by Jessica Mann
‘When you get hold of those papers, Rosamund, what then, do you think?’
‘If only I knew. So far it has all been a question of surviving till then. The trouble is that I am not sure what is in them.’
‘Well, we can feel certain that there is enough to worry Aidan Britton.’
‘When I last saw them I still didn’t want to know. I didn’t want it to be my business. I wish I didn’t have to think about them now.’
Chapter Twenty-Three
TV Man’s Turkey trial.
Distinguished journalist arrested in Turkey.
Professor’s husband’s car contraband.
The papers which Tamara brought in the Hook of Holland all led with the story of Sylvester Crawford’s arrest. He was well known for his own profession, but Thea herself was well known too, and had once been called ‘The crumpet man’s thinker’, at a time when another television performer was known as ‘The thinking man’s crumpet’. Altogether, it made for splendid sensation that Sylvester had been found with a valuable consignment of heroin in his car.
‘I did warn Thea,’ Tamara said guiltily. ‘I never thought about him though. It was before I spoke to you.’
‘Think how much worse they might have done than plant heroin on him,’ Rosamund said. ‘They might have done a Hardman or a Courtney, run him over or blown him up. I doubt if a warning would have made much odds.’
In Rotterdam, they parked Tamara’s car in a multi-storey car park at the main railway station, and hired a Hertz car instead. Just before driving off, Rosamund asked Tamara to wait.
‘I am going to warn Gerald,’ she said. ‘He’s the only one left.’ There was a bank of telephones nearby, and Tamara waited in the car while Rosamund changed notes into coins and waited for a free booth. ‘He didn’t believe me,’ Rosamund said, as she got back into the car. ‘He started gobbling about Ministers of the Crown. But I had to give him a chance.’
They followed road signs to the auto-route, where they changed places.
‘I haven’t driven much since I went to the States,’ Rosamund said. ‘There is no point in having a car in New York. But I used to love it. We used to put our feet down on the straight roads around Cambridge and feel terrific devils if we got up to seventy miles an hour.’
‘I wonder how different Cambridge life was in my day,’ Tamara said. ‘Thea once told me that she thought it was mainly a difference in honesty. She said that in your time you and the dons shared a conspiracy of pretence.’
‘I’m sure that’s true. It was all very unworldly. Like the rules that implied that one couldn’t sin before midnight. But, of course, the dons were far more perceptive than we realised. For instance, when Maria was first in Cambridge she slept on the floor of my room, or Thea’s room, for nearly two weeks. She used to put a towel round her head like a turban on the way to the bathroom, and we cooked her food on the gas ring, and we didn’t think the dons knew she was there. It must have been a marked case of telescopes to blind eyes.’
‘Cambridge still seemed unworldly even when I was there as a research student,’ Tamara agreed.
Rosamund said, ‘As a matter of fact, if you mention Cambridge in America these days, it isn’t ivory towers that spring to mind, it’s spies. The Cambridge traitors, counting them up on their fingers, the third, fourth, fifth men, and so on ad infinitum.’
‘But that’s all such old history. I mean, Burgess, Maclean and Co were at Cambridge before the war. They must all be ancient, or dead.’
‘The ones we know about. But what about the next generation? The ones who are still useful. People in their sixties and fifties, even my own contemporaries. Why should recruitment have stopped?’
‘Son of Tarzan.’
‘Even grandson. I sometimes wonder which of my own acquaintances will turn out to be the Blunts of the end of the century, and whether we’ll all say that we knew all along there was something funny about them.’
‘What would they have done it for?’ Tamara said.
‘Money, if not conviction. Or fun. Or revenge. Or fear.’
‘I suppose the motives would be endless really.’ Tamara lit a cigarette. She thought about Ian who presumably supposed that his work was devoted to defeating that next generation of traitors, and who had, instead, spent the last week harrying an innocent woman around her own country, at the behest of one of those very unscrupulous cynics, those self-seeking monsters, whose influence he had hoped to obstruct. The world of ivory towers seemed infinitely preferable.
