House of the Hanged (9 page)

Leonard and Yevgeny returned from Cannes just before midday, having squeezed in a quick nine holes before leaping into the car and racing back. They came bearing gifts and a whole batch of golfing anecdotes. The former went down far better than the latter.

‘What is it about golfers?' Venetia declared. ‘The bribes I can handle – in fact, I thoroughly approve of them – but the stories . . . My father and brothers are just the same. Do you really think that those of us who've never swung a club in our lives care a fig about “bogies” and “birdies” and “drives off the tee”? I can assure you we don't.'

Yevgeny ran a hand over his bronzed pate, smoothing down the phantom hair, no longer there. For reasons that still baffled even Fanya, he had chosen to shave the whole lot off back in the spring. Whatever his thinking, it suited him; he had the right kind of cranium to carry it off.

‘My dear Venetia,' he chirped, ‘you don't understand. There is no other game like golf –'

Venetia raised her hand, cutting him dead. ‘Yevgeny, I don't doubt you're about to say something terribly profound, but it might have more authority if you weren't wearing those ridiculous chequered trousers.'

No one seemed sure whether to laugh or shout her down. Her sense of humour sailed perilously close to the wind at times. Yevgeny opted for a third way.

Unbuckling his belt, he let the trousers fall to his ankles.

‘Is that better?' he demanded.

There was a stunned silence. And then laughter, wild and uproarious.

Yevgeny's undershorts were adorned with little golf clubs.

Leonard was eager for a swim before lunch. It was the opportunity Tom had been waiting for, and he followed his friend into the water.

‘Mind if I join you?'

‘Of course not. The headland and back?'

It was maybe half a mile across the bay to the headland separating Le Rayol from Le Canadel – a mere paddle for Leonard, but at the limit of Tom's range.

Ever the gentleman, Leonard slowed his stroke so as not to leave Tom languishing in his wake. At one point he even settled into a lazy but surprisingly effective backstroke. The conditions were perfect – a gentle swell, no chop – and it took them no more than fifteen minutes to make it across, suspended in a turquoise dream.

‘Now that's what I call a morning pipe cleaner,' declared Leonard on arrival. ‘Straight back, or a quick breather?'

‘Hazard a guess,' gasped Tom.

They hauled themselves up into the tumble of large boulders at the base of the bluff. The rock face betrayed a violent past, its layered strata coiled into serpentine patterns, even folded right back on itself in places, like kneaded dough. The trees shrouding the headland clung on tenaciously, their roots like grasping claws, defying the vertical almost to the waterline, where the smooth, sea-washed bones of their fallen brethren lay jammed among the rocks.

‘Thanks for holding the fort,' said Leonard, planting himself on a flat boulder. ‘Another evening with the Chittendens would have finished me off.'

Tom settled down beside him. ‘I bowed out, left Venetia and Lucy to fend for themselves.'

‘Wise man. I could have done with a quiet night, too, but Yevgeny had other plans.'

‘It was anything but quiet,' said Tom. ‘Someone tried to kill me.'

Leonard turned and fixed him with a searching stare. He was known for his composure under pressure. He outdid himself now.

‘Well, that rather knocks the holiday into a cocked hat,' he deadpanned.

‘I'm sorry about that.'

‘Did you get him?'

‘Yes.'

‘Alive?'

‘Dead.'

‘Where is he?'

Tom nodded out to sea. ‘About two miles in that direction and half a mile down.'

Leonard nodded. ‘Did he talk?'

‘Not much. He was . . . damaged.'

‘Start at the beginning . . .'

‘. . . go through to the end and then stop.'

Leonard smiled weakly at the memory. It was an old joke of theirs reaching back to debriefings of old: a line from the Red Queen to Alice, as in Wonderland.

Tom spelled out the events of the past twelve hours, taking it slowly, chronologically, the way he knew Leonard liked it. He also knew that no detail was too small, and he left nothing out. For much of the time, Leonard sat with his eyes closed, building pictures in his head. Every so often, his eyes would snap open, staring at the distant horizon, only for the eyelids to fall once more. He didn't speak a word until Tom had finished his account, and even then a good minute of silence hung between them before he finally found his voice.

