House of the Hanged (20 page)

It was a taste of domestic life so very far removed from his own experience, and so very much more appealing. Whereas his father would berate his mother for her profligacy in lighting a second candle at the dinner table, Venetia insisted that the house be permanently ablaze with electric light come nightfall. And then there was the music. Venetia required classical music, always loud, selected according to her mood. She sat him down and made him listen to the end of the slow movement of Brahms' Fourth Symphony (‘for clear beauty'), to the fanfares in Berlioz's
Requiem
(‘for fervour'), and to all of Liszt's piano music (‘for its aquarium brilliance').

She had just turned twenty-five at the time, which made her his senior by a mere two years, and yet her self-possession and sophistication left him feeling like a stripling by comparison. In truth, he was slightly in awe of her, and possibly a little in love with her, too.

One evening, when they found themselves alone together yet again, he made the mistake of hinting at as much. She put him smartly back in his box, like a plaything she'd grown bored of. He wasn't in a position to trust his feelings, she told him, not after what he'd just been through in Russia. He didn't know his own mind and wouldn't for a while yet.

She wasn't patronizing him; she was speaking from hard experience. She too had suffered the distress of having someone she loved cruelly snatched from her before their time. She understood the toxic effects of despair. She knew exactly what he was going through.

This wasn't quite true. Yes, she knew about Irina's death at the hands of the Cheka – she even knew that Irina had been pregnant at the time – but the details of the revenge he'd exacted on Zakharov had, unsurprisingly, been kept from her by Leonard. Tom certainly had no intention of telling her. She would never have permitted him to romp around on the drawing-room rug with her young daughter if she had known.

The offer to become godfather to Lucy was put to him eight months after his arrival at Warwick Square, and just as he was preparing to vacate the basement for a cramped top-floor flat on the borders of Waterloo and Kennington. One of Lucy's two godfathers, an old childhood friend of Leonard's, had died in captivity in Mesopotamia following the Siege of Kut, and it was put to Tom that he fill the dead man's shoes. He suspected the proposal was made more from fear for his welfare than anything else, their thinking being that he was less likely to stick his head in a gas oven if given some kind of responsibility for a small creature.

Maybe they were right. Already devoted to Lucy, nothing quite prepared him for the flood of emotion he experienced when he agreed to act as life mentor to her. Having ruthlessly taken two human lives within the last year, it was hardly a role for which he was equipped. This evidently wasn't a problem for Leonard, though, so he put those reservations from his mind and threw himself into the task, marking the occasion with a trip to London Zoo, where Lucy devoured so much ice cream that she threw up vigorously all over the rear seat of the taxi cab on their way back to Pimlico.

Tom crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray.

These were more than idle reminiscences. He was scavenging for clues, resonances of which might have carried down through the years to the present day. Only now was he being held to account for his actions back in 1919, and there had to be some kind of causal chain at play behind the scenes.

The obvious link in that chain was Leonard: the man who had raised him up and welcomed him into his home, his employer, his controller at the SIS, the man who had determined his existence for more than a decade, dispatching him around the globe to deal with ‘matters of some considerable sensitivity' – that phrase, always that same phrase – but never prescribing how best to tackle the problems in question. He left that side of things to Tom's discretion. He didn't wish to know the more unsavoury details of how the issue had been resolved, just so long as it had been. Blackmail, bribery, intimidation, or worse, the various coercements were never recorded in official files.

For years, Tom had rationalized his actions as playing dirty in the best interests of the nation and the Empire. Besides, everybody else was at it, not just the British. It was an ongoing war, one hidden from the public gaze and with its own rules of combat – a secret war that never slept. He found the work challenging and invigorating. Moreover, he seemed to have a natural gift for it. Even after the debacle in Constantinople, he had bounced back full of enthusiasm.

Then one day, inexplicably, he'd had enough. He'd done enough. Any more, it seemed to him, and his soul would be permanently, irreparably, blackened. If he descended any deeper into the murky chasm of immorality, he would never be able to rise once more into the light. Such high-flown thinking, framed in religious concepts he'd long since discarded, was the first indication that his sanity was also at stake, not just his soul. He was, he realized, beginning to lose his grip, flirting with a serious nervous collapse.

