House of the Hanged (23 page)

The main terrace was awash with pale moonlight and he kept to the shadows at the rear of the cottage, stepping gingerly through the trees on a blanket of pine needles. The smell of pine sap grew strangely intense on the still night air, as if his senses were heightening in anticipation of the looming confrontation. It was the odour of turpentine, he realized. One of the cottage's windows was open – the window serving the small room that Walter used as his studio. The French doors to the bedroom were also open, he noted, and he crept more carefully than ever towards the main house.

They were in the drawing room, and they seemed to be having a heated discussion of some kind. They were speaking in Russian, but even when he edged closer to the window it was hard to make out the words, muffled as they were by the closed curtains. He needed to be sure they were alone, so he waited there awhile, ears straining for the sound of another voice. Satisfied, he made off around side of the house, trying the windows as he went. The lights he had seen from down on the beach belonged to the study and the kitchen, and he skipped quickly past both, momentarily caught in the glare.

The back door was locked. So was the front door. And all the downstairs windows were latched from the inside. Yevgeny and Fanya weren't taking any chances, but they had made one mistake: their bedroom window was open. Tom knew where they kept the ladder because he'd helped Yevgeny hang the Chinese lanterns in the trees around the terrace for last year's summer party. He hadn't noticed as he'd skirted the terrace, but the lanterns were probably hanging there now, ready for tomorrow night's festivities, and with any luck the ladder would be back in the tool shed.

It was. Tom lifted it free of the wall hooks and manoeuvred it carefully out through the door.

He had taken no more than a couple of steps towards the house when something pressed into the nape of his neck.

‘Ssshhhhh,' soothed a voice from behind him.

He was hamstrung, his hands full with the ladder, the muzzle of the gun cold against his skin. A practised hand searched him, pulling the Browning from his hip pocket.

‘Put the ladder down. Slowly.'

The voice was unmistakable.

‘It's me – Tom.'

‘I know,' said Walter. ‘Now put the goddamn ladder down.'

As he lowered the ladder to the ground, Tom thought about going for the Beretta tucked into his sock. The odds were against him, though. And besides, he didn't yet know just where Walter fitted in the thing.

‘It's not what you think,' said Tom, rising.

‘Oh? And what do I think?'

A sharp shove between the shoulder blades propelled him forward, though not towards the main house.

Neither of them spoke until they were inside the cottage and seated opposite each other in the living room. The fact that Walter left all the lights off said something. The darkness, pricked by a few stray shafts of moonlight, also provided Tom with the opportunity he'd been waiting for.

‘What are you doing here?' said Walter.

‘Do you have to point that thing at me? It might go off.'

Tom heard the click of the hammer being cocked.

‘There's always that danger, I guess,' replied Walter.

There was another audible click as Tom drew back the slide, cocking the hammer of the Beretta, now secreted in the shadows around his lap and pointing straight at Walter.

‘It's a Beretta 418, in case you're interested.'

Walter shifted uneasily in his armchair. ‘I believe this is what's called a Mexican stand-off.'

‘I believe so,' said Tom.

‘It's a first for me. What happens now?'

‘I like you, Walter, and I really don't want to have to shoot you, so why don't you give me a good reason for putting my gun down.'

Walter hesitated before speaking. ‘I work for American intelligence.'

‘Oh?'

‘The MID.'

‘Which stands for . . .?'

‘Exactly the same thing it stood for when you were in the business,' said Walter pointedly.

‘The Military Intelligence Division wasn't running its own agents abroad when I was in the business.'

At best, they sat at their desks in Washington collating whatever scraps of hearsay trickled home from their embassies and consulates around the world. The British Secret Intelligence Service had always regarded America's MID as something of a joke.

‘In case you hadn't noticed,' said Walter, ‘a lot's changed in the past five years. Germany's a one-party dictatorship and the Soviets are more active than ever.'

‘So much for American isolationism.'

‘You and I both know if there's another war we'll end up crashing the party like last time.'

Tom held up the Beretta and made a show of laying the weapon on the arm of his chair.

‘Well, I suppose it explains your paintings,' he said.

Walter also laid his gun aside. ‘You think they're that bad?'

‘Bad enough to convince Yevgeny they might be good.'

‘That's the idea.'

‘How long have you known about them?' asked Tom.

‘Quid pro quo,' said Walter. ‘You go first.'

‘Only if you give me a cigarette.'

Walter tossed over his cigarette case and a lighter. Tom fired up a cigarette, calculating just how much to reveal and how much to hold back.

