Confessor (6 page)

“Yes. I’ve spoken to the Old Man. He has some rather good ideas. Want to hear them?”

“Shoot, old sheep.”

“You should have someone with you …”

“I got Ginger.”

“He’s muscle, Herb, and you just might need muscle. Pete tells me whoever did the thing is a pro; but you know that already.”

“Sure. Okay, Ginger’s muscle.”

“Any ideas about who you’d like with you to run interference?”

“You, old sport, like in the old days when you were my junior.”

“Be sensible, Herb. The Chief says Bitsy. She’s already down there and she knows enough. I think he wants to keep her, in this time of dwindling resources and people taking golden handshakes. Wants to give her experience.”

“She looking after Carole?”

“Not for much longer. I’ve already got a pair of nurses on their way down.”

Herbie grunted. For nurses read minders and mind readers. “Why?”

“It has been suggested that Carole should be moved into the luxury apartments …”

“Leave her home?” Slightly shocked.

“She’ll be near enough. For her own safety, Herb. You’ll have to tell her.”

“Great. I show her the bits of metal that, apart from a model kit that’s his bones, is all that’s left of her husband, then I tell her she has to get out of her home.”

“That’s about it. You will stay there—in the Dower House—with Ginger doing the minding and Bitsy running the errands. You’ll have peace and quiet, plus all Gus’s documents, including what he’s done on his memoir. Go through it like—”

“Grease through a duck, sure, I know.”

“It’s handy, Herb.”

“Sure, it’s also insulting to Carole.”

“Herb, for all we know, the dark and lovely Carole could be our first suspect. Isn’t that the old rule? Wife is the first one you turn over.”

Big Herbie, cramped in the phone booth, gave another of his long sighs. “His wife is a former member of the Office as well. But okay, I call you from the Dower House. Is the line clear or have we got a dodgy bit of electronics there?”

“Safe as the Bank of England.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“Do it, Herb.”

“Okay. You’ll have to pick up the pieces.”

“Of course, Herb. You know the Office’ll stand by you.” Pause for twenty seconds, ten seconds longer than necessary. “We’ll also stand by you when the anti-terrorist Plod comes calling.”

“When’ll that be?”

“Three, maybe four days. They’re clearing a DCI from other work.”

“Keep him at bay, Tony. Get him to check out those two car bombs FFIRA say they didn’t do, eh?”

“We’ll try, but we’re right behind you, old friend. Watch your back.”

Like hell, Kruger thought, easing himself from the booth. “Let’s go,” he said without looking at Ginger. “Warminster. The place they call the Dower House. Where the old main entrance used to be.”

“Know it well, guv. Residence of the late Mr. Keene, right?”

“And the lovely widow Keene, yes.” Herbie reflected that he truly did not know how he would do this.

T
HE FACILITY KNOWN AS
Warminster is very much alive and well in spite of the rumors, the reorganization, the shortage of government funds for the Office—apart from the much-criticized two hundred million sterling for the new headquarters—now the Soviets have shouted
Pax
. In fact, in the past three years some of the security has been beefed up against the possible threat of terrorism. In reality, nobody is about to close the place down or sell it off.

Since the demise of the old Evil Empire, the world has become a more dangerous place, and some of those dangers were being addressed right here in the complex called Warminster.

The huge, rambling old house and its estate had originally been known as Fenley Hall. Indeed, that is still the correct post office address, and it is shown as such on ordnance survey maps. The Fenleys’ reign as part of England’s aristocracy had been relatively short. The baronetcy was created in Georgian times, and the first baronet, Sir Charles Fenley, had built the big house, where he lived in grand style and rode roughshod over his local tenant farmers.

Only two generations later the Fenley line died out, but during that period certain additions were made to the property. These included the building of the Dower House by the last Fenley, Sir William—or Billy Tuppence, as he was known—as a place to farm off his mother while he attempted to impregnate his wife, and several other ladies, in the big house, other houses, fields and, in one case, the stable of a coaching inn on the Brighton Road.

All this was to no avail. So perished the Fenley line of succession. The entire estate was sold off in the 1920s and acquired by the Office in the late 1930s, just in time to be used in the training of heroes who fought secretly for King, Country and Empire in the dark days between 1940 and 1944. At Warminster, and many other places, men and women were trained, then sent off to work inside Fortress Europe, as Hitler and
his
Evil Empire called the bulk of the imprisoned continent. Many did not return to Warminster; a large number were blown, but escaped back to England, home and, in some cases, beauty. The majority were not so lucky.