She said, ‘Did you like Cambridge when you were there?’
Rosamund stared at the road ahead, her mind on a conglomeration of memories that seemed symbolised by herself as a girl in a flowered frock, conscious of her own youth and prettiness, in her full eagerness; even then, she had seen the girl as though she were a picture before her own eyes, enticingly displayed in a punt, under overhanging trees, dappled in sunlight, as much a work of art as the fretted stonework of King’s Chapel behind her, and as much a delight of nature as the ranked daffodils. ‘It was fun. Such irresponsible fun.’ She had arranged herself in her setting and decorated her environment with people, both watching it, and enjoying it. ‘It was all quite unreal,’ she added; and the image on her memory was as little connected with the woman she was now as that of any of the other people in the scene all those years before. ‘Did you meet Ian at Cambridge?’ she asked Tamara.
‘No, it was someone else there.’ The two women’s thoughts flickered through similar pages, different only in detail of faces and feelings.
‘Funny for an archaeologist to turn into one of Britton’s bullies,’ Rosamund said.
‘He’s really a career civil servant,’ Tamara said defensively. ‘He’ll go back to that. The secret work really doesn’t suit him.’
NATO aircraft screamed and wheeled not faraway, demonstrating to those who drove through Germany that they were defended. Tamara suddenly remembered Bruce Pilger’s slack features when she had sent him unconscious to the filthy floor, and shivered at the hateful triumph she had felt.
‘I can’t imagine choosing to do secret work for a moment,’ Rosamund said. ‘I hate all this, what we are doing now. The hurrying and hiding. I hate the feeling of other people impinging on my life. And I don’t want to get too close to theirs either. Doing things to people. That’s why I always felt uneasy when I was living on the inside of public affairs. From the moment I was old enough to understand my father’s conversation, I have disliked the thought of manipulating events.’
‘Wasn’t it exciting, from where you saw it? I’d have found it so.’
‘You have the temperament for it. I couldn’t get away soon enough. That atmosphere of urgency and confidence, all so important and portentous. I ran away. I only want to deal with materials.’
‘Back to your drawing board.’
‘You said it,’ Rosamund agreed fervently. ‘I simply long for my drawing board. I know I have to finish what I’ve started now, but by God it’ll be all I do; get the information about Aidan into the right hands, and you won’t see me for dust.’
They stopped for the night just over the border in Basel, and the next morning Tamara turned in the Hertz hired car at the station, and went by bus out to the airport where she hired an Avis with Swiss number plates. Rosamund spent the time in the motel dying her newly cropped hair, and Tamara impulse-bought her a pair of wooden soled clogs, saying that it would change her gait. Rosamund agreed that one was most easily recognised by one’s style of walking, and tied a bandage tightly round one foot to make herself limp. The fact was that they had both read the same escape fiction about escapers. ‘What about cheek pads?’ Tamara suggested, and Rosamund pressed strips of Copydex against her back teeth, and changed the shape of her eyebrows with a black pencil.
Model four, Rosamund Sholto; or was it model five? ‘I am afraid I recognise you every time,’ Tamara said sadly.
‘A lunatic game.’
‘A vital game.’
&n
bsp; They drove on southwards in the hired car, through Bern, past the lakes of Thun and Brienz, and over the mountain passes. A nasty wind was blowing, the final eddies of a föhn, and the lake water was whipped into vicious little waves, while on the summer dried heights, flurries of stone and earth were blown up and about. Once past the Rhône glacier and down towards the river valley, the wind was hotter, dry and irritating, and made driving a small, unfamiliar car difficult. Tamara hunched over the wheel fighting it, but Rosamund said, ‘Cheer up. Helicopters won’t be able to land.’
Children coming out of school scuttled in front of the cars, and adult pedestrians kept their heads and eyes well down. Shopkeepers and customers quarrelled. ‘You can see why the wind is a plea in mitigation of murder, can’t you?’ Rosamund said.
