The Poison Tide Read Online Free PDF Page A

he’d upset her at the restaurant. He had wanted to protect her from scandal but all he’d succeeded in doing was inviting more. One day soon the post would travel up the line and there would be a letter for Major Curtis.
    ‘Letter for Major Curtis.’
    Wolff could see him there, knee deep in Flanders mud, preparing to lead a raiding party, or in a funk hole under shellfire. There’d be a big smile on his face – there was always a smile on Reggie Curtis’s face. He’d tear the letter open with a dirty fingernail.
    I feel it my duty to inform you, Sir, that your wife is fucking your old Cambridge chum, Sebastian Wolff. Yours respectfully, et cetera, et cetera.
    Overcome with grief, he would lead a suicidal charge into no-man’s-land and be blown to small pieces by a Jack Johnson. Reggie could be the most obliging of fellows.
    Wolff shuffled down the bed until his face was close to Violet’s, then leant forward to kiss her lightly on the lips. She smiled but didn’t open her eyes, and he felt a surge of tenderness for her. ‘Shameless hussy, I’ll miss you.’ He’d drunk deeply of her, intoxicated by her beguiling smile, the scent of her and the way she seemed to glide through life with effortless grace – those things and more. But it wasn’t enough. It was an illusion. He leant forward to kiss Violet again. He would go to Germany and, for as long as he could stay alive, he’d pretend to be someone else, someone who hadn’t broken and screamed in agony and begged them to stop. Wasn’t that his patriotic duty? Didn’t he owe his country that much? C had blown his whistle and he would go over the top with the rest.

2
Cover
    T HE TEMPERATURE FELL to freezing at dusk and by the time the ship was close to Christiania the mooring ropes were stiff with ice. Wolff watched from the promenade deck as the pricks of light on the banks of the fjord closed into the solid band of the city. The port was quieter than he’d known it before the war, with fewer vessels in passage or waiting at anchor for a berth. The enemy had been pinched out of Norwegian waters. The
Helig Olav
came alongside the pier beneath the curtain wall of the medieval fortress. Although it was late, there was a crowd at the Scandinavian America Line’s office to meet her and taxicabs and tradesmen’s vehicles were idling on the dockside road, their lamps winking a secret signal as people scurried between them on to the quay. Ropes made fast, stevedores began to swing gangways in place along her side. Wolff peeled his glove from the frozen rail and joined the queue of passengers shuffling towards the companionway.
    ‘You’re Mr Jan de Witt,’ C had informed him the day he accepted his assignment. ‘A Dutchman with a grudge.’
    ‘An Afrikaner?’
    ‘The same thing,’ he joked. ‘You crossed the Atlantic on an American passport – one of our chaps made the journey for you.’
    ‘You were certain I’d do as I was told then?’
    ‘You’re a naval officer, yes,’ he’d replied matter-of-factly. Rank and the service he dropped and raised with the incontinence of a tart’s knickers. ‘Our Mr de Witt works for New England Westinghouse and poses as an American, an engineer adventurer if you like, but on the wrong side. You’ll spend a week in Amsterdam visiting business partners – meetings have been arranged for you – then you’ll travel to Norway.’
    The Norwegians were ‘our neutral allies’, C had said. It was possible to ‘arrange things’ in Christiania.
    From the second-class crowd at the top of the gangway, Wolff watched an officer in the Norwegian border police examining the papers of passengers disembarking at the bottom. The elderly constable beside him had shrunk inside his greatcoat, his face frozen in an expression of complete indifference. Wolff paused to allow a young woman with two small girls to step in front of him, then followed them closely down the gangway. By some small miracle, the steward he’d entrusted