‘Well, it’s stripped. You have to reassemble it.’
‘The work of two minutes.’
She watched as he opened the bag and removed the Thompson sub-machine gun and knelt down, placing the parts on the unwrapped cotton. He examined each constituent element, then began to click them together, his hands moving fast as though he had done this a thousand times before. He probably had.
‘You didn’t tell me you had a brother,’ she said.
‘Is it relevant?’
‘Yes, I think it is. He teaches at a school in Essex. Did you know that?’
‘No. I haven’t seen the bastard in nearly three years.’
‘I went there this morning, but he wasn’t there. That was all the office would give me. I was wondering if you have any clue as to where he might be.’
‘Of course not. Anyway, what’s this all about?’
‘He has the other film. Your father sent it to him, not Wilde.’
Marfield stopped his work on the stripped gun and gave her a hard look. ‘I don’t believe it. My father never had any time for Toll.’
‘It’s true.’
‘That’s not what my mother said.’ He held up the reassembled gun, slid the bolt and tested the safety catch and the trigger. ‘Smooth as silk,’ he said. He picked up one of the two magazines and slotted it into place. ‘Ready to fire.’ He pointed it at her. ‘Now then, what’s this about Ptolemy?’
‘Your father sent him the film. Your mother knows this, but she lied to you. She’s afraid of you, Marcus – she fears what you would do to your brother.’
‘And how have you come to this conclusion?’
‘I went to visit your mother. I saw Ptolemy’s picture – and it all became clear to me. She told you the first thing that came into her head, which was Wilde’s name. Wilde has never had the film.’
‘But he’s seen it.’ Marfield shrugged. ‘Anyway, he’s dead now. And dead men tell no tales, as someone once pointed out.’
‘Maybe. But we still need the film. And so I’m going to leave you now and find your brother.’
‘Did it occur to you that I might have an objection to you hurting my own flesh and blood?’
‘I didn’t say I was going to hurt him. But we must have the film.’
‘Did you do anything to my mother?’
She sighed. ‘No, but would it really matter to you if I had? You loathe each other.’ She leant forward and kissed him. ‘Good luck, Marcus. Get the Thompson hidden quickly. This is a remarkable thing you’re doing. You’re a brave man.’
‘Oh no,’ he said without looking up. ‘This is easy. I hate Americans. All Americans.’
That helped, of course. But Elina was still curious. ‘Why, Marcus? Why do you hate them?’
He stopped his work and looked at her with an enigmatic smile. ‘Do you really want to know?
‘Tell me.’
He shrugged. ‘OK. I was on a choir trip to Munich with the school. It was 1934. We sang in the Frauenkirche and various concert halls, but after the rest of the choir went home, I stayed on with the family of an old friend of my mother’s. They had a boy of my age, Gottfried, and we got on well, really well. We went hiking with his Hitler Youth troop. It was a pure life, a true life. I felt at home.’
She tapped her watch.
‘I was made an honorary member and I wanted to stay there, but of course, I had to come back to Suffolk. However, I persuaded my parents to let me go again the next summer, 1935. I didn’t tell my father about the Hitler Youth, of course. Not then, at least. He would have been outraged and kept me in England.’
‘Something happened?’
‘One weekend our troop was hiking and camping in the mountains around Garmisch. It was early evening and we were singing around the campfire: For today Germany is ours! Denn heute, da gehört uns Deutschland . . .’
‘. . . und morgen die ganze Welt. And tomorrow the whole world.’
He nodded. ‘A band of American hikers came upon us, all loaded down with rucksacks. No, they descended on us. They were all a couple of years older than us – jeering college idiots. They insulted our uniforms, insulted the swastika, finally they insulted the Führer. Gottfried had had enough. He launched himself at them with his hiking stick. One of the Yankee oafs, half a foot taller than Gottfried and twice as broad, pushed him hard. Gottie stumbled, fell on to rocks. His head split open and he died instantly.’
‘My God.’
‘So you see . . . killing Americans is easy.’