‘Okay,' he said finally. ‘Two nights ago, someone tried to kill me in my bed. An Italian. A professional.'

‘Christ . . .' muttered Walter.

‘He had a photograph of me in his possession. He can only have got it from Yevgeny and Fanya.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Do you think I'd be messing around with ladders in the middle of the night if I wasn't?'

Walter reflected a moment. ‘Why you? Are you still active?'

‘No. It's an old story, I think, something going back years.'

‘Petrograd?'

‘Is there nothing you don't know about me?'

‘Not much,' said Walter. He rose from his chair, wandered over and took his cigarettes back. Lighting one, he asked, ‘An Italian, you say?'

‘I know, it doesn't make sense.'

‘So maybe you're wrong about the Soviets.'

‘Tell that to the two NKVD men I met this afternoon.'

Walter didn't react. Tom liked that. It showed a maturity far beyond his years: absorbing the information, filing it away, no need to comment or to satisfy his curiosity about the fate of the Italian and the other two. The boy had prospects. The MID were lucky to have him.

Walter moved to the window and peered out into the night. ‘They're still awake, still arguing, I guess. I could tell something was up these past days. I didn't know what, though.' He turned and announced suddenly, ‘You have to leave them be.'

‘Yevgeny and Fanya?'

‘There's way too much at stake. You have to leave them be.'

‘I'm sorry,' said Tom, not quite snorting at the absurdity of the notion, ‘but I can't see that happening.'

‘At least hear me out.'

Lucy was woken by the sound of the wind singing in the pine tops outside her shuttered windows.

Her first thought was of the
Albatross
and the fine sailing to be had before the early morning blow dwindled to a satisfactory breeze. She lingered a moment in bed, though, eager to pin down the dream she'd been having, to prevent it fading forever into the ether of wakefulness.

It wasn't really a dream so much as a gem snatched from the treasury of her childhood memories. For some reason, she had written out the other characters, although she saw them clearly now, just as she saw the large house in its leafy square south of Vauxhall Bridge. She would stay there sometimes with her best friend from school, Amelia, whose father was a horticulturalist attached to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. He had a greenhouse of his own to prove it: an enormous lean-to affair which ran almost the entire length of the garden against the high north wall.

It was here that Lucy saw her first night-blooming Cereus. In many ways it was an unremarkable plant, even ugly: a gangling mess reaching to some five or six feet in height, its long rubbery leaves sprouting then drooping from a stem so spindly that it had to be staked in its pot to stop it collapsing. What set it apart, though, what made this ungainly member of the cactus family the very finest plant in the known world, in the expert opinion of Amelia's father, were its blossoms. Some said that they only appeared once every hundred years, which wasn't true, but they
were
temperamental. If they graced you with their presence at all, they only ever bloomed at night, and only then for a single night before they withered and died. Lucy happened to be staying when the four enormous, trumpet-like blossoms adorning the plant that year were set to perform. The girls were summoned from their beds towards midnight and brought downstairs in their dressing gowns to witness the rare spectacle.

In her dream, Lucy was alone, not dwarfed by a tribe of twittering adults who had turned up for dinner and stayed on for the occasion. She stood there on her own in her nightdress, candle in hand, watching in wonder as the long waxy-white blossoms, tinged with pink at their tips, slowly unravelled, baring themselves to her. The pointed petals folded back in snowy sunbursts as big as dinner plates, and the stamens clustered at the base of the slender stigmas seemed to quiver in the candlelight like the tentacles of a sea anemone. The odour was intoxicating, a rich vanilla, almost obscene in its heady complexity.

Then night became day and Lucy found herself standing in the low dawn light of the greenhouse, staring at the blooms hanging limp and lifeless from their stiff purple stems. Their job was done – the moths had been and gone – and they were happy to give themselves over to pulpy decay.

Why on earth had she dreamed of the night-blooming Cereus? Mother was all for interpreting dreams, or rather, all for getting Dr Feinstein to interpret them for her. Maybe that's why Mother had been so on edge lately. More reliant than ever on the good doctor, she had no choice but to make do without him when on holiday. She openly referred to him as her ‘guru', which last year had drawn the response from Barnaby: ‘Well, I suppose it's easier to spell than “charlatan”.' Even Mother had laughed. In many ways, that was her downfall – her sense of humour. An amusing comment, correctly timed and applied, could banish her mood in a moment and bring back the best of her.

