by Jessica Mann
Tamara’s contact “in the know” was Thea Crawford’s husband, Sylvester. She rang him from Freya’s house to ask about Carl Hawker. He made the noise that goes with coming across a nauseating smell.
“What’s wrong with him, Sylvester?”
“To be pompous, it’s a question of professional ethics.” Crawford himself worked for a paper that was both puritan and highbrow and often pompous. “If you accept that my job is a profession at all.”
“Do you mean that he doesn’t protect his informants?”
“The opposite, in a way. He’s a smears man. He has sold out. A young man on the make. Haven’t you ever noticed how convenient his exposures can be for the establishment? What was the one a few weeks ago … that man who sneaked to his MP about contracts at the weapons factory, the one Hawker claimed was in the pay of the East Germans?”
“But it all turned out to be nonsense.”
“There was no evidence or corroboration, if that’s what you mean. But the man killed himself all the same. It’s the proverbial situation. Mud sticks. No smoke without a fire. Our masters find it convenient to have a supposedly independent journalist who is prepared to discredit people who are inconvenient. Even if the allegations could be proved to be untrue, which is impossible by definition, it would be too late.”
“But, Sylvester. If this is known about Hawker, why does anyone believe him? Or publish his articles?”
“Because it is sometimes true. Just occasionally. He has had one or two genuine scoops in his time. Anyway, his stories sell papers.”
Tamara hung the receiver up very thoughtfully. What a neat arrangement, she thought, and how characteristic of the Mr. Black she was beginning to understand, a man for whom all was fair in his war. No wonder he had not been especially interested in her reports from Forway once Tamara had confirmed what he needed to know, the identity of the moving spirit of the independence movement. Carl Hawker’s story would bring the islanders to their senses. Once they heard it, and some had already heard it, they would be convinced that Selwyn Paull was leading them by the nose to the slaughterhouse; that he was not interested in their well-being but that of the Russian Paymasters for whom he had worked throughout his career. They would visualize the course of events with horrible clarity; independence, followed by conquest—and being turned into a base for attacks on a country to which they all, in fact, felt loyal.
Carl Hawker was onto a good thing; the secret hatchet man, out there in the public eye, popular on TV, handsomely paid, and all the richer for his tax-free extras; a corrupted whizz kid.
Helping herself to some food in the kitchen, which already felt bleak from the withdrawal of the personality that had pervaded it, Tamara considered the pattern of Mr. Black’s operation on Forway and wondered whether he had followed a similar one earlier in the year. When he chose Tamara to worm her way into the confidence of Mike and Rory, telling her to report on their plans, identify their allies, and eventually make it possible for them to be arrested red-handed, had he planned, had he intended, that neither of the two men would survive his association with Tamara Hoyland? When he read those psychologists’ reports and aptitude-test results about Tamara, had he recognized a woman who would take her own violent action? Had he seen in Tamara what some other unscrupulous man had seen in Dierdre Tyrone?
Tamara’s satisfaction in revenge was tarnished by the thought that some other mind than hers might have planned it. She hated to think that a motivated human could be turned into a lethal weapon, manipulated in a third party’s cause. Had she been as cynically deceived as the indignant public cheated into detestation of Selwyn Paull? Were “freedom fighters” moulded into spearheads by a totalitarian power? Did even the murderous Irish, supreme in Tamara’s demonology, attack people who were the enemies of people unconnected with their own interests? Many unpublished grudges must be wiped out under a false banner of political action.
When she had joined Mr. Black’s team, her motives had been simple—revenge; and she had believed that his was, if different, equally simple: the good of his country. Her mental model of the world had been as simple as a child’s drawing of a house, flat, symmetrical, with nothing behind it, the good guys and the baddies, right and wrong, expiation and revenge. But things are not so simple. Mr. Black’s intentions were probably as devious as his methods. An analogy: a billiard-table. Tamara saw herself as a ball, edged from one angle to move at a different one, with a skilful player calculating the geometry. So, if he had expected her disobedient initiative, when he turned her attentions to Rory and Mike, what had he expected her to do on Forway? More, surely, than report back to him by telephone. He had not needed Tamara’s presence on the island to arrange Carl Hawker’s visit. What was she here for? Why had he sent her to a place where Ian would be so clearly in her mind? Did he know that she would be shaken by surges of punitive fury whenever she thought of him in the setting where she had been with him before? If she was Mr. Black’s weapon, whether bludgeon or rapier, at whom was she aimed?
Chapter 26
Friday morning. The Day. The day of The Visit, of Independence, the day before which numbers had been crossed off on calendars; a rather different day from that which I had heard presaged by my father and the Lisles and Freya Barnes. There was an atmosphere of “last times” on Forway; of repairs not worth making, seeds not worth planting, resources not worth saving.
Dawn—and the moaning of the fog-horn. The brilliant warmth of the previous day was followed by an impenetrable haze. The ferry from Cornwall edged its way through the fog to deliver its load of passengers and papers and was away again by eight o’clock. The captain said that visibility was worsening. The Visitor was due to arrive later in the day by helicopter, one of those twenty-four seaters with room for the attendant crew of pressmen and photographers. But the helicopter was subject to the rules of the Civil Aviation Authority. No passenger transport was permitted to try to land with less than nine hundred metres of visibility.