The news that Leonard was soon to move on, seconded from the Secret Intelligence Service to the Foreign Office by Sir Robert Vansittart, cleared the way for his decision. After ten years together as a team, the thought of working for anyone else was inconceivable, even if the desire had been there. Leonard understood this, and one of his last acts before being kicked upstairs was to secure Tom an honourable discharge from the service on psychiatric grounds.

Leonard. His friend. The man who knew more about him than any other person on the planet. If Leonard was involved then he was dead and done for. Leonard permitted no failures, no loose ends. He harboured a quiet ruthlessness which the young men assigned to do his bidding found hard to square with the relaxed, even jocular, air which hung about him.

Had Leonard been turned? Had he gone over to the Soviets? If so, he wouldn't be the first. Special Branch had been penetrated by Soviet intelligence towards the end of Tom's time at the SIS, and he'd heard rumours since leaving the service that a couple of cipher clerks at the Foreign Office had been exposed as spies. Did the tentacles of Soviet influence extend higher up that organization? Leonard's close relationship with Yevgeny hardly amounted to a guilty verdict, but his over-eagerness to dismiss the Soviets from the picture when their involvement in the plot now lay beyond any possible doubt suggested a degree of professional incompetence quite uncharacteristic of the man.

No, Leonard was definitely up to something, and the temptation was to go for a direct confrontation – possibly even a gun in the face – and see what came out of it. A bit impulsive, maybe, but it was a tactic that had served him well enough in the past.

Meanwhile, though, there was other work to be done.

Tom checked his wristwatch: half past three in London. With any luck Clive would be at his desk, following a lazy lunch at the Cavalry Club and his statutory twenty-minute doze, stretched out on the floor in a corner of his office, a book for a pillow.

Tom made for the telephone on the desk, gave the number to the operator then replaced the receiver on its cradle.

Clive was one of the few people at the Secret Intelligence Service with whom he'd remained in contact – a short, bluff bulldog of a man with a foul mouth and a face like a clenched fist. They had first met at the Teheran Legation in Persia back in 1924, when Clive was still working for Military Intelligence. It was a critical time for Britain's diplomatic and commercial interests in the country, a time of violence and uncertainty. Reza Khan, the Prime Minister, had risen to office on the back of a British-backed military coup two years earlier, suppressing the power of the clergy and the tribal leaders in the process. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company's considerable operations in the south of the country appeared secure. But then Reza Khan had opened negotiations with the United States over oil concessions in the north.

Tom was dispatched to Teheran in August, a month after the American Vice Consul, Robert Imbrie, had been beaten to death by a two-thousand-strong mob of fanatics. Tom's mission was, essentially, a damage-limitation exercise. Rumours abounded that the British had stirred up the mob violence resulting in Imbrie's death with a view to scuppering the passage of the pro-American oil bill through the Persian Assembly. Tom was charged with quashing these rumours . . . while employing whatever means he deemed advisable to scupper the passage of the oil bill through the Mejliss.

The complexities of Persian politics lay far beyond the ken of the average Persian, let alone a young Englishman. Fortunately, a slightly older Englishman was at hand to educate him. Clive had been kicking around the country when Reza Khan was still a Cossack colonel in Qazvin. He knew the ropes. He knew where the bodies were buried. More importantly, he knew who to bribe, and just how much to pay them.

Clive held most Persians in shockingly low regard. They were, in his opinion, a venal, money-grubbing people – none more so than the mullahs – and never to be trusted. It was a deeply unfortunate twist of fate that they happened to scratch out their sorry lives above vast oceans of crude oil, and that one was therefore obliged to deal with them. Clive spent much of the first six months berating Tom for his naïve generosity of spirit towards their hosts. They had a job to do, and it left little place for sentimentality or misguided colonial guilt.

It was quite possible that Clive hadn't got wind of what was unfolding down here in France – not everyone in the organization would be drawn into the loop – but he could be relied upon to discreetly ferret out just how the matter was being handled back in London. He could also be trusted to keep his mouth shut.

The phone rang, startling Tom. He picked up the receiver to find that his call had been put through successfully.

‘Good afternoon,' came a very proper female voice down the crackling line from London, pleasant but guarded.