Why the Cereus, though? There had to be a reason. Maybe it had something to do with the brief flowering of youth and her imminent birthday which would see her step officially across the threshold into adulthood. Yes, it was probably that. She was painfully aware of her own anxieties about the future. She had never felt the need to ignore them or cloak them in bold statements of intent, as some did, although she knew that many of her contemporaries at St Hugh's regarded her as confident to the point of haughtiness. Stella had once been kind enough to tell her so, while adding: ‘Ignore them, darling. For all the opportunities Oxford has given them, most will leap at the chance to raise a horrid little brood with some dreary solicitor who takes the train in from Dorking every morning. They'll be desperately unhappy all their lives and will go to their graves never knowing what an orgasm is.'

‘Whereas we . . .?' Lucy had enquired sceptically. ‘Whereas
we
are going to change the world: for all, not just for womankind.'

‘And if we fail?'

‘Well, then, at least we have the orgasms to fall back on.'

It was bad enough having a friend who talked with such certainty, far worse when that friend then fell hopelessly, inexplicably, in love with a jug-eared Irish labourer whose name she didn't even know.

Lucy wanted to believe in Stella's dream, but when she looked at her life there seemed very little cause for optimism. This time next year university would be over and yet she still had no clear idea of what career, if any, she wished to pursue. She had toyed with the possibility of doing the Civil Service exams, or even teaching, but these were plans she'd voiced in order to satisfy others, not herself. As for men, she seemed doomed to be drawn to the worst possible kind, the Hugo Atkinsons of the world, with their blustering charm, their promises and their lies. Even when one like Walter came along – handsome as a prince, considerate, amusing – she ruined it all through poor judgement.

The thought of another year at St Hugh's, endlessly discussing men, mothers and maidenheads, was hardly an enticing prospect, but she had to face the sad truth: she wasn't yet equipped for anything else.

Except sailing. She was good at sailing.

Maybe that's what she should do with her life, become an Amelia Earhart of the waves. The first woman to sail across the Atlantic single-handed . . .

A foolish dream. And besides, she could think of only one person who would support her in it.

The wind had ebbed a touch by the time she crept from the sleeping house. The treetops still bowed in obeisance but she could sense their heart already going out of it as she hurried down the pathway towards the cove.

She was dragging the rowboat towards the waterline when she heard the whistle.

Tom was watching from the top of the bluff, the villa looming just behind him. He waved a greeting. Lucy waved back, gesticulating for him to join her.

It took him a couple of minutes to work his way down to the cove. Despite the deep tan, there was a pallor about his face, and his blue eyes, usually as bright as broken water, seemed glazed and without life. He didn't just look tired, he looked exhausted.

‘Bad night?' she asked.

‘You aren't exactly looking your best, young lady.'

‘That's because Leonard was up till God knows when talking on the telephone.'

‘Oh?'

The telephone had rung intermittently for a good couple of hours after their return from the restaurant.

‘Work, no doubt.'

‘No doubt,' replied Tom.

She nodded towards the
Albatross
. ‘Do you want to blow away a few of the cobwebs?'

It was the opportunity she'd been waiting for.

Tom glanced up at the white clouds in full sail against a sea of blue before looking back at her. ‘Why don't we talk about it over breakfast?'

He rowed her there, just around the corner, and they pulled the boat up on to the beach right below the Hôtel de la Réserve, where two young men in tight blue-and-white singlets were putting out the sun loungers and the beach umbrellas.

She and Tom were hardly dressed for the occasion, both of them in baggy shorts and
espadrilles
, but it didn't seem to bother Olivier, the manager, possibly because most of his guests had yet to appear from their rooms. He pretended to be insulted that Lucy hadn't shown her face before now, then surprised her by recalling the exact sequence of piano pieces she had played last year – Debussy followed by Chopin followed by Satie. The embarrassing episode had taken place after a long dinner on a night when the regular pianist had failed to show up due to illness. Forced by a slow hand-clap to take a seat at the old satinwood grand in the hotel bar, Lucy had banged out the pieces as best she could, the Satie from memory.

‘Poor Lambert,' said Olivier. ‘He sulked for weeks when he heard someone else had touched his precious piano.'

‘Well, you can tell him not to worry. He has my word it won't ever happen again.'

‘And Satie – he hates Satie – and then all he has when he comes back is people asking for Satie.'

‘Oh God . . .' she groaned.

‘Ah,' said Olivier, ‘but guess who his favourite composer now is?'

‘Satie . . .?'

