House of the Hanged (12 page)

She wasn't going to allow herself to be drawn that easily, even if she knew the answer at first glance. ‘Well, he's certainly a better volleyer of the ball.'

That's when they saw Fanya. She was seated beneath a sunshade by the tea pavilion, nursing a cold drink and idly flicking though a copy of
L'Illustration
. As ever, she was a picture of easy elegance, her patterned chiffon frock tapered to her slender figure, her hair scraped back off her ascetic face.

‘
Cherie!
' she hailed.

Rising to her feet, she spread her arms and took Lucy in a bony embrace before stepping back and scanning her catch from top to toe with her large grey eyes. ‘Yevgeny was right. You are
plus ravissante que jamais
.'

Unlike Yevgeny, Fanya mixed and matched her languages before coating them in a thick Russian accent which was no less pronounced now than it had been four years ago, when Lucy had first met her.

‘I could say the same of you. You look incredible.'

‘
Petite menteuse
, lying to an old lady,' Fanya scolded. ‘Please, don't ever stop.'

She gave a short snort, the prelude to her infectious, trademark cackle.

‘And Leonard? Where is he? Did you bring me no one to talk to?'

‘He had to go to Toulon.'

‘Toulon?'

‘Something to do with work.'

Fanya turned her enquiring gaze on Tom, who shrugged. ‘He said he'd be back in time for dinner.'

‘Well go and beat them,' commanded Fanya, wagging an irritable hand at the opponents. ‘They have been talking about it all afternoon and I'm bored with them.'

‘Have they got a game-plan?' asked Tom.

‘
Bien sûr
. You know Yevgeny . . . he plans to win.'

Tom made the introductions. Walter, she noted, stood almost as tall as him, and both men shared the same vague air of general shabbiness, although Walter won on account of his unruly mop of auburn hair and the paint on the hand he offered for her to shake.

‘Pleased to meet you.'

‘You might not be saying that in an hour or so.'

Oh God, she thought, he's American, he probably won't understand the irony.

His thin smile suggested otherwise, as did his reply. ‘Oh, I don't know, I'm very gracious in victory.'

‘You seem very sure of yourself.'

‘My partner's the most competitive man in the known world. I'm banking on him doing all the hard work.'

‘We can put money on it, if you want,' she suggested.

‘You'll have to speak to Yevgeny. I don't have any.'

‘Yes, I hear he keeps his artists on a tight leash,' chipped in Tom.

‘Lies!' retorted Yevgeny. ‘Not true. Now can we please stop talking and play?'

‘Let battle commence,' said Tom.

And it was a battle, albeit a good-natured one. Yevgeny had always taken the game very seriously, playing at least once a week throughout the year at the Tennis Club de Paris, forever obsessing about his ranking under the incomprehensible French system. Coming late to the game, he wasn't a natural, but what he lacked in style he more than made up for with brute determination, hurling himself around the court, puffing and blowing like a grampus. He was a wily competitor who played to one's weaknesses and approached every rally as if it were match point.

She and Tom quickly figured that they had to keep Walter pinned down on the baseline. He was far too adept at the net, comfortably killing off anything that came his way. For a big man, he was surprisingly graceful, with a long lazy swing. Fortunately, Tom was on his game, because Lucy was off hers, her timing all out, which began to infuriate her, though not nearly as much as Tom's comment when they changed ends halfway through the second set.

‘Relax, you're trying too hard. Just keep the ball in play and let them make the errors.'

‘Shut up, Tom.'

‘Just a suggestion.'

She heeded it, and after breaking Yevgeny's serve – which had him ranting in Russian – they both served out to force a third and deciding set. By now the sun was well in the west, dropping behind the ridge, and a cooling breeze was rollicking up from the bay. The stage was set for the showdown, and at last there were no bands of tricky sunlight raking across it. They were at four games apiece, and desperately fighting to hold Tom's serve, when they heard a voice from behind them.

‘My God, four monkeys in a cage.'

It was Barnaby, wearing a crumpled linen suit and a wide grin.

‘Bugger off, Barnaby,' said Tom.

Barnaby tilted his head at her. ‘Lucy . . . looking lovely, if a little sweaty. Gentlemen,' he added, raising a hand to Yevgeny and Walter down the other end of the court. ‘I'll just settle myself down on this grassy bank here with my beautifully cold beer.'

