Corpus

by Rory Clements

  *

  Nancy’s bedroom was beautiful, the nursery of an Edwardian childhood. A fine and much-ridden rocking horse stood in front of the large window that, like the library almost directly below, overlooked acres of parkland, lake and woods. Wilde looked out. He heard a sound of buzzing and then realised it came from a yellow biplane circling in the cloudless sky. It came swooping over the house, then turned again and skimmed low across the lake and woodland before climbing and looping in a full circle.

  ‘You will see that I have kept all her books. Her mother died when she was nine and she was taught at home by a governess until she was eleven. Then she went off to boarding school when I became master and had to split my time between college and here. I couldn’t be both father and mother to her, you see. I suppose I should have remarried.’ He paused. ‘I want to see her killer hanged, Wilde.’

  ‘You don’t seem to have any faith in the police, yet you must carry a great deal of influence in the county.’

  ‘They’ve made their minds up. Will you help me, Wilde?’

  Wilde frowned, puzzled and surprised by the request. ‘Surely a private detective would be better, someone professional.’ Sir Norman Hereward did not speak for a few moments and Wilde thought he had never seen a sadder, lonelier face. The man was broken.

  Hereward shrugged. ‘Perhaps. But you know I have always trusted you. Even though I have not been your greatest admirer, I recognise your intellect.’ He turned his gaze to the window. ‘The police and coroner have decided it was an overdose, pure and simple. But I don’t think you believe it was an accident. I saw the way you examined things at Nancy’s house. I’m taking a long shot.’ He gave a mirthless smile. ‘You pity me, don’t you, Wilde.’

  ‘I feel for your loss, Sir Norman.’

  ‘You know it’s difficult to imagine it now, but there was a time when this house was filled with laughter. I had a wife, two sons and a daughter – and I loved them more than my own life. Now they are all gone.’ Sir Norman pushed gently on the rocking horse and watched as it creaked back and forth.

  ‘Did Nancy keep a diary?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. If she did, she never mentioned it. Why do you ask?’

  ‘So you haven’t been through her things?’

  ‘I told you: this is all as she left it. Not that she came here very often recently. To be frank, I don’t think I could bear to look. Too many ghosts. I’ll leave you now to scratch around on your own. I doubt you’ll find anything, but you never know. Tread lightly on my memories, young man. They are all I have.’

  ‘One more thing. When did you last see her?’

  ‘That’s easy. The Sunday before last. November the twenty-second. Her twenty-sixth birthday. She came for lunch. I hoped we could make up, forget the past. I offered to find her some sort of treatment. I’ve heard of a clinic in Switzerland, a psychiatric outfit that claims to be able to cure addictions, but she just laughed and started throwing the usual insults at me – bourgeois pig, that sort of thing. We had a blazing row and then she got her damned syringe out and began preparing her opium mixture. I told her never to darken my door again. She said that was fine – that she had no wish to see me or set foot in St Wilfred’s Priory ever again, alive or dead. As far as she was concerned, I was no longer her father. She stuck the needle in her arm, withdrew it, and left.’

  ‘And that was it?’

  ‘That was it. I’m stubborn, she’s . . . she was stubborn. What a damnable waste.’

  ‘Is there anything more you think I should know?’

  ‘How quickly love can turn to hate . . . God, I wish she were here now so that I could tell her how much I loved her. I’d go down on my knees and beg her forgiveness.’

  Wilde could see that the man was about to break down. ‘You go, Sir Norman. I’ll be finished here in half an hour, perhaps an hour. If you think of anything else that might help – her friends, her enemies, her contacts – let me know. Anything, however obscure.’

  The older man nodded towards an open-topped box. ‘Those are the bits and pieces the police returned to me, things they found around her in her bedroom at the house in Cambridge. I can’t bear to look at them.’

  CHAPTER 18

  Wilde went through the box. The silver syringe wasn’t there; he supposed it had gone to the police surgeon. There were books, including Das Kapital and Mein Kampf, a volume of Shelley poems, Wigs on the Green by Nancy Mitford, a few garments, an old box camera, writing paper, pens, a threepenny bag of lemon drops, a foreign coin. He leafed through the books to see if anything dropped out, but there was nothing.

