Play Dead (23 page)

Mrs Capstone stared and drew breath for an outburst, but Poppy got in first.

‘Listen,' she said. ‘You've got to tell the police about your calls, if you haven't already. Especially that bit about the drugs.'

‘What on earth are you talking about?'

‘I'm sure it was Laura. She was the one who knew about me and Janet. I don't know what she meant about the drugs, but she meant something. Inspector Firth specifically asked me if I'd come across anything …'

‘My brother is a Major-General.'

‘I shall have to tell the police if you won't. I've already told them about my calls.'

‘You'll admit to having an affair with my husband?'

‘I told him that too.'

‘Either you are behaving totally irresponsibly or this is all part of a deliberate campaign. I am beginning to think that you did indeed make these telephone calls, just as you are making these ridiculous accusations about murder and drugs. You insinuated yourself into my household …'

‘I didn't. You told Peony …'

‘Mrs Tasker and I met by chance at a concert,' said John.

‘How do you know it was by chance?' said Mrs Capstone.

‘We were further drawn together by a shared dislike of pig farming.'

Poppy rounded on him. She had been able to control her anger with Mrs Capstone by a partial understanding, almost a sympathy with her behaviour. Confronted with a failure in her private affairs she resorted to the weapons of the area in which she was confident of success. Her accusations against Poppy were like the point-scoring of the hustings, slung out to wound, without any expectation of belief by anyone who bothered to think about them. John was different. Facing the not quite smiling mask Poppy found her anger bursting out in a shriek.

‘For God's sake! Can't you be serious!'

He shrugged, invulnerable even to that. No, not quite invulnerable, because the sheer volume of the shriek had produced a momentary flicker of calculation before the look of calm detachment settled back into place. He was winding her up, she suddenly realised, as well as Mrs Capstone, but not just for his own amusement. The confrontation suited him. He wanted her angry, too angry to think, too angry to remember … She remembered.

‘Where was Constantin the night before last?' she said.

‘What's that got to do with it?' said Mrs Capstone. ‘I will not be distracted …'

‘Where was Constantin the night before last?' shouted Poppy.

‘Please,' said John, holding up his large hands, palms half-turned in, in a calming gesture. ‘Mrs Tasker is right, my dear. We are not being serious. I will try to explain my behaviour. Give me a few minutes, please.'

‘I don't see …' said Mrs Capstone.

‘Please,' he said again, looking at her from under his heavy brows. She stared back, nodded and settled on to the arm of the sofa, falling as if by instinct into a pose which you could imagine seeing in the back pages of a Sunday supplement, this week's article in the series about how stylish people deal with the straying spouse. Poppy, by contrast, felt all tatters and confusion. They watched in silence while John moved round the room, picking up and inspecting the bases of ornaments, removing several books at a time from shelves and feeling into the cavity behind, glancing behind picture frames. He paid special attention to the music centre, the TV and the light-fittings and finished by unplugging the telephone jack. In the end he faced them with a sigh. His whole demeanour had changed.

‘That's the best I can do,' he said. ‘We'll have to assume that your caller was this Laura, and her choosing to ring when she did was a coincidence. Well, I'm going to have to tell you some of what I've been doing, though I'd very much rather not, for your sakes as well as mine. Neither of you will tell anyone else. I mean that. I know I can trust you not to, for a very simple reason. You've both, I believe, guessed that Constantin is a member of the Romanian secret police, the Securitate. He's not simply there to keep an eye on me. He is a trained assassin, and he's under orders that on receipt of a particular message he is to kill me and my family—you, Clara, Deborah and myself. I have been told this in so many words by my employers, but I've not been told the circumstances in which the message might be sent. You understand?'

Poppy felt blank, useless. In a way it would have been easier to accept if the threat had included her, and even Toby. She was a passenger in a car on a motorway where there's been a pile-up in the opposite direction, free only to stare or look away, and to shudder.

