House of the Hanged (19 page)

The track dipped sharply before levelling off and worming around a deep bowl in the hills, a vast corrugated amphitheatre, like a Japanese fan, which fell away to his right. The track had been crudely hacked out of the slope – sheer rock on his left side, an unparapetted drop on the other. It was almost perfect, certainly close enough to what he had envisaged, and it would have to do. The Renault was beginning to suffer, one of the rear wheels thumping in protest, its suspension gone.

He checked to confirm that the sedan was still on his tail, estimating that it was four or five seconds behind him, and when the track veered to the left, unsighting him beyond an outcrop, he hit the brakes as hard as he dared. The Renault skidded and shuddered to a halt, the rear end swinging out and blocking the track. For a foolish moment, he imagined fleeing the vehicle, but he rapidly calculated that the best he could hope for was to recover the Beretta which had long since bounced off his lap on to the floor, staying low and preparing himself for the impact.

He saw nothing. He heard almost nothing; the blood was beating so loudly in his ears. There was a dim whistle, followed by a brief silence, then a more distinct sound of shattering wood. He saw it in his mind's eye: the sedan tearing around the bend, the driver finding his path blocked and yanking the steering wheel to the right. He couldn't go left, into solid rock. It had to be right, into the void. In the immediacy of the moment, what kind of man would have chosen the third way: straight ahead, into the Renault? A madman. It was inconceivable.

This is exactly what Tom had imagined, and yet he stepped from the car a little stunned that he had managed to turn the tables on his pursuers so suddenly, so completely. They were down there somewhere, lost in the thick tangle of oaks and underbrush blanketing the slope. He could make out the spot where the sedan had left the track, shearing off a young tree close to its roots and gouging a path through the undergrowth. The sun beat down with a biblical heat and the cicadas kept up their pulsating chorus, undaunted. The rest was silence.

Tom checked the Beretta and set off down the slope. One whole side of an oak tree had been stripped clean of its bark by a glancing blow, but there was still no sign of the sedan. For a moment, he saw the driver expertly working the wheel, picking a path through the trees, the persistent tug of the dense undergrowth gradually slowing the car's passage until it drew to a halt. In which case, the two men were out there and on the move. They might even have him in their sights right now. A sudden fear felled him, dropping him into a crouch, and it was a good minute or so before he was confident enough to continue on his way.

He needn't have worried. The sedan had indeed come to a halt, but with its front end concertinaed against the trunk of a large and gnarled oak. The tree seemed to have lost none of its grip on the thin soil with the impact. It rose straight and proud and defiant. The two men, by contrast, lay twisted in their seats.

The driver was dead, impaled on the steering column, his hands still clasping the snapped-off wheel. The passenger was slumped to one side, his face a crimson mask. Whether he had forced open his door or whether it had burst open on impact was hard to say. Either way, he was alive and struggling to come to his senses, like some collapsed drunk in the street. Aside from the deep gash on his forehead, he appeared to be intact, and Tom was figuring out how best to remove the bulky figure from the crippled vehicle when the petrol ignited, sending a carpet of blue flames dancing through the sandy soil beneath the engine.

His instinct was to extinguish the fire immediately. No man, whoever he was, however evil his intentions, deserved to die such a hideous death – immolated alive. Dropping to his knees, he scooped handfuls of soil on to the licking flames. Sensing that he was losing the battle, and fearing that an explosion was imminent, he turned his attention back to the passenger, who was regarding him with vacant, pleading eyes. Tom scrambled to his feet and wrestled the man out of the car as best he could, falling back, winded, under the dead weight. He hooked his hands beneath the man's armpits and hauled him as far from the vehicle as his strength permitted, propping him up against the base of a tree.

A deep-rooted pragmatism kicked in. What if the dead driver was in possession of identity documents? What if the car contained other essential evidence? He had to prevent the vehicle going up in flames, if only because the plume of smoke would act as an unwelcome summons to all who saw it. He still needed to contain the situation as best he could.