‘This is the last thing we need right now.'

‘What you need right now, my dear Thomas,' said Barnaby, for their ears only, ‘is to start knocking the ball short to Yevgeny's backhand, he's lofting his slice.'

For all his general hopelessness, Barnaby was a gifted sportsman, and she could see Tom weighing the tip. ‘Do you mind?' he said irritably.

‘
If music be the food of love . . .
' chimed Barnaby.

Lucy found herself laughing.

‘Don't,' scowled Tom, ‘you'll only encourage him.'

It was all over in five minutes, Yevgeny lofting his slice, which they were able to volley away with ease. Yevgeny seemed stunned by the loss, aware that he had been targeted, though not exactly how, and certainly not why. He smacked a tennis ball high off into the trees in frustration.

‘
Petit-bébé!
' chided Fanya from the pavilion, really quite angry at her husband's petulant display.

‘No, go for it,' said Walter, tossing his partner another ball. ‘As my father likes to say: Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser.'

It was a perfectly judged intervention, setting them all laughing, Yevgeny loudest of all.

Tom fought the urge to count the bullets in the Beretta yet again. God only knew how many times he'd removed the pistol's magazine in the past couple of hours, but it was definitely becoming a nervous habit. Best to master it now. Unchecked, it was the sort of thing that could play havoc with your head, like endlessly glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece.

Twenty-two minutes past three.

Less than three hours until sunrise, although it would be light long before then. The first rose-glimmer of dawn was probably staining the eastern horizon right now.

It struck him that he was like that poor fool Harker in Bram Stoker's
Dracula
, praying for the new day and the safety it would bring. As if on cue, he felt a sharp prick on his forearm and slapped the mosquito away in a smear of blood.

He had attempted to work, spreading his books and papers out on the desk, only to stare blankly at them, intoxicated with fatigue, unable to apply himself. Maybe he could permit himself forty winks on the divan. The study was secure, the windows shuttered and barred, both doors locked and bolted. He had even jammed chairs under their handles.

He felt a little guilty about Barnaby snoring in sweet, defenceless oblivion upstairs, but during their discussion after lunch Leonard had made a convincing argument that no one other than Tom was in danger. Whoever lay behind the attempt on his life, they had been very precise in their targeting of him and they certainly hadn't wished to draw attention to themselves. Chloroform to disable the victim followed by a lethal injection was hardly the chosen modus operandi of someone looking to make a show of things. It would be a little while yet before they knew exactly what the syringe contained, but Leonard strongly suspected that it would prove to be potassium chloride, which brought about cardiac arrest, leading to a likely prognosis of death by natural causes. No, someone had set out to terminate Tom's life in a manner that raised as few questions as possible, and preferably no stink at all.

Leonard had pressed his case forcefully in response to Tom's suggestion that he pack his bags and disappear, fearing for the lives of those around him.

‘And how long will you be in hiding for? Will you ever not be in hiding? Do you really want to spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder? We have to draw a line under this . . . we have to draw them out . . . here and now.'

‘Easy for you to say, you're not the one being used for bait.'

‘You're wrong. I know exactly what I'm asking of you, but I'm asking it for your own sake, Tom. And who knows, maybe we can negotiate with them.'

‘Negotiate?'

‘Maybe we have something they want, something we can trade. It all depends who they are.'

They had run through the various alternatives, reaching right back to that first time in Petrograd, all those years ago. Barely a day went by when he didn't think about Irina and her death at the hands of the Cheka, about Zakharov's betrayal and his own bittersweet taste of revenge. But it was a private place, a dark sanctuary of the soul; exploring it with Leonard hadn't come easily to him.

He saw it now, but as a spectator might, pressed up against the wall of the gloomy stairwell. He could hear the weary footfalls ascending the staircase, getting closer, the soft scrape of a gloved hand on the banister rail, and then the jangle of a latch-key as the dim figure breasts the top step. It's a man, and he's pausing to catch his breath when two hands come hurtling out of the darkness, driving into his chest, driving out what little air remains in his lungs. He doesn't tumble down the steps, he flies, looping backwards through the air in a graceful arc, like a gymnast. He doesn't die instantly. He lives long enough for Tom to come creeping down the steps and crouch beside his twisted body on the half-landing below, long enough to feel the lips pressed to his ear telling him why this is the end, to feel the hand clamping over his bloody mouth with its broken teeth, cutting off the air.