*
They had put mother and child in a small private room of the hospital. Willie was sitting up in bed telling him about Mrs Cullanan and how she had looked after him and how Mr Cullanan had found Ma. In the other bed, Juliet was asleep, heavily sedated and bandaged. There were no broken bones, but she had tendon damage to her right forearm, some deep cuts to her torso and trauma to the spinal column. But the injuries were not life-threatening.
Jim Vanderberg could not wait to talk to her, to hear what exactly had happened. He also had other tasks on his mind; he needed to contact the family of Joyce Harman to break the news to them and give his condol-ences. Willie had told him how she had kept them fed and how much she had helped in the days adrift in the dinghy.
Most of all, he wanted to take a boat over to the island to give his personal thanks to Cathy and Martin Cullanan, without whom Juliet would certainly not have survived.
He needed to call the embassy, too. With both Herschel Johnson and the ambassador unavailable, he had had to leave a message with young Lincoln Tripp. His first thought was that that would be fine, but since then doubts had crept in. The line had been bad and somehow Tripp’s response had seemed a bit casual. In fact the more he thought about it, the less certain he was that Tripp had understood the urgency of the warning at all.
*
The Gilderstone estate lay in the vast agricultural folds between Steven-age and Saffron Walden. Wilde had only been there once, to a special event. Four years ago on this very day, 12 September 1935. St Peter’s was indeed a Protestant church, but like every English church of four hundred years old or more, it had once been Roman Catholic.
And not all these old churches, though nominally Church of England, had ever truly cast off their Catholic past. St Peter’s was one of these. Every year, it remembered a day in 1589 when a martyr of the Church of Rome was captured during Mass in this little hidden place of worship.
It was a church in which names such as Edmund Campion and Robert Southwell, John Gerard and William Weston had sought sanctuary and brought the Mass to their forlorn flock, suffering under the harsh Elizabethan regime. They were all fugitives, all hunted mercilessly.
On the evening Wilde went there, the way was marked by pitch torches, and the interior was lit by dozens of candles. It was both eerie and ethereal. He had known the story of the poet martyr Barnaby Gilderstone well, and had written a sympathetic article about him, which was why he had been invited. It was not exactly a secret cere-mony, but it was not publicised, for the parish priest knew that many in his flock disapproved of honouring the saints of Rome. And anyway, they didn’t like coming to this ruin of a Saxon church, deep in the woods, preferring the lighter and warmer confines of the fourteenth-century church in the village.
Barnaby Gilderstone was a Jesuit, a son of the family who lived in the hall. He had been tracked remorselessly by agents of the state, and he had finally been betrayed and surrounded here in this tiny church where he had felt safest of all.
Wilde was not the most religious of men, but he had been moved that night by thoughts of the young priest. Even with his faith, he would have known the horrors that awaited him. As an ordained priest – particularly one of the hated Jesuits – coming into England in secret, he was automatically guilty of high treason, and there was but one penalty for treason – hanging, drawing and quartering. Wilde knew all this, for the religious strife of the late-sixteenth century and the machinations of the Elizabethan secret se
rvice were his subject.
The little candlelit gathering Wilde attended had been a solemn, spiritual occasion. Christ himself might have approved of the simpli-city of the church, for it amounted to little more than a pile of old flints, scarcely held together. The church had fallen into ruin in the nineteenth century, and its tower had collapsed into the nave in the 1890s. With no money to repair it, all that could be done was to make it safe.
*
As he drove up, Wilde could see five large black cars parked on the gravel outside the long-abandoned Gilderstone Hall. The drivers stood together by the wall of the old building, smoking, staring at him without interest. Fleetingly, Wilde wondered about recruiting them, but they were unarmed, and explanations would merely take up precious minutes.
Climbing from his car, Wilde checked the Walther pistol in his pocket, looked about to get his bearings and saw the path into the trees that he had taken four years earlier.
He ran at a loping pace. The path was overgrown in places, trees had been blown down, brambles ripped at his jacket and trousers and threatened to trip him. He ran as softly as he could; he had to be fast, but he did not want to announce his approach.
