House of the Hanged (10 page)

Rumours and counter-rumours were still flying when, ten days after the assassination, Leonard turned up in Paris to brief Tom. By this time the true identity of the assassin had been established. He wasn't Czechoslovakian, as his fake passport suggested, but a Bulgarian national of Macedonian extraction. Vlado Chernozemski was a man with a violent past and close ties to IMRO, the Macedonian revolutionary movement – so close, in fact, that he had once been the chauffeur of IMRO's leader, Ivan Mihailov.

A predictable enough picture of disaffected Yugoslav revolutionaries hell-bent on regicide was beginning to emerge. Nevertheless, certain questions remained un answered, not least: Why had King Alexander been provided with such a woefully inadequate security detail by the French authorities? And who had assured him that his ninety-strong personal
guard de corps
could quite happily remain aboard the
Dubrovnik
? And why were there running boards on the motor car, when everyone knew that these afforded a would-be assassin a distinct advantage? And how exactly had Chernozemski managed to lay his hands on a state-of-the-art German machine pistol capable of dispensing death with such efficiency?

Leonard's concerns lay elsewhere. In fact, he was considerably less troubled by the death of King Alexander and what it meant for the future of Yugoslavia than he was by the slaying of the other passenger in the back of the motor car, Jean Louis Barthou. Leonard had a lot of respect for France's Minister of Foreign Affairs, both personally and professionally. Barthou – like Leonard and his boss at the Foreign Office, Sir Robert Vansittart – had always harboured a deep and instinctual mistrust of Germany's charismatic new Chancellor, Adolf Hitler. In this respect they differed somewhat from the British government of the day, who welcomed Hitler's strengthening of the German nation both as a buffer against the Soviet Union and as a counter-balance to France's dominant influence in Europe. That was often the way of things, though; the Foreign Office and the government didn't always see eye-to-eye. Vansittart was still in a rage about Prime Minister Baldwin's capitulation to Hitler over German naval rearmament.

Barthou, meanwhile, had been working tirelessly to hem Hitler in and keep Germany contained, forging pacts, treaties and ententes wherever he could. To the south, he was courting Mussolini to ensure that the Italians never joined hands with their fellow Fascists in the Third Reich. To the east lay the ‘Little Entente' between Yugoslavia, Rumania and Czechoslovakia, and Barthou backed it to the hilt. He had even persuaded the Czechs and Rumanians to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, whose membership of the League of Nations he had championed so successfully just before his death.

On that grey October day in Marseilles Europe had lost its wily and bewhiskered little puppet-master, and the only evident beneficiary of Barthou's untimely demise appeared to be Adolf Hitler. What Leonard wanted to know, what he wanted Tom to ascertain, was whether Barthou had been an unfortunate victim caught in the crossfire or whether he had also been an intended target of the assassin.

The French were being very cagey about the specifics of the attack, though not necessarily because they had anything to hide. The country was caught up in a maelstrom of recriminations and accusations, with heads already beginning to roll. The Mayor of Marseilles, the Minister of the Interior, the Director of National Security – all had been forced to resign. It would be a good while yet before the facts began to emerge, but Leonard wasn't prepared to wait that long, hence his approach to Tom.

Marseilles lay to the west of Le Rayol, beyond Toulon, no more than a three-hour drive away. Tom knew the city well enough, but only to depart from and arrive at by boat; he had never been inclined to linger there. The place had a tough, coarse air to it, an impression reinforced by the natives, who, though friendly enough, seemed to slink furtively about the streets as if permanently engaged in nefarious activities of some kind or other. This was certainly the reputation of Marseilles, one which it had failed to shake off over the centuries: a city where sailors, traders, adventurers, smugglers and other ne'er-do-wells could happily gather from all four corners of the globe to engage in shady dealings. It was, in fact, exactly the sort of place where a foreign monarch might meet a violent end.

It had been easy enough to pose as a journalist, considerably harder to avoid the genuine British news-papermen who could have fingered him for an impostor. Fortunately, they were staying en masse at the Hôtel du Louvre et de la Paix and rarely ventured forth from the bar, which they'd colonized. Tom took a room at the Hôtel de Noailles and set about his enquiries.