I felt my way down to The Town like a blind man, for I left the path several times and was afraid of walking over the cliff edge. By my own reckoning, visibility was not even one metre. I knew I was in The Town from the sound of Jeannie Windows’s professionally cheery voice assuring the schoolchildren that the weather would clear and The Visitor would come. “Come along, children, let’s get on with it. What about some flags for this corner here?” I wondered whether the children could even see the corner. We should not have been surprised by the fog. It often followed a warm day on Forway.
I was on my way to see my father. Thetis Lisle had told me that he had suffered a very mild stroke and that I should not worry, so I turned into The Hotel first. Annie Foggo looked embarrassed when she saw me. She was growing rich out of my persecutors. The ferry had brought a cargo of newsmen, who surged towards me with questions about my father.
I parried their attacks with my back to the bar. They grew bored after a while, for I knew one or two of them, and Annie Foggo had already told them that I had very seldom come to the island since my father lived there. Some of the talk was about the oil, for there had apparently been a press release, embargoed until today. The Visitor was going to announce the plans my father and Freya had feared, later in the day.
Fortified by alcohol, I went out again into the mist. It was not like town fog, it did not choke one’s throat and blacken everything one touched, but wisps of it crept into houses, and even in the bar wafted between me and my interrogators, lending an unreal air to the atmosphere. But then, I had never really thought that Forway was part of the quotidian world.
My father was doped still but had been talking restlessly in his unconsciousness, Thetis told me. Nonie Anholt was in the other bed.
“I haven’t been so busy for years,” Thetis whispered. She was in her doctor’s rig, with a white coat on, and a stethoscope hanging on her bosom. She looked competent and severe and bustled out of the room with that air of busy preoccupation that medical students learn along with
anatomy.
My father was snoring now, hoarse breaths blowing the wisps of his moustache up and down in the still air. But Nonie Anholt was tossing around uncomfortably, and across the passage, Thetty Yetts, now in labour, was making the noises associated by bachelors like me with the steamier television dramas.
Nonie Anholt opened her cats’ eyes and stared straight at me. “What was he saying?” she said in her clear Knightsbridge voice. “What did he say about Freya Barnes?”
I did not think I should reply. Surely delirious old women should be protected from such news. But she was at least temporarily compos mentis and pressed me, so that I found myself telling her of Freya’s dreadful death. She said, “That’s not right. Not Freya. He promised me …” Her voice died away. I waited uneasily. There was no role for me in this macabre sick bay, but through the half-open door I could see that Thetis Lisle and her assistant, Jeannie Foggo, were fully occupied, and the crescendoes of sound from Thetty Yetts inhibited me from interrupting their hard labour. It was not an amusing pun, I told myself severely, as an egalitarian man should; but it did seem apt.
The morning wore on. The fog was not lifting at all.
Nonie Anholt began to speak, rapidly and wildly. With clumsy hands I tried to smooth her sheets and plump her pillows, the useless actions that I supposed proper nurses would perform, but she spoke on, and after a while I was able to gather what she was trying to tell—not me, but anyone who could hear.
“I said I’d show them, I’d show the Brits, I’d pay them out …”
There is no point in my trying to reproduce her words verbatim, for she was very incoherent and repetitive, and it was a long while before I understood what she was saying. It was this: that she had given Frank refuge, and Dierdre Tyrone, and others of their fellow revolutionaries before them, in the hope of helping to punish the Brits, as she referred to them. The Brits had caused the death of her young lover. I remembered the papers in the island Log and realized what she was talking about. I also remembered that she must have been both married to someone else and widowed by the time the young man was killed “while trying to escape.” But she had never forgiven the British for his death and had been planning revenge ever since.
I had time, as she repeated herself, to wonder how true her words were. What I had heard of her London life did not sound like that of a bitter woman driven by unappeasable rancour. Presumably she had revived her anger once she returned to live on Forway.
Frank and Dierdre had made plans, too. They had promised Nonie Anholt that they would do something drastic to “show the Brits.” She regarded it partly as payment for her taking them in, though Frank had been her lover. I found that a peculiarly revolting thought. Their target was to be The Visitor. The Visitor would be a suitable target and deserved to suffer for the United Kingdom’s crimes. But not Freya Barnes. That was why Nonie was so agitated now. Freya Barnes was not a proper victim.
Dierdre and Frank had promised they would not hurt anyone on the island. Only property and The Visitor. But Nonie Anholt said, more than once, that they had not been the cause of the explosion at the Coastguard Station. That was someone else. They were angry. They didn’t like other people doing that on their patch. Nonie had been jealous. “I wanted one for Nonie,” she said several times, the child she had been surfacing in the aged carapace. “One for Nonie. A blow against the Brits. He said he’d do it for me.”