  For the next hour and a half, he looked around Nancy’s room, going through her books and jottings with assiduous care and attention. There was a picture of her in graduation gown, looking very serious and a lot more grown-up than the school picture her father had favoured. Here, her hair was cut short, carved like some warrior goddess, her hair itself a helmet; she was quite beautiful.

  He opened clothes drawers and shut them hurriedly, initially ashamed of himself for such intrusion, but then opened them again and went through the pathetic collection of long-forgotten underwear and other clothing diligently, not at all sure what he was hoping to find. He might know all about the history and theory of espionage and detective work; but he realised he had a lot to learn about the practicalities. Did spies usually feel so grubby as they went about their business?

  In one drawer, beneath a pile of sweaters, he found a bundle of letters tied up with blue ribbon. He hesitated, and then undid the bow. A light whiff of perfume emerged. There were about twenty letters. With great reluctance, he began to read them and quickly stopped. They were all dated by month, not year, and charted a rather poetic and chaste love affair with someone named only as Jack. He tied the ribbon back around the delicate paper and replaced them in the box.

  Somewhere, in another part of the house, a telephone rang and rang. When it was eventually picked up, he heard Sir Norman’s voice, raised and angry, echoing through the hall, though it was impossible to hear what was said.

  In an old school trunk, he found piles of exercise books and reports. He flicked through them but they revealed no clues to Nancy’s life and death.

  An album of old photographs caught his eye. The book had been neglected and some of the pictures had come adrift, the gum decayed. Nancy from babyhood to the age of seven or eight, with her brothers and mother and father. Her mother was not smiling, but her face was kind. In the fields, around the piano, at the beach. Playing lawn tennis here at the priory, playing croquet, sleeping beneath wide-brimmed hats on deckchairs. The sort of photographs he had seen at the Langleys’ house twenty-four hours earlier.

  How many families had such collections, almost too painful to look at because of the missing and the dead? On one page a smiling face, on the next nothing, the album abruptly ended because no one could bear to look at it any more. Men and boys lost in battle. Women lost to influenza or childbirth. Children taken by scarlet fever or polio. Commonplace tragedies.

  Sir Norman might not be able to look at these pictures of those he loved now, but one day he would. This album needed to be restored and preserved. Wilde put it to one side.

  One day, Wilde thought, perhaps he too might be able to look at pictures of his dead wife. They were locked away in a small metal trunk beneath his bed, images of days of joy. What a heavy price a man paid for fleeting happiness. When Tennyson wrote, ‘’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, he didn’t know what he was talking about.

  He turned his attention to Nancy’s bed. Gently he pulled back the counterpane, the blankets and the top sheet, clean and white and perfectly made. It was as if it had never been slept in. He put the single pillow to one side. Nothing. Finally, he took another look at the box of possessions Sir Norman had been given by the police. He found himself picking up the small foreign coin he had spotted before. On one side the figure of a lion and the date, 1930. He turned it over. Una pes
eta, it said. One Spanish peseta. He clasped his hand around it. Time to go.

  At the front door, his host appeared with a tumbler of brandy in his left hand. Wilde held out the old photograph album but Hereward did not even glance at it, merely handed it on to a footman.

  ‘Her syringe wasn’t in the box, Sir Norman.’

  ‘I told the police I didn’t want it. Told them to dispose of it as they saw fit.’

  He held up the coin. ‘And there was this – a Spanish peseta. Had your daughter been to Spain recently?’

  ‘She’s never been to Spain.’

  ‘Did she know anyone who had?’

  ‘I have no idea. Quite a lot of young idiots heading off there at the moment, I believe.’

  Wilde offered the coin to Hereward. ‘Probably nothing then. Perhaps it was in her room at Chesterton before she arrived.’

  ‘You take it, Wilde. I don’t want the bloody thing.’

  Wilde put the coin in his pocket. ‘There was one other matter . . .’

  ‘Go on.’ He was beginning to sound testy.