Eyewitnesses to the assassination were thick on the ground and eager to talk, more so if a drink or a meal was on offer. There were, however, glaring discrepancies in their accounts of the incident. Some maintained that Chernozemski had not been operating alone and that his accomplices, hidden in the crowd, had also opened fire on the motor car. Others swore blind that the extra shots had come from the police, who had panicked, firing blindly at Chernozemski and hitting innocent bystanders in the process.

There was more of a consensus when it came to the fate of Jean Louis Barthou. The French Minister of Foreign Affairs had, apparently, been hit only once – in the upper arm – but the lone bullet had severed an artery. Had the wound been correctly tourniqueted he might well have survived; however, he had been neglected in the ensuing pandemonium and had tragically bled to death. There seemed to be no evidence that Barthou had been directly targeted. Indeed, most were of the firm opinion that if Chernozemski had wanted Barthou dead, his body would have been riddled with bullets, like that of King Alexander. The King and Barthou had been seated side by side on the rear seat; moreover, Chernozemski had been armed with a machine pistol.

Leonard's suspicion that Hitler might have orchestrated the attack in order to rid himself of the troublesome little Frenchman was not, it seemed, supported by the testimonies of the eyewitnesses interviewed by Tom. Evidence had just come to light suggesting Croatian collusion in the assassination – a sort of joint enterprise with their fellow Macedonian revolutionaries – but there was nothing to indicate that the conspiracy extended beyond the boundaries of the Yugoslav kingdom.

That all changed on Tom's last night in Marseilles, when he fell into the company of an entertaining young Italian. Emilio Nicoletti had about him the indefinable air of a man who has never in his life needed to earn a crust. He claimed to be a journalist for the Catholic newspaper
L'Italia
– a claim which later proved to be true – and he seemed set on drinking himself into a stupor. The reason for this only became clear once Tom and he had abandoned the bar in the Hôtel de Noailles for a restaurant down at the old port. They were both bent over bowls of
bouillabaisse
when Emilio dropped his bombshell, glumly announcing that he was staring at the biggest scoop of his short career, and yet there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. He had no choice but to let it slip away.

‘It's as though I'm looking down the barrel at a Bengal tiger,' he mumbled, ‘but the trigger's jammed solid beneath my finger.'

This metaphor confirmed Tom's impression of a young man accustomed to the finer things in life. It also displayed a considerate quality on the Italian's part. Bengal tigers were, primarily, residents of India, and therefore the high sport of Englishmen.

When Tom pressed him to elaborate on the statement, Emilio explained that the Croatian Ustasha – outlawed from Yugoslavia, and recently implicated in the assassination of King Alexander – had been operating quite freely from bases within Italy for a number of years now. It seemed a preposterous notion that Mussolini should have offered them safe harbour, and Tom said as much. Emilio was adamant, though, almost indignantly so. He had grown up in Parma, but his family owned a country estate to the south, deep in the hills of Emilia-Romagna. He said he knew for a fact that there was a Croatian camp at Borgotaro, even if the foreigners who came and went always claimed to be Bulgarians. Gunfire could sometimes be heard emanating from the compound of farm buildings, suggesting that military training of some kind took place there.

One place name was enough to go on; Tom didn't push the point further. This was fine by Emilio, who, fearful that he had already said too much, clammed up, sinking into a morose and inebriated silence.

Tom left Marseilles at first light, briefly breaking the journey at Toulon to fire off a telegram to Leonard:

Arriving home, he unpacked and repacked his suitcase, had a ten minute romp on the floor with Hector round at Paulette's house, and was back on the road within the hour. He spent that first night in Menton, just shy of the Italian border. Torrential rain the following day slowed his passage, and by nightfall he had only made it as far as Portofino, remarkably drab and deserted out of season. He woke the next morning to bright sunshine and a blustering wind which had dried off the roads by the time he cut inland, wending his way up into the hills. The road twisted through wild and mountainous terrain, climbing and plunging over a series of high passes from Liguria into Emilia-Romagna, all the way to Borgotaro.