The questions came in short, clipped sentences: When exactly did you become aware that Hector was missing? What was the Italian wearing on his feet? Is it possible he had time to fire before you clubbed the gun from his hand? When he fled your bedroom was the light on in the corridor outside? Did you check his mouth for dental work before disposing of the body?

Tom could make out the thinking behind some of the questions, but by no means all of them. It didn't matter. The very fact of sitting there and watching Leonard's analytical mind at work was deeply reassuring. He could feel the shock and confusion loosening their grip on him, leaking away, evaporating through his skin.

‘When Olivier greeted Frau Wissmann as she passed by your table on the terrace did she catch your eye?'

‘Leonard, I really don't think she's involved.'

‘Oh, she's definitely involved, wouldn't you say?' replied Leonard, almost irritably. ‘It's the exact nature of her involvement we're after.'

Tom stuck to answering the questions, which kept coming in a steady stream: On the two occasions you headed upstairs at the hotel are you sure no one saw you? Did you wipe your fingerprints from the Italian's room key before replacing it? Knowing Olivier as you do, how long before he alerts the police to his missing guest?

When Leonard was finally done, he said, ‘Okay. That's it. For now.' He lapsed into a brief silence before adding, ‘I'm sorry.'

‘For what?'

‘For you, Tom. You walked away from this sort of thing a long time ago. I'm sorry it's sniffed you out.'

‘Maybe I always knew it would.'

‘Listen to me,' said Leonard, firmly. ‘In our game we all have to live with the things we've done, but it doesn't mean we have to die for them. We'll get you through this and you can return to your life.'

‘That seems . . . well, unlikely.'

‘Don't be so bloody defeatist. You never used to be, and it doesn't suit you.'

‘For God's sake, Leonard, they tried once, which means they'll try again.'

‘How can you be sure of that? We have no idea who we're dealing with.'

‘I have a pretty strong hunch,' said Tom.

‘Oh really? Let's hear it.' The scepticism in Leonard's voice flirted with sarcasm.

‘Well, for one thing, he was an Italian. Doesn't that tell you something?'

‘Yes, his nationality.' Leonard raised a cautionary finger before adding, ‘Maybe. Did you find his passport? No. If you had, could you be certain it wasn't false? Have you ever travelled to the Ticino? I'm sure you know they speak Italian in that part of Switzerland. In fact, Italian is one of the country's official languages. Maybe he was Swiss, like Frau Wissmann.'

‘The labels in his jackets . . .'

‘I know Englishmen who have their suits tailored in Rome.'

‘You're playing devil's advocate.'

‘Of course I am. Never take anything at face value. You know that.'

‘And
you
know what I mean, Leonard. I'm talking about last autumn. I'm talking about Marseilles.'

‘Ah, Marseilles . . .' drawled Leonard.

It was often said that a job at the Secret Intelligence Service was a job for life, whether you liked it or not; the organization never relinquished its hold on you. This hadn't been Tom's experience. He had severed all links with the SIS five years ago, at the same time that Leonard had departed for the Foreign Office, cherry-picked by the new permanent under secretary at the FO, Sir Robert Vansittart, to act as his right-hand man. Both he and Leonard had moved on, one to a job even closer to the heart of the British Establishment, the other to a writer's life at the poor man's end of the French Riviera.

Tom had never doubted that their friendship would survive this parting of the ways; by then he was almost a fully-fledged member of the Pike family. What he hadn't anticipated, though, was the overture that Leonard had made to him soon after their professional paths had divided.

It had seemed a tame enough proposal at the time. In the light of his recent brush with death, he now wondered whether he shouldn't have rejected it out of hand. If he hadn't, it had been more out of a sense of loyalty to Leonard than to his country. The notion of patriotism sat uneasily with him; he would never forget the dark places he had visited in its name.

Leonard had been very clear when spelling out the terms: You now live in France, and you travel widely researching your books. All we ask is that you keep your ear to the ground. If you happen to hear of anything that might be of interest to us, simply pass it on. In return, we'll cover some of your travel expenses, and we'll also place a furnished apartment near the Palais Royal in Paris at your disposal. Dinner parties, as you know, can be hotbeds of indiscretion. I'm sure we can even be persuaded to help out with the catering costs.