Hurrying back to the sedan, he yanked open the crumpled bonnet cover. There were flames playing around the engine block, but he extinguished them swiftly enough with handfuls of soil. A branch was brought into action to break up the spread of fire beneath the sedan towards the fuel tank at the rear. He then scrabbled round the vehicle on all fours, sweeping more dirt beneath it, and when finally satisfied that he'd doused the blaze, he stamped out a few smouldering shrubs before they could ignite in earnest.

Only then did he turn his attention back to the passenger. He hadn't moved from the base of the tree, but he now had his arm raised, a pistol levelled straight at Tom. He was blinking the blood from his eyes, but the hand holding the weapon was surprisingly steady. There was certainly no question of Tom making a move for the Beretta in his hip pocket.

He was dead meat.

‘Go in peace,' said the man in Russian.

Tom stared, disbelieving. It was a phrase layered deep into the beaten gold leaf of his memory. He saw a baby-faced priest in a side chapel in Petrograd, and he saw himself, gun in hand, uttering the same words to a terrified young agent of the Cheka with whom he had collided after fleeing the cathedral. The intervening years had filled out his frame considerably, but the same lean and handsome face lay beneath the gore. It had to be the same man he had spared all those years ago.

‘I won't say it again.' The man spoke in French now, and he wagged the barrel of his pistol up the slope to make his point.

‘You need a doctor.'

The man snorted dismissively. ‘I need a priest.'

He wasn't dying, but he obviously believed he was as good as dead. And he was probably right. The NKVD, as the Soviet intelligence organization was now known, didn't look kindly on failure. They'd pin the Order of the Red Banner on your chest one day then shoot you in the same chest the next as an enemy of the people.

Tom could have walked away, maybe he should have, but he found himself saying, ‘I know a place with both – a place where they won't ask questions and no one will ever find you.'

The man wiped the blood from his eyes with the back of his forearm. The gun remained trained on Tom. ‘Where is this place?'

‘Up in the hills.'

The man hesitated before replying. ‘Why should I trust you?'

‘I don't know,' shrugged Tom. ‘Because you don't have a choice?'

The man placed the muzzle of the pistol against his own temple and regarded Tom enquiringly.

‘That's not a choice – that's cowardice.'

‘It's a better death than the one waiting for me.'

‘I got out.'

‘Really?' replied the man, sceptically. ‘So what am I doing here?'

‘Maybe you should ask yourself that same question.'

It was a few moments before the man lowered the pistol and said, ‘Help me up.'

Tom approached warily and hauled him to his feet. ‘Can you walk?'

‘I think so.'

‘Put your arm round my shoulder.'

‘Is it a bad wound?'

Tom peered at the man's forehead. It was a T-shaped wound just below the hairline, deep, and pulsing blood.

‘Not as bad as the one you were about to inflict upon yourself,' he said.

The man laughed weakly.

They didn't speak again until they had struggled back up the slope to the Renault and were on the move, wending their way slowly back through the hills towards the main road.

‘Who was your friend?' Tom asked.

‘He wasn't my friend. I only just met him.'

He said he had been summoned from Paris with instructions to take a room at the Grand Hôtel in Le Lavandou, where he was to wait until contacted. That contact had occurred less than an hour ago, when the man now skewered on the sedan's steering column had knocked on the door of his hotel room. They had sat in a parked car and they had waited and watched a building. He claimed to have recognized Tom immediately, despite the passage of the years, and when Tom had emerged from the building and driven off in his car, they had followed him.

Tom knew better than to take this account at face value, but now wasn't the time to dig out the exact truth. He did, however, need to establish one thing which hadn't been made perfectly clear.

‘You saw me enter the building?'

‘Yes. And we followed you when you came out and got into your car.' He turned and looked at Tom with a groggy, unfocused gaze. ‘They'll send others. You know that, don't you?'

‘How long do I have?'

‘They'll come from Paris, like me. Maybe twenty-four hours.'

‘You live in Paris?' Tom asked.

‘For a few years now.'

‘Hunting down White Guards and Trotskyists?'