‘Why didn't you tell me before?' said Mrs Capstone briskly. ‘We must have him deported.'

She was still in the same pose, interested, aware, concentrating, but apparently not really troubled. It was as though she believed what John had told her but somehow still didn't imagine it. It didn't belong as a possible event in her world.

‘No,' said John. ‘For several reasons. Doing that might cause the message I told you to be sent. There will in any case be a back-up. Then my business activities, and that means our income, depend on Constantin being available. This is even truer, though Constantin doesn't know it, of what I hope is going to happen in a few weeks' time. My employers, who are effectively the family and associates of President Ceausescu, whom Mrs Tasker and I have just been watching, have been systematically defrauding the Romanian economy for the past decade and more, and transferring the money to Swiss bank accounts. I am their main agent for this activity. For most of the period, until Natalie died, they had a satisfactory hold over me. Since then they have used Constantin. He is not only there to keep an eye on me and be a threat to me, but also because they have so organised their affairs that no serious transaction can take place without his presence. It's done by means of a voice-lock, which responds to him, and no one else, speaking the passwords. They have me, they think, in an inescapable bind. But they are mistaken.

‘The situation is about to change. Very soon. By Christmas, I believe. The commentator in the news programme was saying that of all the countries in Eastern Europe only Albania and Romania will retain their authoritarian regime. I am convinced that in the case of Romania he is wrong. I have very good contacts, much better than those of the professional news analysts, better than those of the diplomats. There will be a revolution in Romania, different from the revolutions elsewhere, more sudden, more violent. Soon.

‘Wait. There's something else, of equal importance to you, and me, Clara. Constantin is not a loyal servant of the regime. He would get out if he dared, but the regime has his sisters for hostages. His dream is to run a small hotel in Crete. But he has seen and believes he knows the apparent strength of the apparatus of control in Romania. He cannot believe in the possibility of revolution. I could try to persuade him. I could say “It's going to happen, and we must be ready for it.” He would be tempted, but he wouldn't believe he could risk it. He would choose the apparently safer course of denouncing me to his employers. So I'm forced to wait until the moment when there comes what the astronauts call a window of opportunity—I shall have three days at the most—when Romania is in turmoil and Constantin can be persuaded that the revolution has indeed come, but before my employers are able to make good their escape and take possession of the enormous sums of money they've been salting away.'

‘No,' said Mrs Capstone. ‘Not if it's illegal. Not in any country. I've always said that. I can't afford it.'

‘It won't be illegal. It won't even be dishonest. I'm a businessman, not a thief. I told you, the sums involved are enormous. A reasonable commission on removing them from the control of their employers and holding them safe until they can be returned to their rightful owners, the people of Romania, will be more than satisfactory. But even that is not my main motive. I have waited sixteen years for this chance, though for a long while I didn't clearly see the shape it was going to take. Only I was sure the time would come. I was born stateless, parentless, homeless, but I can't live without allegiances, so I've had to construct my own—to my family, and to this country of which I am now a citizen, but also to an almost imaginary country which I barely recognised was there when I lived in it, but which I know to exist by having met certain of its citizens—Natalie first and foremost, but also some monks who used to run an orphanage, a husband and wife who kept an illegal lodging-house in Bucharest, a priest or two, a captain of police in a small town, and others like them. Now, at last, I have my chance to help make this imaginary country real. Do you see how much it matters?'

He had spoken slowly in his low, grating voice, talking, Poppy realised, as much to her as to his wife. Was what he'd said true? Probably, she thought, though it couldn't be as simple as that. Did it make any difference, apart from making everything more difficult … ?

‘You really think it will work?' said Mrs Capstone.

‘Until this other business came up I would have said the chances were very good. Even the bankers, I believe, would have considered it a satisfactory result. Now, of course, the outcome is less certain. It depends, I suppose, on where Constantin was the night before last.'

‘You don't know?' said Poppy.

‘He was supposed to be with you,' said Mrs Capstone at the same moment.