The Dower House, while of Victorian origin, had been built in Georgian style—and very successfully at that. Next to the big house it was a cottage, but put it out into the world and the Dower House would have comfortably served a family of eight, with room left over.

It stood close to where the original gates to Fenley Hall had welcomed callers into the long drive, which twisted and turned through high greenery, at last rounding a spectacular bend to reveal the main house in all its splendor. Those gates had long gone, replaced by red brick to match the remainder of the high, and effective, wall that surrounded the estate. The main entrance now lay a quarter of a mile back down the road towards Knook Camp, and while the gates looked like the original wrought iron, they were, in fact, steel—which could be electrified when necessary. They were also, since 1991, the
only
way you could get into the grounds.

This was a trick in itself, for the main gates were monitored by security staff, hand-picked these days and mostly from former military backgrounds. When a car arrived at the main gates, the vehicle was scrutinized via closed-circuit TV and the gates were opened from a secure room within the main house. You could never arrive unexpectedly at Warminster, for there was a code word, changed daily, and the authorization for a visit had to come in directly from the Office HQ in London.

Big Herbie Kruger had bad memories of the Dower House. As they approached it on that July afternoon, he even experienced old dreads. On visits to Warminster over the past few years, he had made certain never to go near the place. The memories still had claws and teeth.

In the days before the luxury “guest suites” had been built as an underground complex away from the main house, the Dower House had been a kind of detention barracks, used almost exclusively for the interrogation of defectors and those who had possibly strayed.

Herbie’s only true sin against the Office had been that time when, through folly and risk-taking, he had been trapped for too long behind the then sinister and flourishing Berlin Wall. On his return he had spent over a year as a guest of the office in the Dower House, undergoing a long, weary and unsettling interrogation conducted mainly by his friend Gus Keene and the young Carole Coles, as she was then. Even Herb, wise to the ways of fleshly lusts, had not suspected that Gus was two-timing his wife, Angela, with the delightful, and very young, Ms. Coles.

Eventually, Kruger had been exonerated, but his time in the Dower House still haunted his dreams. Frankly, at this moment, he was more on edge because of the enforced visit to the place than because of having to talk to the grieving widow Keene. Yet, he considered, Gus’s own study would be alive with memories.

Some of his fear subsided as the car swept around the wall of rhododendron bushes and azaleas to reveal the glowing redbrick house with its large sash windows flanking an oak front door, the five windows above that, plus the two dormers in the roof. The Dower House had not been spruced up with just a paint job and work on the bricks and slates. Now a small garden had been built to surround it, the border marked by what appeared to be genuine old iron railings behind which lupin vied with rose and delphinium. It was a far cry from the colorless, stark exterior Herb had known in his day.

Ginger was three paces behind him as he walked to the door, and his finger was still poised over the bell push when the door swung open and Carole Keene almost catapulted out, her fists bunched and swinging.

“Who, Herbie? What bastards did this to him? They said you’d find out. Bloody Worboys and the Fat Boy say you might already know, and C’s convinced you’re close to the truth. So, who, Herb? Who’d do this to my lovely Gus?” It all came tumbling out, eyes red with anger, not tears, small fists pummeling against Herbie’s barrel of a chest. C is how members of the SIS refer to the Chief, and it is said the initial comes from the first Chief of what was then the foreign section of the Secret Service Bureau, a man whose lengthy string of names was usually abbreviated to Cumming. That his real name was Mansfield George Smith is neither here nor there.

“Who, Herb? What idiots? Gus was the only man I ever looked at twice and they’ve pulped him. For Christ’s sake, Herb, who?”

Herbie had never seen Carole in hysterics before. Serious, yes; moved to tears on two or three occasions; but never this uncontrolled fury of anger, loosed on him. He caught her wrists and barked sharply, “Carole! Hold it! Calm down!” But Carole swept her arms down, in classic break hold, pressuring his thumbs and banging him in the chest.

