Ghost Song

by Rayne, Sarah

  There was a brief silence, then Hal said, ‘Yes. I see. Thank you for being so frank. Who made the statements? Or could I hazard a guess as to one of them?’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘Anton Reznik—probably styling himself Anton Petrovnic,’ said Hal.

  ‘Yes. The other was a lady calling herself the Baroness Ilena Osapinsky,’ said the chairman. ‘We haven’t got transcripts of the actual statements, of course, although we’ll try to get them. But it seems their content is fairly clear and also very damning. Petrovnic says your son was standing next to the gunman—his name is Gavrilo Princip—and helping him line up the Archduke’s car in his sights. He also says Toby was with the other man who threw the bomb. Osapinsky says much the same.’

  ‘Both statements might be discredited,’ said Sir Hal after a moment. ‘Those two are Tranz members—I believe Reznik is its leader. As for Osapinsky, her title and her background are both questionable and I wouldn’t trust her from here to that door. While Anton Reznik himself—’ He made an impatient gesture with one hand. ‘I spoke a moment ago of personal vendettas. Reznik harbours a deep hatred for me and my family.’

  ‘Ah?’ The chairman looked up from making his own notes. ‘Indeed?’

  Hal said in a remote voice, ‘Many years ago he was considerably enamoured of my wife. There was great ill-feeling when she rejected him.’

  ‘Oh. Yes, I see. I don’t think we need to go into old feuds, gentlemen,’ said the chairman and there was a mumble of agreement all round the table.

  ‘But,’ said Hal, ‘Anton Reznik will have half a dozen sycophants at his beck and call: people prepared to commit perjury if he tells them it will further Tranz’s cause.’ He frowned, then said, ‘I should like to say this before anyone else does. I’m very well aware of the possible consequences of all this. If it became known—however mistakenly—that the son of a permanent secretary in His Majesty’s Foreign Office was part of the assassination conspiracy, the integrity of this government could be seriously compromised. At the first suggestion of that, I should, of course, resign.’

  ‘My dear chap, we’ll hope it doesn’t come to that,’ said the chairman rather uncomfortably.

  ‘Forgive me, but I think it might.’

  ‘If so, the work you have done over the years would not be disregarded,’ said the chairman at last.

  ‘I’m delighted to hear that,’ said Hal politely.

  ‘It may be that some other position could be arranged for you.’

  ‘I can’t imagine what. This country has been poised on the brink of war for a long time. Despite diplomatic efforts, we all know it can’t be much longer before a state of war exists between ourselves and Germany, and we know Franz-Ferdinand’s murder will probably be the final trigger. My son appears to have been involved in releasing that trigger. Moreover, he now seems to be at large somewhere in Europe. What this committee needs to decide now is whether we can hope Toby’s actions will remain unknown, whether we can keep them quiet.’

  ‘Providing he isn’t found, I think we could be optimistic about that,’ ventured one of the men. ‘Is there any kind of hue and cry out for him?’

  ‘No,’ said a thin man who presented a severely legal appearance and had been making copious notes. ‘Our communications with other countries are a touch unreliable in the current situation, but we don’t think the Bosnian authorities are especially worried about one minor conspirator getting away.’

  The man who had asked about a hue and cry observed that the Bosnians probably had too much on their plates anyway.

  ‘None of the newspapers mentions Toby’s name,’ volunteered one of the younger ones.

  ‘Yes, but that’s probably because they’re all focussing on the assassination itself and the man who actually fired the shots.’

  ‘Narodna Odbrana is referred to in most papers,’ said the same man, ‘but Tranz doesn’t seem to be mentioned anywhere.’

  ‘I shouldn’t expect it to be,’ said Hal. ‘Tranz is one of about half a dozen splinter groups of Narodna Odbrana. Not very important in the eyes of the newspapers, and it doesn’t sound as if Gavrilo Princip was actually a member of Tranz.’

  ‘Taking all the facts into account,’ said one of the older men slowly, ‘I’m inclined to think we could adopt the good old British masterly policy of inactivity here.’