They reached Sierre in the afternoon. Tamara and Rosamund had settled in advance what to do. They put the car in a tourists’ car park, and left it at different times, in different directions. The bank was a large building in the main shopping street. They approached from opposite ends, and Tamara entered it a few moments after Rosamund.
Rosamund spoke to a uniformed attendant, and was conducted through a door into a private office. Tamara stood at the counter that ran round the walls of the banking hall, and wrote gibberish on paying-in slips. The walls were of pale marble, so highly polished that she could see the movements of the other customers and personnel reflected in it. The service was commendably quick and, as far as she could see, nobody was hovering or watching. People went in and out with the nonchalance of habit. The porter swivelled his gaze around, presumably ready to press a panic button, but his eyes did not seem to rest anywhere in particular. Tamara raised her head, as though to read a notice about protected species of wild flowers, and glanced out towards the street. Passers-by crossed the doors rapidly, their coats and scarves tossed in the wind. Nobody was waiting in the doorway.
That morning Tamara had bought two identical document cases in Interlaken. One was on the counter beside her now. When the door through which Rosamund had gone began to open, Tamara moved away to read the list of that day’s exchange rates.
Rosamund came out of the office. She shook hands with a bowing man in horn-rimmed spectacles. She was carrying her document case, but put it down on the counter while she bent to adjust the bandage on her foot. When she stood up, she picked up the case which Tamara had been carrying, and went out into the street.
After a short while Tamara retrieved the other case, and left the building. She could not see Rosamund in the street, but they had agreed to meet at the car, and Tamara turned, as arranged, to her left.
Tamara had already noted that there was a supermarket three doors away from the bank. She went in and bought some fruit, and at the checkout asked for a large paper bag. She folded the document case under the apples and pears, and left a bunch of grapes resting on the top. She carried the bag clutched against her chest.
The tourist season must be just between the summer and the winter trade, for there were few cars about, and Tamara felt proud of having thought to hire a car with an unremarkable native make and number. Just as she was crossing the road to the car park, Tamara had to stop as a long, chauffeur driven car whisked by; tax exiles, she thought.
Rosamund was not in the car yet. Tamara sat behind the wheel and put her bag of fruit onto the back seat. She waited with increasing uneasiness. Five minutes, six, eight, ten. Could Rosamund conceivably have lost the way? Quarter of an hour. Rosamund would have been here long ago, if she was coming.
It was only too easy to guess what had happened. The question was, what would happen to Rosamund next?
A limousine with a chauffeur. Could that woman passenger have been Rosamund? Both people had been looking away from her. Had she a pale coat or jacket and red hair? Rosamund had changed her appearance so many times in the last day, and Tamara might have seen her go by without realising it. But the men looking for them would have been clear eyed and undeceived. They would have watched, and eliminated, and been satisfied about every person who had entered and left the bank that day.
Where would they take her? Tamara opened the Michelin map. St Jean was in the mountains south and east of Sierre. Would they drive up to the chalet, or take her back to Britain? If the chalet was the fortress Rosamund had described, they would probably feel safer there than anywhere.
‘She’d be easier to dispose of here,’ Tamara muttered. She turned on the engine, and followed efficient signposts out of the town.
Was there the slightest point in asking at petrol stations? Hardly; there were too many garages and too many cars. Secret agents had things easier in the old days, she thought; but as she half smiled, she almost wept at the thought that their enemies were also more ruthless than in the old days.
They would already have discovered that the imitation leather case Rosamund carried was empty. Rosamund would already have told them that the bank had refused to surrender any of Phoebe’s papers to her, without all the proper probate documents, testified by an English commissioner for oaths.
Indeed, as Rosamund and Tamara had feared all along, the bank might really have done just that. Tamara pulled into a picnic area where the car was protected by a belt of trees from the buffetting wind. She hauled out and unzipped the bogus leather, and, because it would do neither her nor Rosamund any good for her to starve, she ate some of the fruit.
