DEATH ON THE AGENDA
Patricia Moyes
FELONY & MAYHEM PRESS • NEW YORK
To all the people, of many nationalities, who have made life in Geneva so stimulating and delightful, this book is affectionately dedicated.
Born in Dublin in 1923, Patricia (“Penny”) Packenham-Walsh was just 16 when WWII came calling, but she lied about her age and joined the WAAF (the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force), eventually becoming a flight officer and an expert in radar. Based on that expertise, she was named technical advisor to a film that Sir Peter Ustinov was making about the discovery of radar, and went on to act as his personal assistant for eight years, followed by five years in the editorial department of British Vogue.
When she was in her late 30s, while recuperating from a skiing accident, she scribbled out her first novel, Dead Men Don’t Ski, and a new career was born. Dead Men featured Inspector Henry Tibbett of Scotland Yard, equipped with both a bloodhound’s nose for crime and an easy-going wife; the two of them are both a formidable sleuthing team and an image of happy, productive marriage, and it’s that double picture that makes the Tibbett series so deeply satisfying. While the Tibbett books were written in the second half of the 20th century, there is something both timeless and classic about them; they feel of a piece with the Golden Age of British Detective Fiction.
Patricia Moyes died in 2000. The New York Times once famously noted that, as a writer, she “made drug dealing look like bad manners rather than bad morals.” That comment may once have been rather snarky, but as we are increasingly forced to acknowledge the foulness that can arise from unchecked bad manners, Inspector Henry Tibbett—a man of unflinching good manners, among other estimable traits—becomes a hero we can all get behind.
Contents
Author’s Note
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Author’s Note
This story is set in Geneva, and centered on the Palais des Nations. Inevitably, therefore, it involves characters who are international officials, members of the Geneva Police, and so forth. I need hardly say that none of my friends or acquaintances at the Palais or in the gendarmerie bears the faintest resemblance to any of the people in the book, all of whom are purely imaginary. Nor, to the best of my knowledge, does the Permanent Central Opium Board hold conferences of the sort which I describe here. For readers who know Geneva, I should perhaps add that the mythical conference in the book takes place in the old conference wing, which is in the process of being rebuilt.
CHAPTER ONE
“IN SHORT, GENTLEMEN, my country has taken—and is taking—the most active steps to prevent the illegal importation of narcotic drugs. As we see it, the problem confronting our excise authorities divides itself into two facets...”
Henry Tibbett pulled himself together and sat up straight. The booming voice in his earphones had a disquieteningly soporific effect. He wished he could take the wretched things off, but the speaker was the delegate from Spain, and Henry’s knowledge of Spanish was not sufficient to enable him to follow every word. Consequently, it was not Señor Moranta’s volatile, lightweight voice that Henry was hearing, but the robust English of a tall, fair-haired young man called John Trapp, who sat in a glass-fronted booth overlooking the conference hall, performing the small miracle of simultaneous translation.
John Trapp was, as a matter of fact, dissatisfied with himself. He had been on the permanent staff of the Palais des Nations at Geneva for five years, attending numberless conferences, translating witty speeches, dull speeches, speeches on vital international affairs, and speeches on the sewage problems of Upper Nigeria, speeches on the resettlement of refugees and atomic energy and overpopulation and disarmament. By now, all speeches sounded much alike to him. The only fun he got out of his job was the determination of the perfectionist to do it well. That word “facets” had been wrong. You can’t divide a problem into facets. Still, no time to worry about that now. The slightest hesitation, and the translator is lost. He went on.
“There is the question of identification of the smugglers. That is all-important, and becomes increasingly difficult. I don’t have to tell you that the master-operators never carry contraband themselves, and are constantly changing their couriers. Then there is the question of actual methods of concealment. This I do not propose to elaborate today, since the subcommittee on countermeasures—of which I have the honor to be a member—is due to start work tomorrow, and will be able to produce a report far more detailed and valuable than anything we can achieve in plenary session. Nevertheless, statistics collected over the past three years show...”
The subcommittee. Henry, too, had been chosen, along with five other delegates to the International Narcotics Conference, to study, compare notes and report on current methods of dope smuggling and the countermeasures being evolved by the police of various nations. He allowed his attention to wander again, as he looked around the conference hall, picking out for special study the fellow members of his committee.
The hall was upholstered in the usual Palais des Nations color scheme of brown and beige. The delegates’ seats, comfortable and well-sprung, were shabbily solid in the manner of the 1920s. Great slabs of mahogany had been hewn to form the desks, with their complicated panoply of microphones and headphones. Above the Chairman’s head, a Cubist-influenced mural in muddy colors showed Humanity—a massive, square-jawed superman in an open-necked shirt—clasping hands with Peace. Peace was a large lady in a flowing and faintly classical garment, who held in her free hand a chunky, bored-looking dove. Henry sighed, reflecting on the fate of that dove since the optimistic days of the early twenties, when this great palace had been built in burning hope by people who honestly believed that they had fought a war to end war, and that the League of Nations would prove an unbreakable bastion of peaceful discussion and common sense in the face of fanaticism and self-interest.