‘I believed he was in Portsmouth,' said John, ‘staying with a woman called Bronwen. I had arranged for them to meet, a few weeks ago. Bronwen has worked in a hotel, and expresses a longing to live in Crete. I pay her a small retainer. I told you he wasn't at heart a loyal servant of the regime. On occasions when I don't need him to operate the voice-lock he has been dropping me at the airport and then driving on to Portsmouth. If he was with Bronwen then he couldn't have been in London, murdering this woman …'

‘Nobody has told me why he, or you, or anyone should want to kill somebody else's nanny,' said Mrs Capstone.

‘In a minute,' said John. ‘It's very important to me that my employers shouldn't learn that on some occasions I've been leaving Constantin behind. On this last trip, for instance, I was meeting the people who I hope are going to see that his sisters are safe, when the time comes. That could put our lives at serious risk, as well as ruining my plans. As for our supposed motive, I too would be glad to have that explained.'

‘Oh,' said Poppy. ‘Well, you see, the man in the park, I'm almost sure it was him who followed you that evening, after we'd come back here for supper. You were very excited at first, then you pretended not to be interested. You thought you'd shaken him off, but he recognised you. He lived in a squat at Sabina Road. There was a photograph of you both on the notice-board. He was a rather hopeless, stupid young man. He wanted to impress the people at Sabina Road by finding out something important about Mrs Capstone. He'd have done just what he did here, gone and hung around your house and watched. Then perhaps he saw Constantin washing the car or something, and tried to get into conversation with him, pretending to know more than he did—the people at Sabina Road held briefing sessions on their political opponents, so he'd have some idea. And then Constantin might have decided he was dangerous, and simply got rid of him. Pretended to be friends, followed him back to Sabina Road, found out about the set-up there, and so on. But you see Laura knew the man—I think he'd been one of the babies she'd looked after. She was telling him things she'd picked up at the play centre—I mean the girls do talk, and she'd suddenly become much more friendly—and he must have told her about you visiting me. She was terribly upset when he died, and she started making all these accusations, and she asked Peony and Deborah to tea and I expect she said things then, and Peony would have told … oh! That's important. Is Peony all right?'

‘As far as I know she's in Runcorn,' said Mrs Capstone. ‘She was extremely upset by this woman's death—as you say she'd been to tea with her only a few days earlier. Then she came to me and told me her mother was ill. I didn't believe her, but she was upsetting Deborah, so I packed her off home. She was in any case having the weekend off. I expect her back on Monday. I hope you are not planning to involve her in this tiresome business.'

Oh, God, thought Poppy. She glanced at John, and had the impression that he'd looked away as she did so. She felt at the end of her strength. She couldn't face the prospect of outraging Mrs Capstone still further with the possibility that her nanny was having an affair with her chauffeur, who'd then used her to get Laura to let him in at Barnsley Square.

Mrs Capstone rose.

‘John, do you believe any of this?' she said.

‘I suppose it's a possibility. There are certainly members of the Securitate who would kill under such circumstances. In fact I don't believe it of Constantin. I've been watching him for over a year now, remember, and though I don't know what his exact orders are I don't think he would kill anyone in this elaborate fashion. He isn't stupid, but he's vain and lazy. He must be equipped with several simpler methods of assassination. Or he might simply strangle the woman and fake a break-in. So I don't believe it. On the other hand …'

‘Well, I don't believe a word of it,' said Mrs Capstone. ‘It's all supposition. I would like to go home. Are you coming? I have the car.'

‘I'll make my own way,' said John, as easily as if discussing arrangements after a lunch-party.

‘You can go now if you want,' said Poppy.

He shrugged and followed his wife into the hallway. There was a murmur of voices as the door opened and closed, and she thought he'd taken her at her word and left without even a goodbye, but he came back.

‘I'm sorry,' he said.

‘It's too late for that. I don't think there's anything to say.'