by Jessica Mann
“One of your tools was found in the wreck of the Bedford van,” Tamara told him. “Your fingerprints were on it.”
“That is not true. I didn’t—”
“And you can’t prove that. The tool’s on its way to the mainland.”
“That doesn’t mean a thing,” Gerson said.
“And you left the rope from your dinghy tied to the rail of Freya’s boat that night. Humphrey Lisle unhitched it when he rowed her out there. I found it in his boat.”
“You can’t identify rope.”
“You can when it’s entangled with homespun wool.”
“You have framed me,” he said; his face was vicious.
“No, just forged your signature. That’s my specialty.”
He turned the trust deed over in his hands and re-read a paragraph; then he said, “Anything else?”
“I dare say I could show that you fixed the explosion at the Coastguard Station, if necessary. You’d been so desperate to stop Freya’s plans going through. Don’t forget, I’ve been taught how to create instability too.”
He rubbed thoughtfully at the bald patch on his head. Tamara said slowly, “When was it exactly that you were wounded on the head so conveniently?”
“Spring, last year.”
“Ian died then.”
“That’s right.”
Tamara stared at the man. He looked like the victim of a deprived urban childhood, rather small and too thin. Her trained eye observed the balance of his body though, the ever-readiness of his reactions. The pair of them were equally well disguised. She said, “You were the man they said was with Ian when he died. That’s when you were injured. ‘Incapacitated for work though not for ordinary life,’ those were Mr. Black’s words.”
“So?”
“What happened? Why weren’t you in the car? If it blew up as they said, you couldn’t have escaped so lightly.”
“It was when he started the engine. I was not in the car yet. I was hit by flying debris.”
“Was he killed at once?”
“So they said.”
“And you were unconscious?”
“Yes.”
“So when did you take his gold pencil? A souvenir, was it? A reminder of a narrow escape? A tip from the terrorists? A thank-you present for fingering Ian to them? Your thirty pieces of silver?”
“What do you mean?”
“You were out of range, somewhere safe. You weren’t unconscious. Not then. I dare say they knocked you out convincingly enough. You saw Ian after that explosion. Answer me now. Did he die at once?”
“Well, almost.”
Tamara launched herself at the man, her reactions speeded but her judgement dimmed by the intensity of her revengeful fury.
Chapter 28
Down in The Town, I had eventually braved the bar again and, fortified by the last of the brandy (“The drink’s nearly run out with this lot here,” Annie Foggo warned), had said more than I meant to the gathered newshounds. Local people popped in and out to say that the fog was, or was not, lifting. When the door opened, letting in more wisps of white nothingness, ever-louder noises could be heard from the school, where presumably the children blamed their elders for the weather. Their elders blamed fate.
The journalists had moved on from my father in particular to the moving spirits behind U.D.I. in general. We all moved on from whisky to rum.
Eleven o’clock, eleven-thirty, midday … the fog remained as earth-bound as the sea itself.
At half-past twelve the final definitive message was relayed around The Town. The Visitor’s helicopter would not take off. The Visit was cancelled.
The other visitors were much put out. No booze, no story, no escape … I was far from sober. I said, “Come on, then, if that’s what you’re interested in. I’ll show you all the Independence papers.”
Shambling, but not straggling so far as to lose sight of my lurching figure, they followed me up the hill through the fog. If I had been soberer, I should have worried about these erratic strangers falling off Forway in the engulfing mist, but they say that drunkards don’t fall and these did not, although by the time we had panted up to the Barnes place, several had collapsed, and only three of the men were still with me. I registered but did not recognize the heaving, grunting noise I heard when I opened the door. I called, “Anyone here?”
The door into the living-room was flung open. Rik Gerson stood there, panting. Blood was running from his nose and from a gash on the side of his neck. He was bent over, one hand cradling his genitals. We stood aside stupidly, as he pushed by and out of the house.
Tamara Hoyland was in the sitting-room. She was getting up slowly from the floor. All but the heaviest pieces of furniture were overturned or askew. I tripped over a reel of cotton. Freya’s work-table had fallen over and open. Tamara held a pair of dressmakers’ scissors at an aggressive angle. Her cheek was bruised. When she put her weight on her right foot, she winced and sat down on the upended armchair.
“I kicked him too hard,” she said and rubbed her foot. Her cheeks were scarlet, her eyes shining. Like me, the journalists gazed at her with delight.
One of them said, “What on earth’s been going on?” And another answered, “I should have thought that’s obvious.”
“Are you all right, Tamara?” I said.
“Never better,” she assured me, her eyes glistening.
“Did he try …” I began.
“It was nothing,” she said. “Just between the two of us.”
One of the journalists began to pick up the things that were scattered around the room. From where she sat, Tamara reached out for a stiff piece of paper, some sort of document, and casually folded it up and put it into her pocket.