  ‘When I came here before, your chauffeur said you couldn’t see me. As I was leaving, I couldn’t help noting that Lord Slievedonard was arriving.’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘Well, there was a picture of him at Kilmington – he’s there with you and Cecil Langley.’

  ‘What is your point, Wilde? We’ve all been good friends for many years.’

  ‘In the picture you were all at one of the Nuremberg rallies. It struck me as a remarkable coincidence. I had never seen nor met Slievedonard or Langley before. But within the space of a few hours, I saw one of them here at St Wilfred’s Priory and then attended the murder scene of the other. And the murder scene had pertinent political references.’

  A vein was throbbing in Sir Norman’s temple. ‘There is no coincidence at all, Wilde. Slievedonard and I are friends – and we were both friends of Cecil Langley, God rest his soul.’

  ‘I was thinking of his politics.’

  ‘I know you were, God damn it. But my politics are my own business, as are Peter Slievedonard’s.’ Hereward sighed heavily. ‘Look, Wilde, you have a precise and interrogative mind, you are fastidious in your research, and you are one of the best historians of your generation. Don’t go off at a tangent. Look to bloody Horace Dill and his slimy cohort. And, by the by, they are the ones sticking their damned noses into Spanish affairs. I want my daughter’s killer caught.’

  *

  Lydia Morris had read Sassoon and Brittain and Graves, but she hadn’t needed their memoirs to understand what the generation before hers had undergone in the trenches. Anyone with a germ of imagination should be able to envisage what would happen if a shell tore a limb from your body or if shrapnel or a bullet ripped into your throat or spilled your intestines. The war to end all wars, they had called it. Did anyone believe that any more?

  She peered at the proofs. Her mind was elsewhere. There were times when she needed company, and times when she wanted simply to be alone. Her thoughts turned to Tom Wilde. She supposed he would want another wife and children. She supposed he would tire of waiting for her. Yet somehow she couldn’t see him with a compliant kitchen mouse. She wondered about his late wife. Surely she must have been a scholar? He’d always need intellectual stimulation.

  Even as such thoughts crowded in, she rejected them as girlish. She was well aware that she had a lot to be grateful for. She was an independent woman. The money bequeathed to her gave her freedom to pursue her own interests; had given her this publishing company. Today, however, she didn’t feel grateful. Nancy’s death had shaken her to her core. When her mother died she had vowed never to cry again. She thought of that now as the hot, stupid tears fell, unstoppable, onto the proofs of Prime of Youth.

  *

  When Tom Wilde hit the Ely road at the end of the drive out of St Wilfred’s Priory, he stopped. The yellow biplane was still buzzing overhead, performing a series of stunts. He watched it for half a minute, the engine of the Rudge growling beneath him. And then the aircraft came low, as though it was about to land, somewhere inside the deer park, and he saw it no more.

  What had Sir Norman heard over the telephone, he wondered, that had altered his mood? And why had he become so defensive at the mention of Slievedonard?

  Wilde twisted the throttle and roared off along the deserted road southwards towards Cambridge.

  CHAPTER 19

  Back in his rooms, Wilde cleaned himself, dusted down his jacket and trousers and asked Bobby to make him a pot of coffee. He collected his thoughts as the gyp fussed round him. Finally, he put through a call to Vanderberg.

  ‘Did you get anything, Jim?’

  ‘This and that.’

  ‘Is Eaton an MI5 man?’

  ‘No idea. Like you and I have always said. We should have records on stuff like that, but we’re way off the pace.’

  The lack of an American strategic intelligence office had been a constant refrain of their old tutor at Chicago. ‘The wars of the future will be won and lost in small back rooms,’ he had told them. ‘Espionage and covert action: two sides of the same coin. One means spying on your enemy, the other means working to preserve your national interests and keep your country safe from harm. Walsingham understood that and showed the way. We have to follow him. The world is too dangerous a place in the twentieth century. We’ve got to know what the other guy is doing. And, when necessary, stop him doing it.’ Neither Jim Vanderberg nor Tom Wilde could disagree, but thus far there seemed to be no urgency to do anything about it in the White House or on Capitol Hill. Former Secretary of State Henry Stimson had even closed down the state department’s codebreaking operation because ‘gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail’. Yes, there was the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the secret service to protect the president, and the various intelligence-gathering operations of the armed forces, but nothing was centralised. Everyone was doing his own thing. No one was combatting the work of hostile agencies and operatives. No one was undermining the enemy. And this in a world where Stalin and Hitler used assassination as a means of implementing government policy and sent out secret armies to wreak havoc abroad.