His first glimpse of the crumbling flint church made him stop in his tracks. Lincoln Tripp was standing outside the porch beneath the sheltering branches of a yew tree, wearing the same rather foppish suit in which Wilde had first seen him at Chelsea: silk kerchief dangling from his breast pocket, trilby at a rakish angle. At his side was a man Wilde did not recognise. He was broad and strong with an American crewcut, and held his hand inside his suit jacket. Surely that must be Kennedy’s bodyguard.
And then Wilde heard the voice. The voice of the angel.
CHAPTER 38
The Mass had finished. It had been an exquisite service, reminiscent of those that must have been held here by the likes of Gilderstone and Campion and Southwell three hundred and fifty years earlier. No ornamentation, no organ music, no choir. Just a simple telling of the Latin Mass by two priests – in this case, one Roman Catholic, one Anglican.
And then the Kennedys’ young friend, Lincoln, son of their friends and neighbours at Hyannis Port, had opened the door for the singer. Marcus Marfield had entered in his choral scholar’s ensemble of red cassock and white surplice. Using both hands, he held a small crucifix to his chest, and he started singing as soon as he entered.
The Kennedy family of eleven – nine children and the parents – along with Herschel Johnson from the embassy, the family’s nanny, Luella Hennessey, and Rosemary’s godfather, Eddie Moore, and his wife, Mary, were ranged on the ancient pews, facing the altar, a simple table which had been draped in pure white linen for the occasion and was decorated with the Mass things. There was no pulpit.
The power in Marcus’s voice was instantaneous, as befitted the Schubert masterwork. No quiet build-up to the Ave Maria. And yet it was so pure it seemed to soar to the very heavens, and sent a chill down the neck.
Ave Maria, gratia plena. Hail Mary, full of grace.
All eyes turned to the young man who had entered.
Joe Kennedy sat between his wife, Rose, and the birthday girl, Rosemary. He took her small hand and squeezed it and smiled at her through his round tortoiseshell glasses.
She leant into him. ‘Oh, Daddy,’ she whispered. ‘This is so beautiful.’
‘I know, honey.’ He put a finger to his lips.
Marcus had progressed to the front of the church now, so they were able to watch him without having to crane their necks. He stood tall, his chin slightly elevated, his fair hair, still short but less severe, glowing in the strange light. He might almost have had wings. Behind him was the altar. The space had been filled with candles, which guttered in the breeze that came through the gaps in the walls. Light streamed in through the windows and through a hole in the roof. The old stone font, worn with time, stood ghostly towards the rear of the church. The font in which Barnaby Gilderstone had been baptised almost four hundred years earlier. How many decades had passed since last a child was christened here?
Marcus was singing the second verse.
In hora mortis nostrae. At the hour of our death.
*
Wilde was thinking fast. Tripp and the guard were obviously on sentry duty, but they had no idea who they were guarding against, otherwise Marfield wouldn’t be in the church now. Somehow the message hadn’t got through properly to Tripp.
He had to act fast because he knew the song was short and he feared the ending.
No time to think. Wilde put the Walther in his trouser pocket, with the safety off. He thrust both hands in his pockets and stepped forward, whistling as though he had not a care in the world. He was twenty yards from the church porch when Lincoln Tripp looked up and saw him. He raised his hand, and Wilde strode towards him.
The bodyguard opened his jacket to reveal the pistol in his shoulder-holster. ‘Hold it right there, mister.’
Wilde stopped, hands in pockets. ‘Tell him who I am, Tripp.’
Lincoln Tripp looked bewildered. His glance swerved between Wilde and the bodyguard.
‘My name is Wilde. If you’re trying to protect Mr Kennedy, you’re on the wrong side of the door.’
The bodyguard turned to Tripp. ‘You know this man, Mr Tripp?’
‘Uh, yes, yes, I know him.’
‘Is he dangerous?’
‘I . . . I don’t think so.’
Wilde stepped forward. There was no more time for explanations. Ave Maria’s last notes were melting away. The bodyguard withdrew his pistol, but he was too slow. Wilde’s hands were already out of his pockets. He was a boxer and his punch bare-fisted could lay many men low. Now, with the added weight and unforgiving edges of his Walther, the blow to the side of the bodyguard’s head knocked him cold.