  ‘Sit tight, do nothing, and hope for the best?’

  ‘Yes. No charges have actually been made against Hal’s boy, although…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m sorry to tell you this,’ said the man, ‘but two days ago our embassy in Bosnia telegraphed saying the Sarajevo authorities have requested that if Toby surfaces in this country, we hold him on a charge of conspiracy and intent to commit murder. They want us to watch ports and ferries.’

  There was a sudden silence.

  ‘What about Anton Reznik himself?’ asked the younger man who had talked about the newspapers. ‘Isn’t there also a danger from that quarter?’

  ‘Yes, there might be,’ said the chairman thoughtfully. ‘Even if we find Toby and somehow protect him, if Reznik is as…vengeful as Hal indicates, he could make the whole thing public.’

  ‘Hal, is that likely? You know more about Tranz than the rest of us.’

  ‘Which isn’t a great deal,’ said Hal drily. ‘But I believe Reznik is a man in the grip of an obsession. His prime goal now will be to ruin me.’

  ‘By ruining Toby?’

  ‘Yes. But,’ said Hal, thoughtfully, ‘at the moment, as a member of Tranz, Anton will have to lie very low. Life will be quite difficult for him. We could make it even more difficult by having Tranz declared a threat to national security. That would send Reznik even more deeply into hiding and spike his guns. Matthew, can that be done fairly quickly?’

  The legal-looking gentleman nodded. ‘It can,’ he said. ‘It won’t be difficult after the Sarajevo affair, and when the war comes we’ll have all manner of extra powers anyway. We should be able to have Reznik himself listed individually as a traitor or a dissident or an agent provocateur. We can make it all three in fact.’ He scribbled several notes.

  ‘Make sure the newspapers know about him, as well,’ said the chairman. ‘In case Reznik approaches them to spread the story that way. We need to discredit him before he tries to discredit Toby Chance—and in the process discredits Hal and the rest of us.’

  ‘Very well, sir.’

  ‘What about your informant, Hal?’ asked the chairman. ‘The person who told you Toby was mixed up in this? You said you thought it was reasonably reliable information.’

  ‘From what we’ve just learned today it seems it was very reliable indeed,’ said Hal. ‘It’s a lady, by the way; someone who was a member of Tranz for a while, although I’m inclined to think it was only in a superficial way—I think she saw it as simply a new diversion. She seems to be having what I should think is a very uncharacteristic attack of conscience. She didn’t go to Sarajevo, by the way, and we haven’t got anything against her.’

  The chairman leaned forward. ‘Hal, forgive me, but—you haven’t heard from Toby, have you? Or formed any view as to where he might be?’

  ‘I haven’t heard from him and I have no idea where he could be,’ said Hal. ‘And it pains me to say this, but for everyone’s sake—my son, my wife, the British government—I’m starting to believe it might be better if Toby never turned up at all. It would keep the whole thing secret for ever.’

  ‘That’s an extreme point of view,’ said the chairman.

  ‘It’s an extreme case,’ said Hal.

  Flora had discovered that the place she felt nearest to Toby at the moment was in the Tarleton itself. It was deeply comforting to sit in the stage box—the box always regarded as Toby’s own—and know this was his place. The warm friendliness of the audiences was both soothing and strengthening. When she watched the lighted stage it was easy, as well, to pretend that Toby would suddenly stroll onto the stage, looking like an aristocratic ra
gamuffin with his black hair slightly dishevelled.

  The Tarleton audiences missed him; Flora heard a number of them asking where he was and when they would see him, and wasn’t it high time for a new Chance and Douglas song? Occasionally this almost reduced her to tears, but at other times she drew strength from it.

  But there was more than Toby’s absence to occupy the audiences at the moment. People were talking about the imminence of war—of the shooting of the Archduke which the newspapers all said would plunge most of Europe into conflict. There were not many people who had previously heard of Sarajevo, in fact there were not many people who had heard of Bosnia, but everyone who could read knew about the murder of the Archduke Franz-Ferdinand. People who could not read it for themselves had it read aloud to them by their friends. Dreadful. What was the world coming to when a royal personage could not ride through a few streets in a motor car without a bunch of madmen taking pot shots and hurling bombs? Even people who were apt to denounce royalty in general and the Habsburg house in particular, said the culprits should be strung up and made an example of.