  ‘But there are things I can tell you. Yes, Philip Eaton is a Times reporter. Yes, he went to Eton and Trinity. At one time, when he was an undergraduate in the late twenties, it seems he applied for membership of the Communist Party – but if he was accepted, there is no record that I can access. Youthful indiscretion, I suppose. Since then he has become a fully paid-up member of the establishment. Belongs to the right clubs, attends social events with the great and the good. One more thing: he recently joined the Anglo-German Fellowship.’

  ‘That doesn’t make him a Nazi lover. The AGF has some pretty respectable sponsors.’

  ‘Of course, but I guess it shows him on the right of centre. Not many Reds in the AGF.’

  ‘More importantly, it shows us that Mr Eaton is a political animal.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘What about Peter Slievedonard?’

  ‘Ah yes, now he is interesting. I’ve never met the man, but others here have and from what I’m told I don’t like him one bit. This guy is somewhere to the right of Adolf. Slievedonard would happily kill and burn every commie, every Jew, every Oriental, every American, every African, the lame, the sick and plenty more besides, and sell their blood and bones for gold. He would certainly burn you and perhaps me. He is immensely wealthy and as a sideline he has a small limited circulation newsletter called North Sea. It’s a little like a cross between Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent and Streicher’s Der Stürmer.’

  ‘Not good.’

  ‘Not good at all. This thing is only circulated to those of a like mind. You won’t find it on newsstands. The embassy has a copy, which I’m holding on to. In the event of war, I want Slievedonard to be viewed as a hostile alien and forbidden entry to the USA. This edition should be evidence enough of his political sympathies. On the front, it has
a picture of that blonde anti-Semite Unity Mitford-Freeman, taken at last year’s Hesselberg gathering. Inside, there are lengthy quotes from Mein Kampf with the juiciest bits picked out in bold. It’s in front of me as I speak and I have to tell you, Tom, it makes me want to go straight outside in the street, find a pile of steaming dogshit and use this rag to clean it up.’

  *

  Juan Ferreira found the blue and white house with no difficulty. It was a little way inland from the creek, no more than half a kilometre across open land. Two of them would stay here overnight; they would bring their bedrolls and blankets and it would be warmer than the Gaviota. They could even start a fire. One of them would have to stay with the boat, however. You cannot just leave seven and a half tonnes of gold unattended. They would take the sentry duty in turns.

  The telephone sat on the bare boards. He picked up the receiver and was gratified to hear a dial tone. Now all he had to do was make a call to a man in a town called Cambridge. And then wait. There was nothing to do but wait.

  The wait was not long. Kholtov called him back within the hour.

  ‘You are safe, Juan?’

  ‘Some official saw us, but he went away on other business. We found the place.’

  Kholtov chuckled down the line. When he had embarked on this plan, he had never really believed it would work. He thought back three months to the chaos of Barcelona, the anarchists holding sway over the city like Paris during the French Revolution. Full of hope and violence, ruled and divided by factions, both home-grown and imported. Men such as Kholtov and his immediate superior Abram Slutsky had held immense power, courted by every side because they had the force of Stalin and the Soviet Union behind them; because they could provide guns and money and fighting men.

  But Kholtov and Slutsky had other work to do, far more important to Stalin than fighting fascists. Together, they had been busy organising the killing of senior members of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification – the POUM – to eradicate Trotskyite tendencies from the theatre of war. They must not be allowed to gain the upper hand in Spain. It was work that Kholtov and Slutsky knew well. Their ultimate goal, if only it could be done, was the elimination of Trotsky himself. But he was slippery, and protected.