‘Clive Jopling, please.'

‘Who shall I say is calling?'

‘Reginald Meath-Butterworth.'

It was a pseudonym Tom had employed in Teheran, chiefly because no one would be able to remember it, let alone repeat it.

After a few moments there was a click on the line and a voice said in Farsi, ‘
Goh bebareh roo gahbret
.'

This roughly translated as: May shit rain down upon your grave.

‘
Goozidam too chesmet
,' Tom replied.

I fart in your eye.

Clive's deep laugh was followed by a question. ‘How are you, you old dog?'

‘Fair to middling,' said Tom.

Lucy had just changed into her tennis gear when the telephone shrilled through the house.

It was Tom.

‘Where are you?' she asked. ‘Le Lavandou.'

‘Still?'

He'd had a problem with his car, something to do with the suspension, which a mechanic was still trying to fix. He wouldn't be back in time for tennis, and suggested that Barnaby stand in for him.

‘If I can detach him from Ilse,' she said. ‘They're still down at the cove.'

‘Tell him it's an order from me. And he's also in charge of the cocktails. With any luck I'll be back before we leave for the restaurant.'

‘And if you aren't?'

‘I will be.'

He was. Just.

Lucy had assumed he was lying, that he'd taken the opportunity to sneak off to see Hélène in Hyères, but he was covered in dirt and grime, and there was even some blood on his shirt where he'd cut himself trying to fix the suspension by the side of the road.

He didn't want to talk about his wasted afternoon, though; he was far more eager to know how the tennis had gone.

‘Six–four, six–three,' said Barnaby, handing him one of his lethal rum concoctions.

‘To you two?'

Barnaby rolled his eyes. ‘Of course.'

‘You should have seen it,' said Mother. ‘Barnaby was prancing around the court like a man possessed.'

‘Ilse was watching,' added Lucy, with a teasing grin.

‘You men are so deluded. If you only knew how little store the female of the species sets by sporting prowess.'

‘What, we'd hang up our plimsolls for good?' asked Barnaby.

‘I was going to say, you'd take up the cello, or learn how to paint.'

Lucy saw the glint in Barnaby's eye and guessed what was coming next.

‘Is is true, Lucy? Does a man who knows how to paint set your heart racing?' Barnaby turned to Tom. ‘Walter insisted on “showing her his etchings” this afternoon.'

‘First of all – he didn't insist, I asked. And secondly – they're not etchings, they're oil paintings.'

This drew a few chuckles.

‘It's a euphemism, my darling,' explained Mother. ‘Barnaby was trying to be funny.'

‘Well, give me a bit more warning next time and I'll try and remember to laugh.'

‘Ignore them,' said Tom, planting a kiss on her cheek and handing her the rest of his cocktail. ‘And finish this. I need a swim.'

Mother glanced pointedly at her wristwatch.

‘If I'm not out front and ready to leave in fifteen minutes, dinner is on me,' called Tom as he hurried off, snatching a beach towel from the line slung between the two tall palms beside the terrace.

Lucy found her eyes tracking him as he made off down the pathway, already pulling the shirt from his trousers and tugging it up over his head.

When she turned her attention back to the chatter on the terrace she saw that Mother's eyes were on her. They lingered, expressionless, but just long enough to let her know that her momentary distraction had been registered.

She would always remember the first time she ate at Les Roches. It wasn't her first night in France – they had taken two days to motor down from Calais – but it was her first ever night on the Mediterranean. And it didn't disappoint.

This was hardly surprising. After the unseasonal rain which had done its best to foul their passage south, and the detours to visit the cathedrals so beloved of Leonard, it would have taken a very strange child indeed to be disappointed by the cloudless skies and scented heat and crystal-clear waters of the Côte des Maures. The exoticism of the place was immediately captivating. Even the palms with their feathery topknots seemed to speak of a secret lotus land.

It was Tom's first summer in Le Rayol, and although he had completed the refurbishment of Villa Martel, installing new plumbing as well as electric light, he was still in the process of filling its large and echoing rooms. There were beds for all, a big table to eat at with benches, the odd armchair here and there, a picture or two on the walls, but that was about the extent of the furnishings. His study contained one old desk, home to every worm ever born, along with a mountain of books still in their packing cases. Surprisingly, Mother had not baulked at the prospect of the simple living, so taken was she by the Art Deco house, which held the memory of a high style she aspired to.