‘If I'd known I was going to get a lecture, I would have shot you. I still might.'

‘What's your name?' asked Tom.

‘Pyotr.'

‘Well, in case you hadn't noticed, Pyotr, you no longer have your pistol – I do.'

Pyotr grunted distractedly, beginning to display the symptoms of a serious concussion.

The moment Hélène opened the door, her face fell. ‘My God,' she gasped. ‘What happened to you?'

Tom gave a furtive check over his shoulder and slipped inside, pushing the door shut behind him and bolting it.

‘It's a long story,' he said. ‘Although I don't have long to tell it.'

He had parked the car in Place Massillon, Hyères' main square, travelling the rest of the way on foot, taking a circuitous route through the streets, doubling back on himself every so often to ensure that he wasn't being followed. He had also scoured Hélène's street thoroughly, checking each of the parked cars in turn to establish that the house wasn't under surveillance. Only then had he mounted the front steps of her stolid late-Victorian villa.

He had been so distracted by the events of the past two hours that it didn't occur to him until he tugged on the bell-pull that the new man in Hélène's life, the Polish count whom Benoît had mentioned, might actually be inside.

He wasn't; Hélène was on her own, and looking more beautiful than ever. A month in Greece had darkened her skin to the colour of light mahogany and her hair, pinned back behind her dainty little ears, had the lustre of black silk about it. He searched for signs in her appearance of the news she was about to break to him, but her pale lemon summer frock was tight and alluring, cut low at the front to reveal the necklace he had bought her during their trip to Saint-Jean-de-Luz. She was also wearing the perfume she knew he loved.

Maybe she was intending to sleep with him one more time, a courtesy to their long and slightly bizarre relationship. The devil on his shoulder told him to take what was on offer; after brushing with death twice in the past few days, the urge to lunge at anything life-affirming was almost overwhelming. He repressed the impulse, though. He wanted her gone, far away, as soon as possible, until the storm tossing his life had blown itself out.

He had drained the tall glass of water she gave him long before his story was finished. Hélène sat in stunned silence while he spoke, perched demurely on the divan in the drawing room, and for the first time he told her the truth of his past, of his involvement with the Secret Intelligence Service, Britain's equivalent of her own country's Deuxième Bureau. He left out the more sordid details, but he couldn't hold everything back, not if he was to convince her of the seriousness of the situation, of the very real danger in which he had unwittingly placed her. He had to make clear there was a strong likelihood that the people bent on killing him knew of her existence, and that they might well use her to get to him.

When he was finished, she rose silently and approached the overstuffed armchair in which he was seated, a look of compassion in her eyes. The notion that she might be about to stoop down and hug him was swiftly dispelled by the stinging slap across his cheek.

She walked to the window, crossing her arms in front of her and staring outside. Without turning, she said, ‘You should have told me before.'

‘All this has only just happened.'

She turned now. ‘You should still have told me before.'

‘I know. I understand.'

‘No, you don't,' she fired back firmly. ‘How can you possibly know what's in my mind? I don't care that you lied to me. I don't even care that you've placed me in this situation. I
care
,' she said with a bitter emphasis, ‘that things could have been very different between us if I'd only known who you really were.' She paused. ‘It explains so much about you. About us.'

Benoît would suffer for it, but he had to say it. ‘I know you've met someone – someone important to you – and I understand.'

It took her a moment to process his words. ‘Oh, such magnanimity!'

Tom felt his own anger rising. It even carried him to his feet. ‘What do you want? You want me to fight for you? Is that what you want? Believe me, you're far better off with your Polish count.'

‘I don't doubt it. At least he's a man who wouldn't tell me what's best for me, a man who might allow me to make up my own mind.'

‘I'm not sure you've quite grasped what's happening here. Your life is in danger. You have to pack a suitcase and you have to disappear – immediately.'

‘I'm not sure you've quite grasped that I find that idea rather thrilling.'

Tom heaved a conciliatory sigh and took a couple of steps towards her. ‘Hélène, listen, I haven't been entirely honest with you.'