So young. So reckless. So completely out of his depth. So consumed by a thirst for retribution that nothing else had mattered at the time, not even his own life. After parting company with Dukes in the cemetery, he had made his way straight to Zakharov's apartment building and he had waited there, patient, immobile, hunched in the shadows of the top-floor landing like some avenging imp.

‘It's not the Soviets, though,' Leonard had insisted. ‘How can you be sure?'

‘Because there's no way they could possibly have known it was you who killed Zakharov, even if they suspected it. He was a man with many enemies. Secondly, why on earth would they wait – what? – sixteen years before acting against you? And thirdly . . . thirdly, this just isn't their style. I've never once heard of them using freelancers, they always send their own.'

Sound logic – then, as now – but Tom still felt cheated by it. Irina's death sat unseen at the heart of everything, the central fact of his existence, and he found it strangely comforting that there might be others out there still bound to the same bitter past. It meant that he was not entirely alone in purgatory. It meant that in some small way Irina lived on.

Leonard had been adamant, though, favouring the incident in Constantinople over the other possibilities, chiefly because they knew for a fact that Tom's anonymity had been compromised on that occasion; indeed, he had been lucky to get out of the country alive. Moreover, the Turks had notoriously long memories and a rare gift for revenge.

Leonard had toyed with the idea of returning to London in order to conduct the investigation from there, opting instead to stay at Tom's side and use an intermediary. Apparently, there was an agent in Toulon – ‘a good man based out of the embassy in Paris' – who could act as their conduit with London. Leonard hadn't been sitting on his hands; he'd already arranged to meet the fellow in Toulon that afternoon.

‘Just how good is he?' Tom had wanted to know.

‘Top drawer.'

‘If that's the case, why didn't you use him for the Marseilles assassination last year?'

‘There's really no need to be quite so suspicious.'

‘From the man who spent ten years telling me I was far too trusting.'

‘We didn't use him for Marseilles,' intoned Leonard, ‘because he's only been in Toulon since February.'

‘A novice, then?'

‘Actually, your paths crossed in Egypt in 1928.'

‘Not Mustapha the camel boy?'

‘Very droll.'

Before leaving for Toulon Leonard had assured him that the Foreign Office, the SIS and MI5 would soon be bending themselves to the task of finding those responsible. Meanwhile, he was to carry on with life as best he could, while taking the obvious precautions, of course.

Tennis had offered a welcome distraction, his mind flushed free of all dark thoughts as he lost himself in the match, one eye on the little dance taking place between Lucy and Walter, each playing shots which made the other look good. It didn't take a genius to detect the crackle of mutual attraction. What he hadn't anticipated was the stab of jealousy he'd experienced while observing their quiet flirtations over drinks and dinner later.

The evening had been a ringing success, certainly if the number of empty wine bottles now standing on the table in the kitchen was anything to go by.

Barnaby had thrown himself into the occasion with his usual enthusiasm, sweeping all before him. Their friendship reached back years, through university to their very first day at boarding school – two thirteen-year-old boys packed off by their parents to a forbidding flint pile on the south coast. It was an improbable match: Barnaby loud, confident, devil-may-care, more than happy to be free of his family; Tom quiet, guarded, and resentful at being sent so far away from home. Their shared passion for running themselves ragged on the football pitch had provided the glue, along with an unspoken understanding that the same seam of un happiness ran through them both.

The friendship had faltered during their first year at Oxford, when Barnaby had turned jester-in-chief to a pride of strutting young peacocks with titles and country estates. He had made them laugh and kissed their rings and they in return had sneered at him behind his back.

Although it no longer stood between them, Barnaby's fascination with the great and the good showed no signs of abating. After many years in journalism he was still little more than a gossip-writer, the longest-standing member of the
Londoner's Diary
team, peddling title-tattle about the high and mighty to the masses. This allowed him to rub shoulders with the high and mighty, including Lord Beaverbrook, the proprietor of the
Evening Standard
, who had come to regard him as something of a surrogate (and slightly irritating) son.