Dinner at Les Roches that first time was Tom's treat to them all after a tiring day on the road. It was to become their canteen over the following week; that's how good the food had been.

The hotel was proudly perched on dark rocks which rose sheer from the water, and its restaurant occupied a vast terrace, like the deck of an ocean liner, overlooking the wide expanse of the sea. Lucy could remember sitting at their table, drinking in the twilit fragrance, and scampering around on a small patch of sand with the boys in between courses. But her strongest recollection of the occasion was the story Tom had told them towards the end of the meal.

Maybe he embellished it for the benefit of George and Harry, who were ten and eight years old at the time. If he did, it was worth it. The two boys sat in rapt silence listening to his account of how he first became acquainted with this stretch of coast which was now his home.

The story started simply enough. Soon after his eleventh birthday, he had come south one Easter to Hyères with his parents. The year was 1907, and the town had long been a popular winter resort with the British. Robert Louis Stevenson had sought a ‘cure' there, and since the visit of Queen Victoria many of the shopkeepers had taken to advertising their wares in English as well as French.

The event in question, though, took place on the coast, just to the east of where they were all sitting, a short walk from Les Roches, around the headland.

An associate of Tom father's, a missionary recently returned from the wilds of central Africa, happened to be staying at that time with friends in Cavalaire. Invited to luncheon, Tom and his parents took the train over there from Hyères. During the course of the meal it became clear that the poor missionary had been traumatized by his experiences in the Congo, and Tom was excused from the table with instructions to make himself scarce. He strolled off along the beach to the rugged little headland west of town, and was happily foraging through the flotsam at the rocky waterline when a boat hove in view around the point.

He had never seen a sailing vessel like it.

Long and sleek, it was painted pink and green and blue, and was driven by a vast lateen sail which the crew now furled. The boat glided gracefully towards the small beach west of the headland and nosed into the sand.

Tom's view was obscured by an outcrop. Unable to approach along the shore for fear of being spotted, he took to the pines at the top of the bluff, creeping stealthily closer, wincing with every crack of a twig underfoot.

They were working so silently that he thought at first he must have imagined the whole thing. But then he saw them down below: half a dozen men shovelling sand by hand into large reed baskets, which they then heaved on to their shoulders and humped up a crude gangway laid from the prow of the strange multicoloured boat on to the beach. In appearance, they could have stepped directly from the pages of
The Arabian Nights
. Their heads were bound with colourful kerchiefs, they wore loose, high-waisted cotton breeches, more like skirts, and their shirtless backs were browned to a deep umber.

To Tom's young mind they were, of course, pirates, possibly a raiding party sent to snatch a small white boy off into slavery. If there was any doubt, he now saw their captain, supine on a flat rock, turning a shiny knife in his hands, as if he might hurl it at any moment at one of his crew. There were thick gold hoops in his ears, an ancient pistol was tucked into the crimson sash around his waist, and his head was tied with a colourful foulard.

Tom lay on his belly, as still as a toppled statue, barely breathing. The minutes ticked agonizingly by, but still the barefoot crew kept loading the ivory-white sand, padding quietly up and down the gangway.

His parents would already be wondering where he was, and yet he risked discovery if he moved. He was caught on the horns of a terrible dilemma. Was it to be his father's volcanic temper, and a near-certain thrashing, or a lifetime of slavery in some distant land? There wasn't much to choose between them, but he was spared having to cast his lot.

A barked order sent the crew scurrying aboard. The captain then rose to his feet and slowly surveyed the wooded slopes backing the beach, his chin raised, as if sniffing the air. If he detected the smell of a terrified young boy, he didn't react to it. Rather, he turned and strode majestically across the sand and up the gangway.

They used the anchored line they'd dropped off the back of the boat to haul themselves off the beach. A light breeze filled the sail and the felucca slipped silently away, making for the islands.

Only when Tom calculated that he was out of range of a pistol shot did he break from cover and begin to run.

George was eager to hear if Tom had been beaten on his return. Harry, although younger, had always been far more pragmatic in his thinking, and he wanted to know why the pirates had been stealing sand. Was it very precious sand, perhaps with gold dust mixed in?