The town lay stretched out beside a river, low in a valley, with densely wooded slopes rising sharply to the north and south. There was a remote, almost Alpine, quality to the place. Only the architecture, punctuated with exuberant Italian Baroque, told you that this wasn't the foothills of some soaring Swiss range.

Tom made straight for a bar in the main piazza, where he ordered a brandy – anything to loosen the tension in his arms and shoulders brought on by wrestling with the Renault's obstinate steering wheel for the past few hours. The bar also served food, a limited menu of three dishes, all of which featured
porcini
mushrooms in some form or another.
Porcini
mushrooms were, unsurprisingly, a speciality of the region. The barman told him so when he took Tom's order. He also asked, ‘Are you French?'

He had obviously registered the number plate of the Renault parked out front.

‘English,' Tom replied. ‘But I live in France.'

‘Why? Why not Italy?'

He wasn't joking; he was genuinely curious.

‘It's just the way things turned out,' Tom shrugged.

‘And what brings you to Borgotaro?'

‘A friend suggested I visit if I was ever passing. He spent some time here a few years ago. A Bulgarian friend.'

‘What's his name? Maybe I knew him.'

‘Andrey Vazov.'

It was a conflation of the current prime minister and a long-dead poet – the only two Bulgarian names Tom could recall with any certainty.

Unsurprisingly, it rang no bells with the barman. ‘And he didn't tell you about the
porcini
mushrooms?'

‘I don't think he got out much. He was a refugee, you see, in some kind of camp near here.'

‘Oh.'

The barman was far more forthcoming when he returned with the food. He said he knew of the camp that Tom had mentioned, and he gave a fairly clear idea of where it was located.

‘A lot of the people here don't like the idea of all those foreigners so close. But me,' he added magnanimously, ‘I don't mind, just so long as they keep themselves to themselves.'

It wasn't a camp so much as a large farm. Set amidst trees on rising ground to the west of the town, there was one dirt track in and out, lined with sorry-looking cypresses. Tom made two passes before finding a narrow lane which wound its way up into the hills behind the farm.

It was an old device, one he had employed before. Few people suspected a painter, even a bad one. Tom stuck to watercolours, one of the few fields of artistic endeavour in which the British still excelled. Sadly, Tom didn't. He had opted for a style borrowed almost entirely wholesale from the sketchbooks of Edward Lear, if only because the sparse, bare beauty of Lear's landscapes – a few elegant pencil lines and some pale washes of colour – lent itself to easy imitation.

Tom was happily ensconced on the hillside above the camp and about to embark on his second painting when he saw the men approaching. He knew immediately that something was wrong. How many people went tramping through the countryside in gabardine suits and leather shoes? They were Italian, and they made no bones about their business. They asked him politely but firmly to accompany them.

Tom knew the type, because he had once been the type, and it was immediately clear that they weren't to be underestimated. Even as they accompanied him back to his car, they kept a good distance between themselves, presenting a split and ever-shifting target, not that he had any plans to tackle them. He'd had forty-eight hours to work out his cover story; all he needed to do was stick to it while making the indignant noises of the innocent from time to time.

Tom rode in the front passenger seat of their sedan, while the younger of the pair, a tall and bug-eyed fellow, followed in the Renault. Their destination proved to the headquarters of the local
Carabinieri
, a walled and wired compound on the far side of Borgotaro. It was to be Tom's home for the next three days.

The two men, whose names he never discovered, occupied a small building that stood alone behind the main administration block. It consisted of two offices, a toilet, and a cell with a comfortable pallet bed and a postage-stamp window set high up in the wall. Tom's demand that he be allowed to place a call to the nearest British legation was deflected with the feeble excuse that, unfortunately, all the telephone lines were down at present.

The questioning didn't start until the evening, by which time the Renault had been stripped clean. All of Tom's belongings had been thoroughly searched and neatly laid out on the floor of one of the offices. His passport was sitting on the desk, along with copies of his first two books, which he'd packed at the last minute in case of just such an eventuality, deciding it best to fly under his own flag on this one. Although his identity and occupation were established beyond doubt, it didn't appear to have allayed the suspicions of the secret service men. Their first question threw him.