asked, Doctor?’

‘I was wondering what my father was working on at the time he read the paper on atomic fission.’