He held up his hands, the hands which had held her, caressed her, wiped the tears from her cheeks, pulled the splinter from her foot in Avignon . . .

‘These hands have taken the lives of two men in the past two days. They've also killed before that. They are soiled, defiled. They will always be defiled. That may not bother you now, but one day it will. And I would think less of you if it didn't.'

He could see that his words had struck home. Fear clouded her expression.

‘I thought I'd buried the man I used to be, but others have dug him up again . . . and I'm going to have to call on his services if I'm to get through this.'

Hélène stepped close, took his hands in hers and raised them to her lips, kissing each of his palms in turn, anointing them. It was such a tender and unexpected gesture, but there was also something final in it.

‘I'm so sorry.'

She shook her head, dismissing the apology. ‘Where shall I go?'

‘Somewhere obscure.'

She thought on it for a moment. ‘My sister has a friend who's a painter. She lives in the Corrèze. Saillac. It's a small village in the middle of nowhere.'

‘The middle of nowhere is good. We'll find you a train in Toulon to get you as close as possible.'

‘I'll go and pack,' she said quietly.

What I wouldn't give to be going with you
, he thought forlornly as he watched her leave the room.
Carefree, unencumbered, without fear – the way things used to be.

He didn't know the Corrèze intimately, but he had motored through the
département
on a couple of occasions, and he could picture himself there with her: feasting on
foie gras
and
magret de canard
in some medieval village beside the Dordogne river, walking in the humped hills scattered with stout stone farmhouses, coiled damp and spent on a lumpy mattress beneath the crooked beams of some ancient
auberge
.

Food had always been a determining factor in their jaunts around France. The last had been back in spring, to the Charente-Inférieure in search of oysters. They had taken a small villa at Ronce-les-Bains, and when not gorging themselves on shellfish they had cycled through the pine forests south of the town to a deserted, dune-backed beach which ran straight as a plumb line for ten kilometres or more, and there they had frolicked naked in the wild Atlantic surf, the undertow plucking at their heels like the hands of the sea people.

Would things really be different between them now if he had come clean with her back then? He doubted it. For all her words, she would have been horrified by the revelation. His honesty would have shattered the spell that bound them during their trips away. Their expeditions had never been conceived as building blocks to something more lasting and meaningful. Rather, they had been momentary explosions of indulgence, of sexual abandon, played out in some distant corner of the country, anonymously, far from the eyes of those back home.

This was the tacit agreement into which they had entered, presumably because it had suited them both. He had not coerced her into it, and she had never called for a break in the pattern, for a more public display of the close intimacy which fired them when they were off on one of their breaks.

Tom took a cigarette from the jade box on the side table and lit it, holding the smoke down before exhaling.

He could see what he was doing; he was already writing the obituary of their relationship, growing a great scab of indifference, because if he stopped to really think about the gaping wound which had just appeared in his life, he was liable to find himself swallowed up by it.

The dried blood on his shirt sleeve wrenched him back to the present and the hard realities hedging him in on all sides. However, like the stains on the famous shroud he had visited in Turin two winters ago, it also held the promise of some deeper salvation.

Pyotr's blood, the blood of his enemy, a man whose wounds were now being attended to by Carthusian brothers at their sprawling monastery high in the hills near Collobrières. There was an almost mystical circularity to the chain of events, a cycle which had started with a few words of kindness uttered by a young priest in a Russian cathedral. Tom had taken those words and had handed them on to another, who in turn had carried them with him over the years, before handing them back and taking refuge in a community of holy men.

If he hadn't lost his faith long ago, he might have been tempted to detect some divine purpose at play, but all belief in God's providence had died with Irina back in Petrograd, hurling him into a darkness from which he had finally dragged himself, years later, by sheer force of will.

Yes, he had spared the young Pyotr beneath that street lamp in Petrograd, but the following night he had dispatched Zakharov without so much as a flutter of conscience. And when fleeing the country by the northern route, he had killed again, quite effortlessly. The guide he had paid to see him safely through the snowy wastes and across the border into Finland had chosen instead to hand him over to the Bolsheviks. Tom had put two bullets into the man's head as he was shouting to attract the attention of a border patrol.