The bodyguard spun around and his knees gave way. He was falling to the ground, but a weathered sandstone headstone, the name long since worn away, broke his fall. The pistol flew from his hand as his body cracked into the stone memorial, knocking the wind from him. He crumpled to the ground, blood seeping from the head wound into the dry earth.
Tripp moved to stop Wilde, but the Walther was in his face and he backed away. Wilde elbowed him aside, then pulled open the church door and stepped inside.
*
The last plaintive syllables of Ave Maria had slipped effortlessly from Marcus Marfield’s vocal chords. He bowed graciously to his audience, then turned and genuflected to the altar. But instead of rising to his feet, he reached down beneath the altar cloth.
A gust of air and the sound of the porch door opening stopped him, and he turned.
His eyes met Wilde’s and then flashed back towards the altar as he scrabbled beneath the white linen covering.
*
Wilde saw the dark metal of the gun and its shape as Marfield pulled it clear: a sub-machine gun, complete with stick magazine. He registered all this in the split second that it took for him to dive across the aisle and throw himself at Marfield.
The force of Wilde’s attack pushed the Thompson out of Marfield’s grip, and it slid away from him, under the altar, clattering as it hit the stone wall.
The Walther fell from Wilde’s grasp. Marfield saw it and tried to reach out for it, but Wilde was on top of him, grappling for control and managed to kick the pistol out of reach. Marfield punched wildly and caught him in the abdomen, taking the wind out of Wilde. He hit back, connecting with Marfield’s jaw.
Even with his injured arm, Marfield was strong – much stronger than Wilde had anticipated – and he had the advantage of youth and speed. But Wilde was the more seasoned fighter and as they wrestled and punched, sliding across the worn stone floor, he seemed to be gaining the upper hand. Marfield’s elbow smashed into Wilde’s face. Then the younger man was up on his knees, scrabbling to get his cassock up. Wilde rode the blow and realised instantly that Marfield must have a pistol under the robe. He brought his knee up into Marfield’s balls, but didn’t connect clea
nly.
‘Hold it right there, mister.’
There was a gun at Wilde’s head. The bodyguard, blood streaming from a wound to his temple, was standing over him, arms outstretched, pistol gripped in both hands.
The momentary lapse gave Marfield the chance he needed. He slid from Wilde’s grasp and stumbled towards the door and disappeared out into the graveyard. Wilde rose to follow him, but the bodyguard pushed him back down.
‘Don’t move an inch, or I’ll blow your brains out.’
‘Get him!’ Wilde rasped, pointing urgently at the gaping doorway. ‘That’s the killer – get him.’
For a moment the bodyguard wavered.
‘Look,’ Wilde said, pointing to the altar. ‘There’s a Thompson under there – Marfield was about to kill everyone in this church. He may have other weapons outside.’
There were gasps and wails from the banks of worshippers. All were now standing, backing away to the far reaches of the little church. Wilde looked down. He had a scrap of white cotton in his left hand – torn from Marfield’s surplice as he had pulled away.
Jack Kennedy moved forward and placed a restraining hand on the bodyguard’s gun arm. ‘I think this man’s telling the truth. I saw the Tommy gun.’ He met Wilde’s eyes. ‘What’s this about?’
‘Can we talk later? We need to catch that man. He would have killed you all.’
Wilde pushed past the bodyguard and almost fell out of the church door. Twenty yards away, Marfield had hitched up the skirts of his blood-red cassock, and was pulling out a concealed pistol from his belt. Wilde shouted after him. ‘No, Marcus! It’s finished. OK?’
Marfield fired two shots, but the bullets whistled helplessly past Wilde. Behind him, the bodyguard emerged from the church and fired back. He missed. Marfield laughed, and shook his head at Wilde. ‘I should have shot you before,’ he called as he disappeared into the dense undergrowth, and was swallowed up by the enveloping forest.
Nemesis Page 28