  Flora listened to all this, and she also listened to the rumours about the Tarleton’s future. If there were to be a war, might it close? people asked. Somebody said it was what happened in times of war, but this was shouted down, because wars were just the time you wanted a bit of light-heartedness here and there.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Flora to Hal that evening, ‘your colleagues at the Foreign Office—that grisly little committee they put together to discuss Toby—all expect me to creep into a corner and hide away for the rest of my life.’

  ‘Toby wouldn’t expect you to do that. I don’t expect it, either,’ said Hal.

  ‘Well, I shan’t do it. I’m not ashamed of Toby and I never will be. So I’ll help with running the Tarleton until he comes back.’ She broke off, then said, ‘Hal, he didn’t do it. He wasn’t part of the plot to kill Franz-Ferdinand.’

  ‘My dearest love, I know that as well as you do.’

  ‘We’re being watched, aren’t we?’ said Flora miserably. ‘I mean, this house is being watched to see if Toby turns up.’

  ‘To almost any other woman in the world, I would say, no, of course we aren’t being watched. But as it’s you—yes, I think you’re right.’

  ‘Is it Anton Reznik’s Tranz people or the Foreign Office who are doing the watching?’

  ‘I don’t know. It could be both. Reznik might be anywhere in the world by now, and he won’t dare show his face openly in London, but he’ll have people here.’

  ‘I suppose I always knew he would come back one day. You knew it as well.’

  ‘Yes.’ He came to sit beside her. ‘Flora, I’m a government official and I’m not supposed to be fanciful or imaginative. Dammit, I don’t think I’m even supposed to have an imagination! But the night Stefan Reznik died seemed to draw down a—a darkness. Ever since, I’ve had the feeling that the darkness was still there, somewhere inside the Tarleton, lying dormant, but waiting.’

  ‘It was,’ said Flora. ‘It still is. Toby knew it was there. Do you remember how he went down to the cellar one day when he was five, and was absolutely terrified. He said there was something there—something that watched him. I don’t believe in ghosts, not in the conventional sense, but I’ve never been able to go into that underground room on my own.’ She reached for his hand. ‘Hal—he will come back, won’t he? It’ll be all right, won’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hal. ‘Yes, of course it will.’

  But would it? wondered Flora.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The Present

  HILARY WAS BEGINNING to believe that the world had shrunk to this dark rain-swept night, and to this eerie country lane with trees reaching down to claw at her face, and someone stealing along after her.

  She had no means of knowing how far she would have to go before reaching another house and there was no way of knowing if she was going in the right direction to find one. The hedges were high on each side, but as she went on they thinned a little and she caught sight of what looked like a main road, quite a long way off, but with the occasional sweep of car headlights. Was it the road they had travelled down on their way to Levels House? Hilary stopped and listened to see if she was still being followed, but could not be sure. The wind was dragging at the trees and there was the pattering of the rain on leaves, and for all she could tell, an entire army could be marching along after her.

  It was still difficult to believe all this was happening—that Shona—of all people, the svelte and efficient Shona Seymour—had crouched in the attic and played that music to lure Madeleine up there. Had she actually meant to kill Madeleine? Hilary still found it incredible that Shona had talked about killing—about murdering someone called Elspeth and hiding her body behind a wall. Had she really been working for a murderess for the last four years? It was bizarre and unbelievable. She’d had meals with Shona, helped her give presentations—she had admired and liked her… She could hardly believe Shona was behaving like this—or that she might be creeping along through the dark after Hilary now.

  It was a main road up ahead after all. Hilary rounded a curve in the lane and saw, with deep thankfulness, the outline of a fairly large house on her left. There were no lights in any of the windows, but there was a small lamp over the porch. She looked over her shoulder again. Had something darted out of sight into the cover of the hedge? She was not sure, but she began to run towards the house. If Shona came hurtling out of the night and attacked her, Hilary would scream as loudly as possible and hope she was near enough for someone to hear and come to the rescue.