Obsessed with money, Barnaby never seemed to have any of his own, and was forever hatching doomed plans to get rich quick. However, what little he had in his back pocket he always shared freely with his friends. It was one of his many redeeming qualities. Last year he had shown up in Le Rayol behind the wheel of a borrowed, blinding-white Bentley saloon accompanied by a monosyllabic but exquisitely beautiful Rumanian chorus girl whom he'd met in Paris, two cases of very fine white Burgundy acquired directly from the Château while motoring south, as well as the usual treasure trove of gifts for Paulette and her two daughters, which always included a selection of teas from Fortnum and Mason and a tin of Huntley and Palmers biscuits.

Barnaby had style, and he struck with the force of a hurricane wherever he went. More importantly, he liked his fellow man, actively embracing their faults and their foibles, possibly because he had so many of his own to contend with.

He had been on particularly fine form that night, circulating like an energetic host during
apéritifs
on the terrace, ensuring that glasses were topped up and the
canapés
given a fair wind, making introductions, pairing people off, and generally sprinkling his fairy dust about the place. The terrace was abuzz with conviviality by the time Leonard showed up, late and a little flustered, after his trip to Toulon. He managed to take Tom on one side and say, ‘He'll be boarding the sleeper to Paris about now. Don't worry, everything's in hand.' He then downed his Dubonnet sec in two gulps; the first of three, Tom noted, that he put away before they took their places for dinner.

They would have been fourteen around the big teak table, and two more European nations would have been represented, if Beatriz and Margot hadn't already accepted an invitation elsewhere that evening. In their early sixties, they lived together in a small farmhouse along the coast near Cap Nègre, and were the cause of endless speculation among the locals. Were the tall Spanish potter and the petite Belgian music teacher more than mere companions? Or were they what polite society called ‘new women'? Tom was privy to their secret but would never have considered sharing it, because he also knew just how much pleasure it gave them to think of all those wagging tongues. They were about the only other foreigners who lived in the area throughout the year, and they mothered him like a pair of broody hens, which was just fine by him.

He owed their friendship, along with many other things, to Benoît and his impishly attractive wife, Chantal, who had driven over from Le Lavandou for dinner. Benoît was the notary who had overseen the purchase of Villa Martel five years ago, championing Tom's bid with the executors of the estate over those of the other interested parties in a manner which wasn't altogether professional. ‘The first time we met you made me laugh, and then when you came to lunch you played with the children,' Benoît had explained some years later, when their acquaintance had blossomed into something more meaningful and Tom no longer referred to him as Maître Véron.

The other ‘local' guests at dinner were new to the area, and possibly not long for it. Klaus and Ilse Straub were brother and sister, he an author, she a journalist. Both had been forced to flee Germany after attracting the unwelcome attentions of Chancellor Hitler's henchmen for their outspoken attacks against the new regime. Nomads for almost six months now, their journey had taken them from Munich to Rome, then briefly to Capri, before depositing them in Le Canadel back at the beginning of June. Poor as church mice, almost entirely reliant on the grace and favour of friends or admirers, they were staying in a house belonging to a Swiss publisher whom they had never met, and whom no one else had ever met, for that matter. Yevgeny and Fanya – fellow exiles – had recently swooped on them, drawing them into their circle of friends.

Tom had always had lot of time for Germans – certainly since his posting to Berlin in 1927, which had seen him travel the country widely and put to rest any prejudice left over from the Great War – but his admiration for Klaus was close to boundless. He was still struggling to square the quiet, grave-eyed young man he had recently come to know with the extraordinary novel he'd just finished. Somehow, the two just didn't seem to mesh.

The Gardener
told the story of an aimless young drifter who finds himself employed as a leaf-raker one autumn at a state-run asylum for tubercular patients in Bavaria. The grim inevitability of Death hangs over the establishment, as it does over all of Life; doctors and nurses hold god-like sway, intoxicated by the power invested in them, dispensing pleasure and pain according to their increasingly capricious moods, dangling elementary rights as if they were privileges before the noses of the infirm. Hardly the stuff of humour, and yet the story was laced with the most subtle wit, which both undermined yet somehow heightened the veiled metaphor of a nation's slow slide towards totalitarianism.

It was Klaus's second novel, his most recent, and Tom knew from Yevgeny that it had died a sudden death in Germany, assisted to an early grave by a government quick to take offence. To Tom's mind, the novel was a work of genius, and he had waited until they were all seated at the table before telling Klaus as much, eager for everyone else to hear his verdict.