Inside the case was a white parchment envelope, sealed with the bank’s arms and countersigned by Phoebe on September 3rd of that year. Phoebe had read the papers and returned them to their safety deposit.
The envelope contained five sheets of paper: A letter from Rosamund to Phoebe, which was little more than a covering note; one from Phoebe to Rosamund, scrawled on paper with the bank’s letter heading; she must have written it while she sat in the bank vaults examining her property:
If anything happens to me, so that all this comes back into your hands, you must use it. It will mean that I have tried and failed myself. This isn’t a question of personal relationships with A any more. If he carries on he will destroy everything Father worked for all his life. This here is a weapon. A blackmail weapon. I am going to give him the choice of retiring without publicity. I shall try to persuade him. But I truly mean to have this made public if he won’t. Just think, Roz, what a man like Britton could do to Britain, and use the weapon which we, of all his opponents, have. You must do this, Roz. Phoebe.
An examination paper for part two of the Cambridge University English language and literature tripos, for 1957, with brownish fingerprints in the margin: blood stains. Clipped to it was a note in a European-style cursive: This was left in my sister’s room, where she lay dying, by the abortionist, her murderer.
A letter in a childish script in an incomprehensible language, faintly purple: indelible pencil. In ink, in the same cursive as the other note, was written in English, I certify that this is a letter written in the handwriting of my sister, Maria Czernin. I did not see it until three months after her death. A translation is appended.
The translation was typed and dated October 1957.
Dear, dearest, kindest brother Stefan. If you ever read this letter it will be because I have died of what happened today. I am afraid. I was not afraid before. I have committed a mortal sin, and if I die, I shall not be in a state of grace.
Stefan, it did not feel like sin, because I loved him. He said when I was old enough for the law of this country to permit us to marry we should wipe out that venial sin. Even when I knew that I would bear his child I was happy. I thought it would be a child born in love, and that we should have a family to replace those who are gone. But he said that we could never marry. I know now that he is our enemy. He is the friend of our enemies. He said that he would not be taken into the public service if he were tied to me, and that if it were known that he had seduced me, a minor, he would go to prison. He said that my child would be taken from me because in law lam a child myself. He does not love me. I did not know what
to do. He said that our friend Aidan would help us. Aidan studied to be a doctor until this year and he would do it safely. Aidan did not like to touch me, Stefan, he would not look in my face. It was very painful. Now I am very unhappy, for I think perhaps I die. I do not think he did it properly, if it was to be done at all. I have let him kill a human soul. It is I who am guilty of the killing. I am afraid. Do not tell our parents. You did not deserve such a sister as your unhappy Maria.
There was a postscript, typed with equal clarity in the translation, but in the original hardly visible, written by a wandering hand.
Gerald has come and has seen how it is with me. He is angry. He says all is my fault and that he and Aidan suffer for my folly. He no longer loves me. He has gone to find help because I bleed so much, but now I do not think that he ever loved me. I wait for help to come.
Chapter Twenty-Four
There had been plenty of time to discuss contingency plans, some fanciful – Devil’s Island, or incarceration in a permanently orbiting rocket, as Aidan Britton’s final resting place – some practical; unfortunately, the best of these, summoning an invasion of pressmen, depended on Rosamund being there to do it. But they had agreed that they would meet, if separated, at Placidus Reichenbach’s house. Now Tamara hoped that the Holmesian associations of the name did not presage a violent end for the dramatis personae; or at least for only one of them. Britton would be a death-or-glory man.
Reichenbach, Chalet Edelweiss. Tamara wanted to draw as little attention as possible to herself, and thought that St Jean was small enough for her to find the house without asking for directions. There was not much scope. St Jean’s main street was narrow, and clogged with continuous traffic ranging from Daimlers to ox carts. Tamara parked on the outskirts of the village and walked along, clutching her brown paper bag, looking at the houses, and the unexpected press of people; she hoped not to get caught up in some local festivity.