But Freya Barnes should not have suffered. They had promised. This went on and on, and then on again. It felt like hours. At last Thetis came in and shot something into the old woman’s arm, so that she fell silent and her eyes closed. Thetis told me briskly that there was nothing I could do for my father mooning around here, and returned to her other patient.
Outside in The Square, the day was still muffled by fog. The usual sounds of Forway were indistinct murmurs, the very smell was damped down. But I could hear loud wails from the school.
I bumped into Rik Gerson on my way across The Square and then came upon Tamara standing outside The Hotel. I said something idle about Rik Gerson, remarking that the weather he had seen when he came over prospecting a year ago should have put him off Forway for good.
“I didn’t know he’d been here then,” she said a little sharply. “You mean he was here on the island when Pedro Barnes died?”
“That’s right. I thought you knew. And now poor old Freya. Do you think that was an accident, Tamara? Listen to what Nonie Anholt has been rambling on about.”
I told her all that Nonie had been saying.
Chapter 27
Tamara had the telephone receiver in her hand and was beginning to dial Mr. Black’s number again, when she heard a sound from her room, Ian’s former bedroom. Rik Gerson was standing there, holding the miniature camera which she had not had occasion to use on this mission.
“Neat little thing,” he said. “In my day they looked like cigarette lighters.”
“Smoking is so unfashionable these days.” Tamara watched him return the gadget to the tampon box and push the drawer closed. He held his finger and thumb together.
“Want me to stick the hair back again?”
“Please don’t bother.”
“I thought you must be one of Mr. Black’s army.”
“Did you?”
“Funny coincidence, really.” He walked past her into the living-room. “Okay if I take a drink?” He poured one for himself. “I mean, two of the chaps working in Department E having connections with this place.”
“Did you meet Lena through working with Ian?”
“Yeah.”
“Ian never mentioned you to me.”
“He wasn’t supposed to mention his work to you at all.”
“Didn’t Lena know what you did?”
“You kidding? She would have told half London.”
“Do you still work for Department E?” Tamara asked.
“No.”
“But you sent Mr. Black one of the U.D.I. leaflets.”
“For old times’ sake,” Rik Gerson said.
“Or to make sure that Forway wouldn’t drain away the Barnes fortune?”
“Once a member of Mr. Black’s team, always a member.”
“You put your heart into it, did you?” Tamara said savagely. He did not seem to understand her. He replied, “It was a job, of course, not a crusade.”
“Why did you stop?”
“I was invalided out.”
“What had happened to you?”
“I had a knock on the head and it made my memory wonky. And my sense of balance.”
“That sounds easy to fake.”
“But it all turned out very nicely for me in the end. It’s not as though I was ever exactly dedicated to it as a career. I got a very decent little pay-off.”
“Insurance on special Civil Service terms,” Tamara quoted.
“That’s how we paid for the Aragons’ place.”
“It seemed like a good idea to live near the rich widow, did it?” Tamara said. “Once she’d been made into a widow.”
“That’s right. Lena’s her only relation. Infertile lot, that family, I’m glad to say.”
“With one blood relation left to inherit.” Tamara went over to Freya’s desk and took from it the envelope that had arrived the previous day in the mail. She extracted its contents.
Tamara unfolded the stiff paper. It was typed in those very large letters used for legal documents, with wide margins, but even London lawyers could not much complicate the deed’s simple provisions. There were only three paragraphs. Tamara picked up the pen that Freya always used and tested that its ink was flowing. Then she wrote the name Freya Barnes, in Freya’s handwriting, in the space beside which a cross had been pencilled.
“You can be one of the witnesses,” she said. She wrote her own name, Tamara Hoyland, her address in London, and her profession, archaeologist.
She held the pen out to Rik Gerson. She warned him, “No spoilt papers, mind.”
He loo
ked at her with what seemed like admiration. “A gutsy lady,” he said. “And a good try. Who’d have thought that the plight of the islanders would have grabbed you like that? But no way, no way at all. That money is going to make the Gerson family very happy.”
“I have no idea what the criminal laws of Forway would have been if it had become an independent state,” Tamara said. “They might have started from scratch. You might have been allowed to get away with murder. You might even have been able to profit from a murder you committed. But so long as you remain a citizen of the United Kingdom, a murder or manslaughter committed by you can be tried in England. That’s in the British Nationality Act. So it won’t make any difference if Forway turns out to be French or Irish or even nothing at all. You are still British and you can be tried in England for the murder of Freya Barnes. Let alone the murder of Pedro, a year before.”
She had been prepared for Rik Gerson to attack her. But his training had been as extensive as hers. He said calmly, “Proof?”
“Has been created.”
“By you?”
“Who else?”
“Unwise.”
“The mailboat took its details,” Tamara said. “I dare say you were a better pupil of that brutal trainer in Bays-water than I ever was, but proving it would not help you now. In fact, keeping me safe and well is extremely important to you.”
“That’s an old trick.”
“None the worse.”
“There’s no way of proving what was done to that boat. There’s nothing left of it or the gas cylinder. Quite apart from the fact that you can’t blame me if she lit a match in her own cabin.”