“Not another bloody airy-fairy-Lillian!” She all but screamed, turning on her heel and marching back into the cool hallway of the house. “If you can’t tell me now, don’t bother me with platitudes, Herb. Not
me
”—thumping her own chest—“not
me
, not Carole Cool, mistress of this place and beloved widow of darling Gus. Out, Herbie! Out and find the sods!” She slammed across the hallway and through a door before Herbie could catch her again. He ended up in the tiled hall, looking at the slender figure of Bitsy Williams, who moved in front of the door through which Carole had disappeared, as though barring his entrance.

“She’s been like this since it happened.” Bitsy had an almost breathless voice, throaty, low. Like a cello, Herb thought, but then reflected that he often thought women had voices like cellos, only to find that, on closer listening, they were flutes. “Not a tear,” Bitsy continued. “No real grief. Just this terrible anger against everyone and everything. She used ‘language’ at C on the telephone. Told him that he should be able to protect his f-ing stars, even if they were retired. Never seen anything like it. I’m Bitsy, by the way. Bitsy Williams.”

“Ja! Yes. Yes, I know.” Herb stared at her, considering whether the chauvinist pig gossip from inside the Office was true. Bitsy was just on the wrong side of forty, he thought. Not quite desperate yet, but fairly close to the border. Her legs did, indeed, seem to reach up to her armpits. As she moved, so her skirt floated over her thighs, which appeared to be very high. In motion she was like a beautiful race horse, though there was certainly nothing horsey about her face.

“And you’re Mr. Kruger.” She came close to him. For a second, long fingers untroubled by rings touched his sleeve. “I was Pucky’s friend. I was so sorry when …”

That was like a blade of ice piercing the big man’s heart. Pucky Curtiss had been the second great female event in his life, an event that finally toppled into grief. He knew that emotion showed in his eyes, but he blinked it away, and from behind the door came music. Falla:
El amor brujo—Love, the Magician
—the “Ritual Fire Dance.”

“She’s played that a hundred times since I arrived,” Bitsy told him.

Herb nodded. “Could have been
their
song.” He tried a little smile in an attempt to lighten the load. “The anger has to turn to the weeping. It’ll come. I know what she’s going through.” Then, as though breaking from some enchantment of his own making, he asked if Bitsy knew what was to happen.

“No?” Tentative, even a little frightened. “No, what’s to happen?”

“I’m here to evict her. …”

“Oh, Jesus …”

“For her own good, and for
our
good also in finding whoever did this. She could be in danger. We could all be in danger. It has the distinct scent of Middle East terrorism, Ms. Williams …”

“Bitsy. Please, Bitsy.”

He nodded his big head. “Sure. They’re sending down a pair of nurses and she’s to be moved into the Guest Quarters. You, Ms. Bitsy, are to be my gofer, and Ginger here is to lie across the door and make sure we don’t get spooked. Okay?”

“If those are the orders, yes. Yes, of course it’s okay. I’ll do whatever you ask. It’s an honor to—”

“Don’ say it, Bitsy. Honor, schmonor. I’m just a burned-out case who wants to find out the whys and whos. In many ways I loved old Gus. Unnerstand? I’ll talk to Carole now, okay?”

She stepped aside and he softly opened the door.

“Hey, Carole. It’s me. Herbie. Remember?” Softly not to alarm her, quietly closing the door behind him.

Her back was to him as she sat on a settee covered in a rich blue silklike material. She said nothing and did not move. Around them the luscious strings and throbbing rhythms of Manuel de Falla’s dazzling ballet score worked their own magic ritual.

Herbie took a step forward. He felt like a child stalking a small bird, afraid it would up and fly away before he got close enough to touch it, and a thousand images passed through his mind.

When he was first brought to England, having proved his skills as a young teenager in postwar Berlin, someone had recommended that he read poetry to help him with his English. Poetry and English history, he recalled, and he had found great solace in both. Not as great a comfort as he later discovered in music, but enough, so that he continued to read poems almost indiscriminately. The first time he had set eyes on Carole, he thought of her as a schoolgirl. She had that fresh lithe kind of compact body which would keep her looking young until probably early middle age, and her complexion was that of a girl: clear, pink, peaches and cream, skin without a blemish. She was short and slim, and she moved with the unconscious charm of a fifteen- or sixteen-year old. That first time, he remembered a poem by John Betjeman—Poet Laureate, now gone—about a young girl called Myfanwy.