Tom explained that he had got away with an ear-bending from his mother, stumbling breathless into the house in Cavalière to find his father still deep in prayer with the troubled missionary. As for the sand, well, he now suspected that the men weren't pirates after all, but traders. Having offloaded their cargo along the coast, they were filling the empty hold of the vessel with ballast for the long slog back to North Africa.

Both boys overcame their respective disappointments as Tom turned back the Wheel of Time, bringing to life a distant era, a thousand years ago, when the Côte des Maures – the Moorish Coast – fell into the hands of the Saracens, where it remained for almost a century until a Christian army commanded by Guillaume I, Count of Provence, expelled the foreigners for good. This chapter might have been written out of French history, but maybe the pirate captain was acquainted with it. Maybe he hadn't been sniffing the air at all, but taking a long hard look at the land of his forebears before heading for home.

The same might hold true today, he suggested, for a Frenchman finding himself on Cyprus, an island ruled over for three centuries by the Lusignans from Poitou, before they were eventually forced out by the Venetians, who in turn gave way to the Turks. The Mediterranean was littered with such tales of conquest, colonization and eventual displacement. Since time immemorial, the Middle Sea had been fought over by the various peoples inhabiting its shores. It was a vast crucible of disparate cultures and conflicting religious beliefs, a place where East and West collided. And although our own island lay far to the north, the Mediterranean still sat at the heart of our civilization. To ignore its rich history was to blinker ourselves against our true place in the world.

Lucy hadn't been aware of it at the time, but this was also a statement of intent on Tom's part. Yes, she knew he no longer worked with Leonard and was writing a book on Egypt, where he'd spent time as a cultural attaché, but that was about the extent of it. The pattern only began to emerge with the release of his second book – an account of his travels in Palestine and Transjordania – which, like the first, offered an unusual mix of history and personal anecdote spiked with a dry and irreverent humour.

Having explored the eastern reaches of the Mediterranean, Tom had now turned his sights west, to an island this time. Lucy knew very little about the twelfth-century Norman Kingdom of Sicily other than what Tom had told her when he last visited Oxford, but this slice of the past sounded far more like an adventure story than a history-cum-travel book.

The terrace at Les Roches was jammed with diners. To make matters the worse, the Maître d' had reneged on his promise of the large circular table requested by Tom, assigning it instead to a party of loud Americans.

‘You're losing your clout, old man,' joked Barnaby.

‘You obviously didn't tip him enough the last time you were here,' said Mother. ‘Give me a few minutes with the regrettable little man and I'll have him dancing to our tune.'

She was persuaded to let the matter drop, although she only began to relax once her wine glass had been filled. Fanya arrived with Walter, Klaus and Ilse as the first bottle of the evening was being poured. Yevgeny wasn't with them.

‘He sends his apologies,' explained Fanya. ‘He's not feeling well.'

‘A bad case of two defeats on the tennis court in two days?' wondered Leonard aloud.

‘Tell him we'll let him win tomorrow,' said Barnaby.

‘Hey, we don't need your charity,' Walter fired back, taking the empty seat next to Mother, rather than the one beside Lucy.

This was surprising, almost insulting. Was he trying to send her a message? Did he think they'd spent quite enough time together today? Could it be that he was already bored of her? Or maybe it was something else . . .

A sudden flush of embarrassment warmed her cheeks as she thought back to her behaviour out at the islands earlier that day. Walter had seemed quite happy to play along at the time, but it had obviously been a grave error of judgement on her part. Not that judgement of any kind had featured in her thinking. She had fallen foul of pure impulse, dropping the anchor over the side of the
Albatross
and stripping off her clothes.

They had approached from the north, sailing slowly past Héliopolis, with its cluster of whitewashed houses set among the pines on the rising ground beyond the low cliffs. Disappointingly, they had not spotted one naked person by the time they drew level with the small harbour, and even that appeared deserted. They were on the point of abandoning their voyeuristic mission and beating across the narrow strait to the island of Port-Cros when they saw the beach: a crescent of sand lapped by a turquoise streak of sea. There were a fair few people in view, and not one bathing costume between them.