Tom would have been lying if he'd said that the prospect of his own place in Paris hadn't played a significant part in his decision to accept Leonard's offer. That first winter in Le Rayol had been extremely unpleasant; nothing compared to the big freeze of 1929, as the locals insisted on telling him, but from November to January the coast had been swept by a bitter Levant wind which fled down out of the east, setting all the world's teeth on edge and bringing clouds and rain. Tom had found himself making excuses for yet another trip to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, anything to break the monotony of the grey, wet, dead days beside a granite sea.

With one book under his belt – an irreverent swipe at the gimcrack Orientalism of the Egyptian tourist trail – and a healthy advance from his publisher for a second in the same vein on Palestine, a base in the French capital had been a welcome antidote against the isolation of his new life as a writer, and he always returned to Le Rayol reinvigorated after his forays north.

At first, Leonard had left him entirely to his own devices, quite happy to receive the reports as and when Tom chose to travel to London, and rarely commenting on their contents. In the past couple of years, though, as the situation in Europe had continued to deteriorate, Leonard had grown more demanding: Would it be possible for Tom to try and cultivate a relationship with a particular individual at the French Ministry of the Interior? Any chance that he could attend the Opéra and take note of the comings and goings in a particular box from his seat in the stalls? One time, he had even been asked to eavesdrop on a conversation between an Austrian industrialist and a French journalist in a brasserie near the Place des Vosges.

This sort of activity was a notable escalation from the dinner party tittle-tattle he'd been sending back home, but it was hardly hazardous work and he'd been happy to oblige. He knew that he wasn't the only one at it. With Europe edging its way towards an ever more uncertain future, the stakes were high and information of any kind was at a premium. For the past year or two, rumours had been reaching Tom's ears of certain Parisian individuals, primarily women, whose circumstances had taken a sudden and marked turn for the better, and he had duly handed on their names to Leonard.

Only once had Tom refused a request, when called on by London to take photographs of the French fleet in Toulon harbour. It had felt too much like a betrayal of the nation he now thought of as his home and the people who had welcomed him so warmly. There had been no question of refusing to cooperate, however, when he'd been asked to turn his attention to the assassination of the King of Yugoslavia in Marseilles last October. If nothing else, the incident had disturbing echoes of the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo twenty years ago – the catalyst for the Great War. Leonard had even insisted on travelling to Paris to discuss the affair with Tom in person.

King Alexander I of Yugoslavia had been slain within five minutes of setting foot on French soil. Disembarking from the Yugoslav cruiser,
Dubrovnik
, he was greeted on the Quai des Belges by the French Minister for Foreign Affairs, the energetic and formidably intelligent Jean Louis Barthou. The two men then climbed into an open motor car and set off from the old port along the city's most famous thoroughfare, La Canebière. It was here that a lone gunman burst from the cheering crowds, bounded up on to the car's running board and with a cry of ‘Long Live the King' began firing his machine pistol.

King Alexander died almost instantly. Barthou was also fatally wounded, along with several bystanders. Others, although struck by stray bullets, survived. The assassin didn't. Hacked to the ground by the sword of a mounted policeman, he was beaten to death by the angry mob. Remarkably, the whole gruesome spectacle was trapped for posterity's sake by a news cameraman who just happened to be filming at the exact spot.

Europe reeled in shock, though not necessarily surprise. There had been a prior attempt on King Alexander's life the year before in Zagreb, and his reputation as a brutal tyrant was well grounded. In 1929 he had abolished the constitution and declared himself dictator of the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia, since which time he had dealt ruthlessly with those who didn't share his grand vision of a unified empire of Slav peoples under his rule. Supported by the majority of Serbs, whose interests he blatantly favoured, he was reviled by other ethnic groups. Both the Croatians and Macedonians had formed revolutionary movements committed to independence from the new Yugoslavia as well as the murder of their despised monarch. Indeed, the Croatian Ustasha had officially pronounced a death sentence on Alexander from the safety of Belgium just a short time before his official state visit to France.