By now the dark, sprightly little Spaniard had sat down, and the French delegate, Jacques Lenoir of the Deuxième Bureau, was on his feet. With relief, Henry removed his earphones. This he could follow in the original. He liked Lenoir, and was pleased that he, too, had been picked to serve on the subcommittee. Unlike many Frenchmen, Lenoir spoke quietly and with a surprising lack of gesture. He was a small, brown-haired, dapper man in his forties; everything about him was neat, from his light brown suit and pointed suede shoes to his impeccably turned phrases. He was a precise, witty speaker who set problems for his interpreters.
Lenoir came out with one of his elegantly satiric remarks, and Henry glanced across the room, caught Alfredo Spezzi’s eye, and grinned. Spezzi was an old friend, a young but brilliant officer of the Italian police with whom Henry had worked on a murder case in the Dolomites. He was exceptionally good-looking—tall and blond, with clear blue eyes. Henry had been overjoyed to find him in Geneva, for several reasons. First, because a familiar face is always welcome in a strange city. Second, because Spezzi’s presence here was an outward sign of his rapid promotion, his transfer from Montelunga to Rome and the hierarchy. And lastly, because success, far from spoiling the young man, had apparently relaxed him. The slight tendency to pomposity which had occasionally riled Henry in the old days had evaporated, revealing a most engaging sense of humor. Henry looked forward keenly to working with Alfredo on the subcommittee.
Several places along
from Spezzi sat the fourth member of the subcommittee—Bill Parkington, a large, ginger-haired American who seemed to have been carved carelessly out of a redwood tree in his native California. He stood up to speak next. After Lenoir, the contrast was bizarre, like an earnest St. Bernard following a dancing poodle. Parkington was no speaker, but everything he said was illuminated by common sense and a blazing sincerity. Henry knew that the more sophisticated Lenoir and Moranta considered Bill to be a naïve country cousin. Henry himself had great respect for the big American, for it was clear that his battle against the dope runners was a personal, deeply felt struggle, too serious to be subjected to the trivialities of wit.
Glancing up to the interpreters’ booth, Henry saw that John Trapp had removed his earphones and left the hall, leaving the English-French interpreter, Helène Brochet, to wrestle with Parkington’s richly idiomatic phraseology. Helène was a tall, dark woman in her thirties, with a beautiful but almost frighteningly intense face and a lovely figure. While French was her native language, her English was so perfect, so easy and idiomatic, that Henry surmised she had spent many years on the more austere side of the channel.
Reluctantly, Henry looked away from Helène Brochet, and transferred his attention to the last member of the subcommittee. This was Konrad Zwemmer, of Western Germany. To Henry, Zwemmer had been an enigma ever since the opening of the conference. He was fair, stocky, and apparently open and friendly, yet Henry had found it impossible to fathom just what went on behind the glinting rimless glasses. He sat now, very upright, polishing his spectacles and listening to Parkington with a concentrated attention which did not seem to imply agreement. Zwemmer, Henry reflected, represented the postwar generation of Western Germany, her prosperity and her precariousness, her ambivalent sense of pride in the present and guilt for the past. Not that the guilt was ever allowed to show: it simmered beneath the surface, an inferiority complex assumed by an innocent generation, the sins of the fathers visited on the sons.
These were the men who were to form the subcommittee, of which the chairman was Henry himself. Chief Inspector Henry Tibbett of Scotland Yard, to give him his full title. A deceptively insignificant man in early middle age, with sandy hair and a mild manner, and a flair for intuitive detection which he described, with some embarrassment, as “my nose.” It never occurred to Henry—who thought of himself as the most obvious and uninteresting of characters—that his fellow committee members might be studying him, too, and might find him as baffling as he found them.
Bill Parkington had by now launched out into a technical and impassioned description of the newest American electronic identification system—a wonder-working machine which, when fed with certain facts, could produce the names and photographs of a limited number of suspects within seconds. The Chairman glanced up in annoyance. This was precisely the sort of thing which should be reserved for the subcommittee. As soon as the American paused for breath, the Chairman stepped in smartly. He wished the subcommittee success with its work, and requested a report at the earliest possible moment. He then declared the day’s meeting at an end.
At once the hall was filled with a rustle of papers, as the delegates collected their files and their notes, and prepared to leave. The faint but continuous tapping of the verbatim reporters, as they took each speech down word for word on their machines. was cut off suddenly. Quiet conversations began, and the delegates sauntered out of the windowless conference hall into the bright sunshine of the great marble corridor of the Palais des Nations.
Whatever architectural aesthetes may feel about the somewhat weighty design of the Palais as a whole, nobody can deny the impressive beauty of the marble corridor. As wide as a street, floored with an inlaid design of colored marble from all over the world—green, black, red, white and beige—the corridor runs the length of the central building. On one side, doors open into the various conference rooms, rest rooms and offices. The other is made almost entirely of glass, and looks out over sweeping green lawns and trees, to the sparkling blue of the lake and the majesty of the mountains beyond, topped by the ever-white peak of Mont Blanc.