“I came to show these people the documents that were prepared for Forway’s U.D.I.,” I explained. Tamara smiled brilliantly at the journalists.
“Would a bit later do?” she said. “Let me clear up first.”
“We’ll help you.”
“No, no, I can manage.” With remarkable speed, considering the stubbornness alcohol usually induces, she persuaded them to leave now and come back later. I realized that they were only so docile because they hoped to get a better story from Rik Gerson. I refused to depart with them, but when they had gone, Tamara said, “If you’re staying anyway, Magnus, make yourself useful. I could do with some coffee.”
“Tamara … are you sure that Rik didn’t …?”
“You can see for yourself,” she said. Her sleeve was torn, but her jeans undamaged, it was true.
“You are obviously able to defend yourself.” I am not sure whether I sounded admiring, approving, or envious.
She laughed and said, “I’ve learned some judo, that’s all. Anyway, you broke it up almost before it had started.”
While I was getting out cups and coffee, I heard the telephone bell tinkle nine times; she was apparently ringing someone in London. Tamara’s voice was raised, but I could not hear her words through the closed kitchen and bedroom doors. When she came through to the kitchen, she had changed her jersey, and combed her hair, and looked like a nymph instead of a maenad. When she had drunk some coffee, into which I had poured some of Freya’s brandy, she pulled the legal document from her pocket.
“I thought you might fill this in,” she said. I took it from her. It was the trust deed in which Freya made over the Barnes fortune to the people of Forway. Tamara had witnessed her signature. I looked doubtfully at the blank space.
“One’s supposed to see the person actually signing,” I said dubiously.
“You’d rather that Rik Gerson and his wife get it all?”
I took the pen from her and wrote my name underneath Tamara’s and Freya’s signatures.
Chapter 29
The role of Dr. Watson, when Sherlock Holmes is played by a youngish woman, is not a flattering one. I am aware that I come out of this story seeming an ass. Nor is my appearance in that guise deceptive, although appearances so often are. This narrat
ive, for instance, may have seemed to be a political thriller. It turns out to be an old-fashioned story of murder and detection. One thing, however, has gone according to the formula. The ninny with whom the detective shares the clues, and from whom the detective hears of them, falls in love with the detective. Tamara Hoyland is a permanent inhabitant of my heart and mind. She’s amusing herself with me, using me as her reward. I keep hoping for more. She may learn to love me. But like the heroes of fiction, she seems intent on moving forward to her next assignment without me. She has been very kind. She has talked to me about that week on Forway in the most patient and indulgent manner. She has explained all that I did not understand and made me privy to conversations that she did not understand. She has given me information that she should not have passed: for instance, that Frank Hooley and Dierdre Tyrone, alias Emma Hurst, were arrested when they slipped ashore from a fishing boat somewhere near Falmouth and that they credibly denied any intention of harming The Visitor to Forway. “It would have been suicide,” the man is said to have exclaimed. “No kamikaze missions for us.” Like Freya Barnes, Nonie had been cheated in her attempt to make a final impression on the world. Dierdre Tyrone was returned to the Irish Republic to complete her term of imprisonment there. Tamara was astonished to find pity in her own reaction to this news. She had the feeling that the girl had been drawn into something that she never quite understood and later regretted. Hooley is still awaiting trial on charges of murder alleged to have been committed in Birmingham two years ago.
I wanted to know whether she would ever have left Rik Gerson at liberty, to use on any other inconvenient victim the skills that he had learned from the same instructor as herself. Could she have let the murderer of Ian Barnes and both his parents go free?
“That was how I first realized he must have worked for Department E, actually,” she told me. “When his wife used a phrase the instructor uses. A spot of turbulence—that’s what that man would call the third world war. And those references to a special Civil Service insurance, too.”
“Anyone who had received your training would know how to blow up something much more challenging than a disused coastguard station,” I said, nuzzling my face into that soft patch between throat and collar-bone. Tamara was not just being kind. She enjoyed it as much as I did, probably more; for my distracted emotions came between me and abandonment.
“You wouldn’t need any training to know how to undo a gas tap and insulate a door,” she said. “Even you could have done it, Magnus.”
“I doubt if I could have done the other thing. I don’t know anything about the inside of cars.”
“I don’t know that Rik Gerson did either. I showed that throttle spring to a mate of mine in London, and he said it would have looked just the same if it had suddenly snapped from old age.”
“What about the brake line, though?”
“Who knows? A lot can happen in a two-hundred-foot fall.”
“Would you have used that evidence you manufactured?”
“I should never have been allowed to. Think of the beans he might have spilt if he got in a witness-box.”
Tamara had got answers from Mr. Black in the end—perhaps not true, but convincing. Ian had not been on an Irish assignment. His death at terrorist hands had been an unexplained surprise to Department E. Now, however, it was clear that Gerson had betrayed him in the hope that he would be murdered—the first step on a journey towards a dazzling inheritance.