  She was level with the gate when two things happened.

  The darting shadow she had glimpsed a moment earlier reared up and ran straight at her.

  And the headlights of a car coming towards her sliced through the blackness.

  Robert had driven for almost three hours with only the briefest of stops at a garage just outside Salisbury where he had topped up with petrol.

  The journey had been easier than he had dared hope, and once clear of London the traffic had been fairly light. He put on the car radio for company and to keep him focussed, and also because it might provide a degree of normality in a world that was starting to become very far from normal. As he drove, he tried to think what he would do when he finally reached Levels House. It would be well after midnight when he got there, and he could hardly hammer on the door of a strange house and request admittance. This was the trouble with impulses; they almost always landed you in a peculiar and potentially difficult situation, which was why Robert always avoided them. Yes, but this is about Hilary, he said to himself. I don’t care how peculiar and difficult the situation will be when I get there.

  He turned off the main road and headed towards the village signposted Fosse Leigh, and he was just slowing down to look at the names on the gates of houses, when a white blur swam into his headlights—a blur that incredibly had Hilary’s face. Robert stamped on the brakes and skidded to a halt. He was half out of the car when Hilary fell into his arms.

  Shona Seymour, barely recognizable, her hair plastered to her head with rain, came running out of the darkness towards them.

  The thing Hilary was to remember afterwards was the way that Shona, confronted with Robert, stopped in mid-flight and suddenly regained something of her former poise. To see the tousled figure stop dead in the middle of the road and struggle for a semblance of sanity, then greet Robert as coolly as if this was no more than a chance encounter, was grotesque, but also pitiful. She appeared to find nothing odd in encountering him in the middle of a rain-sodden lane at midnight; she merely said, ‘How nice to see you, Mr Fallon. I think you’ve met my assistant, Hilary Bryant, haven’t you?’

  ‘I have,’ said Robert. ‘Hello, Hilary. You’re drenched. You’d better have my jacket.’ He had put it round her shoulders before she realized what he was doing, and although his abrupt appearance was wildly puzzling Hilary thought explanation
s about that could come later. Trying not to sound too panic-stricken, she said, ‘Robert—uh—there’s been a development—rather—alarming—’ Was he sharp enough to pick up that she was trying to warn him against Shona? She was immeasurably grateful when he said, in a completely ordinary voice, ‘I realize that but we can have the explanations later. Miss Seymour, would you like to get into the car? It’s raining quite hard, isn’t it?’

  Shona did not move. She said, ‘We’ve been chasing an intruder. Hilary got it into her head that someone had broken into the house where we’re staying. Absurd, of course, there was no intruder, it was all Hilary’s imagination.’ She smiled at him. She was still standing in the road and Hilary willed her to get into the car but she did not.

  Robert said, in the same mild, unthreatening voice, ‘That must have been quite an upset. Why don’t we go back to the house anyway? Is it far?’

  He looked at Hilary, who said, ‘It’s just along there on the right.’

  ‘Good. Miss Seymour while you get into the car, Hilary can go into the house to let your friends know what’s happening.’

  He’s keeping us apart, though Hilary. He’s seen that dreadful mad look in Shona’s eyes.

  ‘Do be careful of my jacket, Hilary,’ said Robert. ‘There’s a mobile phone in the left-hand pocket—I think it might be switched on.’

  His meaning could not be much clearer. Hilary, seeing Shona was at last getting into the passenger seat, began to walk back to Levels House as quickly as possible, feeling in the pocket for Robert’s mobile as she did so. It was still raining and she was icy cold and shaking so violently she thought she might not be able to tap out 999. She managed it at the second attempt, hesitated between asking for police or ambulance, but thought the police would be better at this juncture. ‘Ten minutes,’ said the impersonal voice at the other end. ‘They’ll be coming from Upper Leigh, see. Will that be all right?’