‘No, Brahms. He still hates Satie.'

Tom laughed. ‘Olivier, leave her alone.'

‘How is that possible?' said Olivier. ‘Look at her, look at what she has become. Her face has found itself finally. How do you say in English?'

‘We say double-handed compliment. We say two coffees and two orange juices, please, and don't spare the horses.'

They installed themselves at a sheltered table on the wind-blown terrace and examined the breakfast menu while the awning flapped and bellied above them. Tom disappeared to place their order before the coffees and juices had arrived, which seemed unnecessary. When he hadn't returned after a few minutes, Lucy poked her head inside the dining room.

Tom and Olivier were deep in discussion near the counter. For all the jocularity of their opening exchange, there was now something decidedly serious, almost furtive, about Olivier's expression. That all changed when he caught sight of her out of the corner of his eye. He beamed at her and laid a hand on Tom's shoulder, dispatching him back outside.

‘Is everything okay?' she said, once they were settled back at the table.

‘He asked me where Hector was.'

‘Did you tell him the truth?'

Tom nodded grimly. ‘I'm dreading having to break it to Paulette. She'll be devastated.'

‘If it's any consolation, she already assumes the worst.'

‘You think?'

‘That's what she said. She also told me to persuade you to get another dog.'

‘One day. Maybe.'

She almost came out with it there and then. Not wishing to be interrupted, though, she waited until the waitress had brought their food.

‘Tom, I've never said this before, and I haven't really thought about how to say it, so I'm sorry if it comes out all wrong. It's something I have to do – no, that's wrong – it's something I
want
to do, I mean, something I've
wanted
to do for years. Oh God, I'm rambling, aren't I?'

‘If you've waited this long, I'm sure I can wait a few more minutes.'

Lucy poked at her half-eaten scrambled eggs then put her fork down and looked him in the eye. ‘Thank you.'

‘Don't mention it,' he replied.

‘I mean it. Thank you for being there . . . for always being there . . . for as long as I can remember . . . and for making me laugh . . . for always making me laugh . . . and for making me feel beautiful even though I'm not . . . and for treating me like an adult even when I was a child . . . for never telling me what to do or what to think . . . for letting me be . . . for letting me be me.'

‘Lucy . . .' Tom said softly.

‘Shut up, I'm just hitting my stride.'

‘Oh dear.'

‘You're a good man, Tom Nash. I don't know a better man and I doubt I'll ever meet one. I can't imagine what my life would be like without you in it. I think about it sometimes and it scares me. No. It makes me feel sick. Like I'm falling. Spinning in the darkness.'

Tom was no longer looking at her, but down at the tabletop.

‘I'm sorry if I've embarrassed you,' she went on, ‘but I wanted you to hear it. I'm glad I've finally said it.'

He reached over and took her hand, and when he looked up there was a sheen to his eyes. And a sadness.

‘I'm not embarrassed. But you're wrong. You don't know me.'

‘I know you well enough.'

‘Just enough to keep the dream alive.'

Lucy frowned, confused. ‘Why are you saying this?'

It was a moment before he replied. ‘You said it yourself just now – for letting you be you. You were always you, Lucy, long before I showed up on the scene.'

She could feel a panic beginning to swell in her chest. ‘Why are you saying this?' she repeated.

‘I have to go away.'

‘Away? Where?'

‘It doesn't matter.'

‘Why?'

‘It's complicated.'

‘Tell me.'

‘I can't. And you mustn't breathe a word of this to anyone.'

She gave a derisive little laugh. ‘How can I, when you're not telling me anything?'

‘You have to trust me it's for the best. Do you think you can do that?'

‘No. Yes. If you insist.'

He gave her hand a squeeze. ‘Do you remember that time I took you flying?'

‘No,' she replied sarcastically.

‘The following day the engine seized on that Avro Avian – the same plane we went up in. An oil leak. Two young men died in a field near Woodstock. I've never told anyone that.'

She felt a chill run through her.

‘These things happen, of course, and no one is necessarily to blame, it's just the way of things.
Sic transit
. But that's how fragile life is. That's why we have to be thankful for what we've got . . . for what we've had . . . for making it this far.'

She glanced down at her hand, smothered by his, safe, encased. She saw the pale scar like a small smile near the base of his thumb and the way the thick hairs curled around the tan leather strap of his wristwatch. They were details of him she'd noted many times before, and she refused to believe they wouldn't always be there.

‘If you leave me I'll never speak to you again.'