My life, or your life? He hadn't even hesitated. That's how easy it had been.

Had there been regrets later? Had he been tormented by thoughts of the dead man's daughters mourning their father's murder? None that he could recall. In fact, he would have been quite happy to search out the two sour-mouthed sisters with whom he had briefly shared soup in front of a spitting cedarwood fire and inform them that their father had met a violent end entirely fitting to his low treachery and that the world was a far better place without him. Such had been his state of mind at the time, the blind malignity of his thinking.

He had anticipated far harsher treatment at the hands of the Secret Intelligence Service on his return to Helsinki; after all, he had stolen a sizeable sum of money from the organization in order to fund his failed rescue mission. But when shipped out to Sweden to face the music, he found himself treated like a returning hero at the embassy in Stockholm.

This had been his first encounter with Leonard, whose sympathy and solicitude never once wavered during the two days of his debriefing. On the third day, Leonard invited him to luncheon at the Grand Hôtel, and over the cheese course offered him a permanent post with the Secret Intelligence Service. Tom was dumbstruck. It didn't make sense. He had expected a traitor's death at the end of a hangman's noose, or a long spell in gaol at the very least, certainly not a job offer. Still reeling from his ordeal, he lunged unquestioningly at the lifeline before it could be snatched away.

It was a good few months before he fathomed the true motive behind Leonard's surprising offer. At the time, the Secret Service Committee was preparing to make its first report on the performance of the respective intelligence agencies during the Great War. MI5, Military Intelligence, Special Branch and the SIS were all under close scrutiny, and there was worrying talk of cutbacks and mergers to avoid ‘overlapping'. Consequently, the SIS was doing everything in its power to boost its reputation and set itself apart from the other agencies. It just so happened that Tom's actions in Petrograd squared nicely with this agenda.

His rogue mission was swiftly dressed up as an undercover operation sanctioned by SIS Stockholm, and for which Tom had bravely volunteered. At great personal risk, he had exposed (and then disposed of) a Bolshevik double agent closing in on Britain's last remaining agent in Soviet Russia: the near-mythical ST-25, Paul Dukes. It was entirely down to Tom that Dukes was still at large in Petrograd, channelling home invaluable information.

Irina might have been written out of the doctored tale of derring-do which found its way through to the Secret Service Committee, but Leonard had not forgotten her, or the devastating impact of her death on Tom. On their return to London, he insisted that Tom move in with him and his new bride at their house on Warwick Square, a temporary arrangement while he searched for an apartment.

A month slipped by unnoticed, then another, then a third. It wasn't a case of Tom abusing the kindness and hospitality shown him by Leonard and Venetia. Every time he identified a suitable flat to rent, Venetia would insist on casting an eye over the place, only to dismiss it as some ‘bolting-hutch of beastliness' or ‘not fit to trap a rat in'. She successfully kyboshed all his efforts to move on, and Leonard appeared quite happy to play along with her, not in the least threatened, it seemed, by the close friendship springing up between his young wife and Tom.

For Tom, it was an uneasy ménage à trois – or more precisely, ménage à quatre, Lucy being a precocious four-year-old at the time – though not so uneasy that the prospect of life on his own in a scrap of a flat south of the river held any real allure. The spacious basement apartment at Warwick Square was effectively his, and although he took most of his evening meals with Leonard and Venetia, they weren't exactly living out of each others' pockets. Moreover, after a few months he began to realize that his presence in their lives also suited their needs. With the Secret Intelligence Service's future still trembling in the balance, Leonard was working improbably long hours, often hurrying straight from the office to some club or other for an official dinner. Far better for Venetia to have company of an evening than to be knocking around a large townhouse on her own and possibly wondering just what she had got herself into. Instead, she had a lodger at hand who was happy to mix her a cocktail and play with her daughter and watch the stove while she lounged in the bath with a novel.