“I hope he’s frying in hell,” she said uncharacteristically.
“On earth he’s a hero instead.”
In that blinding fog on the day of The Visit, a ship had gone onto Forway’s barrier of rocks. It had radioed for help. Without the distorting fog, they could have been seen and heard quite easily. As it was, there was a nightmarish scene that should be described by a more vivid pen than mine. I’d got down to The Town by then. I was looking for Rik Gerson. I almost thought I might kill him.
All the men then in The Town had rushed towards the lifeboat slip, myself inevitably with them. John Yetts was the coxswain. He said, “Not you, Magnus, you’re no good in boats.”
Rik Gerson climbed in unchallenged, and the lifeboat disappeared from our sight almost the moment it was cast off.
“There’s no danger,” the women said. “It’s glassy calm.” There should have been no danger. Rik Gerson need not have stood on the gunwale to help a swimming mariner into the boat; Rik should have been tied on, as the rules required, and all the others were. When he fell into the sea, he disappeared from view. Nobody saw him surface, nor could he be found in the fog, although the lifeboat stayed out looking for him for hours. He could not have survived, although sometimes Tamara has nightmares in which he did, and lives in comfort with Ian Barnes unavenged.
It was a hero’s death and Rik’s wife Lena has been presented with a medal by the Royal Humane Society. I doubt, though, that it consoled her for the loss of Freya Barnes’s fortune. She is said to have taken the government compensation for the Aragons’ place without disputing the very low figure set on property values in Forway by the official valuer, and we hear that she has gone back to being a secretary in London. No doubt she now spends her lunch-hours gazing into the windows of the shops from which she had expected to buy her clothes with the Barnes millions. Since she loved secretarial work, as she had said, she is probably happy.
The dead Gerson and the living one, in fact, were more fortunate than my innocent father. He never recovered from Mr. Black’s exercise in technique. He suffered a second stroke while he was still in Thetis Lisle’s care, and now he is paralyzed and incontinent and lives in a geriatric hospital in West London. If the staff are whispering that he was once a traitor and a spy, he cannot understand them. Perhaps I should say that he has no way of indicating it, if he does.
Tamara and I do not live together. I want more than that and have less. I long to marry her, to exchange mutual promises of perpetual fidelity, to feel that she is mine. I know it is old-fashioned; but once you feel about a girl as I do about Tamara, you realize that any previous conviction of love has been counterfeit.
Tamara will not even let me spend the night in her flat. She has entertained me there to decorous meals, but she will only lie with me in my bed. The impermanence makes me restless, for she will not stay for long or leave her belongings there, and she keeps rushing off to get on with her backlog of work at the Royal Commission. Soon she will leave me permanently behind her. I am no more than light physical relief—the biter bit.
Even on Saturdays and Sundays she sets the alarm clock too early. But I am physically stronger and can hold her to me.
“How did you know it was Rik, anyway?” I said.
“I am ashamed to admit.” She pushed me away with a trained twist of the torso and stood up, a heavenly sight in the most literal sense of the words. “I just knew. The evidence was all there, all the indications were quite definite. All the things you told me you had see—”
“I didn’t know they meant anything.”
“The ICI fuse tin in the midden. The insulating tape in his dinghy. Anona Aragon seeing him rowing around that evening. And they had such a massive motive for killing Freya before she completed the trust deed. Then it seemed to me so obvious that they were faking about their simple-lifery. Lena was pining for Piccadilly. Worth being away from it to her, of course; she thought there were millions involved.”
Once the various taxes had been deducted, according to the laws of the United Kingdom, there was less money than expected, but still enough to make each Forway family prosperous when it was shared out between them.
I went there in the following spring. I had been commissioned to write a piece called “The Last Days of Forway” for a Sunday colour supplement.
The Yetts family had already left, with the baby whose name had been changed from Independence to Elizabeth. Annie Foggo had married a publican from Plymouth but come back to Forway for the occasion. All the others were sticking it out to
the end, though they knew it was only for a few months more. Even the Lisles had made their plan. Thetis was going into partnership with a general practitioner in the Outer Hebrides.
The three governments that claimed the rights to Forway had agreed that whichever of them was adjudged its historical owner at the International Court would facilitate the completion of the oil rig and terminal, so that the only dispute, like all disputes are in the end, was about money.
Meanwhile, at the second attempt, the first and last Royal Visit was to take place. I was standing in the Press pound in The Square on Forway when the Royal Yacht anchored in the island’s waters. The islanders cheered continuously as the launch was lowered, the Visitor descended to it, and the pipes shrilled. There were tears in most eyes, even my own, when those feet touched the pier, and there arose to the top of the newly erected flagpole that brightly coloured scrap of fabric, the Union Flag.
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