Now, at half past five on a late spring evening, the distant, snowy mountains had caught the last rays of the sun as it set behind the Jura, and had turned from white to rose-pink. On the lake small white sails scudded over blue water. To the right the city of Geneva was just visible—green spires and golden stone houses and tall white blocks of modern flats. The famous Jet d’eau fluttered like a huge white feather over the lake—a solid column of water five hundred feet high, fanned out by the evening breeze into a gentle, falling curve. Henry stood by the window wall, gazing out and marveling, as he had done each evening since he came to the city.
He became aware of a tall figure looming up beside him.
“Coming to the party tonight?” asked Bill Parkington.
“I suppose so,” said Henry, his eyes still on the view. “There seems to be one every night. Who’s giving it this time? I haven’t even checked. My wife keeps the engagement book at the hotel.”
Bill looked surprised. “Oh, this isn’t one of those,” he said. “Not official, I mean. This is Paul Hampton’s party.”
“I’m sorry,” said Henry. “I seem to have been in a daze of hospitality ever since I came to Geneva. Who is Paul Hampton?”
“American,” said Bill laconically. “Rolling in dough. Lives in that huge white house you can see on the other side of the lake, the Villa Trounex. I met him at the French party. Old buddy of Lenoir’s. He’s invited all the subcommittee delegates out to his place this evening. Wanted to have the whole bloody conference, but Jacques and I finally got it into his head that six of us were enough to inflict on a private party. Should be quite a binge.”
“It’ll be a pleasure to get away from official cocktails for once,” said Henry—and immediately regretted it. For him, this conference represented a miraculous break in a basically humdrum and underpaid existence, and he was determined not to become blasé.
“Yeah,” said Bill. “Well, be seeing you.”
***
At the Hotel Étoile, Emmy Tibbett was taking a long, luxurious bath, and pondering for the hundredth time in the past week how lucky she was. With finances tight, and little or no prospect of a summer holiday abroad, Henry had suddenly been assigned to attend the Narcotics Conference. The opportunity had seemed too good to miss. Emmy had drawn on her reserve of carefully hoarded housekeeping money, bought an air ticket, and come with him. She was having the time of her life.
This was in great measure due to Annette Delacroix. Annette was a pretty, blond Swiss girl whom Emmy had met some years before in London, where Annette was working temporarily as a secretary at an international conference—the type of job for which, because of her knowledge of English, she was always in demand. They had become friendly, exchanged addresses, and thought little more about it.
Emmy’s first day in Geneva had been a little bleak. Henry was at the Palais, and there are limits to the amusement to be gleaned from exploring a strange city alone, hampered by an imperfect command of the language. That evening, with some misgivings, Emmy had conquered her shyness and telephoned Annette, to be met with a heartwarming surge of hospitality. Of course Annette remembered her perfectly. She and Henry must come and have a drink at her apartment at once—well, then, as soon as they could get away from the official party. And she, by the greatest good fortune, was on a week’s leave from the Palais and free as air all day. She would show Emmy Geneva.
Later that evening, Henry and Emmy had gone around to Annette’s gleamingly modern little flat on the top of a tall block overlooking the lake. Annette, looking stunning in a pale blue silk dress, opened the door to them and said, “Henri...Emmie...it is so good to see you. Be angels and pour yourselves drinks—I am just on the telephone. Please excuse me.”
She went back to the phone, and Henry heard her say, “C’est un peu difficile ce soir, John, j’ai des invités...”
Quickly, Henry said
, “Annette, don’t let us interfere with...” but she silenced him with a smile and a gesture. To the phone, she said, “Oui...oui, d’accord...au revoir, chéri...” Then she put down the receiver and came over to them.
“But it is drôle, Emmie,” she said. “I work now at the Palais and my first job when I return from my vacation is with Henri’s very conference, les narcotiques et stupéfiants. And before that I have a whole week for myself and I am dying of boredom.”
After they had been there for a few minutes, there was another ring at the door, and John Trapp arrived—tall, handsome, a little bored, and, Emmy judged, somewhat taken aback at the presence of a fellow countryman who was also a delegate at the very conference on which he was working. He soon relaxed, however, and expounded at some length and over many whiskies on the complex structure of Genevan society.
“The Genevois keep to themselves,” he said, “and I can’t say I blame them. The place is infested with foreigners, and if they once started inviting them to their homes, there’d be no end to it.”
Annette looked uncomfortable. “I am Genevoise, mon cher Jean,” she said.
“You’re different,” said John, with a quick, attractive smile. “I’m generalizing now. And in general the Genevois keep to themselves. D’accord?”
“I suppose so,” said Annette.
John went on. “Then there are the expatriates. The American business people have their own society which overlaps with that of the English, but only just.” He poured himself another drink. “The elite of the expatriates are the writers and film stars and exiled royalty and other rich men who come here because of the tax laws. They usually spend only a few months of the year here, and they talk only to each other and God.”
“Some of them,” said Annette, in a slightly clipped voice.
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