The Old Vengeful

by Anthony Price

  “Not quite.” To stifle that foolish ache she tried to concentrate on that business. “You left out Number Seven, of course.”

  “But you are going to tell me about her, Elizabeth—don’t you remember?”

  Elizabeth stared at the road ahead, on which the home-going traffic from the coast was thickening. She wished she was going home with them, even to another lonely evening.

  “I remember that we started this conversation yesterday.”

  “So we did. But yesterday you weren’t exactly brimming with ideas. Quite understandably, in the circumstances, of course.”

  “Yes … quite understandably … since I was brimming with alcohol—administered to loosen my tongue, presumably, rather than my brains?”

  That earned her a longer look, a little rueful, mostly apologetic, but with a suggestion of respect which she found gratifying.

  “Yes … I’m sorry about that. But it seemed a good idea at the time.” He smiled disarmingly. “Anyway, I’m hoping you can do better on reflection.”

  Respect was better than nothing, thought Elizabeth as she hardened her heart against the smile: if she couldn’t have anything else from him, at least she could win that.

  “But now that you’ve read Father’s chapter you really know as much as I do. And you are the trained historian, not me.”

  “But you are the expert on this, Elizabeth—not me.”

  “No. I was only the typist. I keep telling you.”

  For a minute or two he drove in silence. Then he shook his head slowly at the two small children who were waving at him out of the rear window of the car in front. “No … I don’t think ‘only the typist’ could ever be a description of you, Elizabeth. You’re always going to be a lot more than ‘only the typist’. And that’s not just my opinion … although it is my opinion.”

  Elizabeth was half surprised, half shocked. “You’ve canvassed other … opinions?”

  “Of course! We don’t go entirely blind into something like this, we know a lot about you. But it’s Number Seven we want to know about now.”

  Elizabeth was still grappling with the news that she had been … “investigated” was the only word for it… by—by whom? “Who are you, Paul? What are you?”

  “But you know who I am, Elizabeth. You checked up on me—and quite efficiently, too—the moment you left the fête yesterday.”

  She stared at him. “You were in that car—in St Helen’s Street— when I visited Margaret’s bookshop?”

  “No. I wasn’t in that car.” Suddenly his expression was intent. “You spotted that car?”

  “I didn’t exactly ‘spot’ it—I mean, I just saw it … I didn’t really take any notice of it until I saw it again behind me, when I reached home.” His interest made her uneasy.

  “But it could have been any car. Why did you notice it?”

  “Well …” she floundered under his intensity “… I thought it might be you, as a matter of fact.”

  “Why should I follow you?”

  This was becoming awkward. “Well—I don’t know—I didn’t know … I suppose I was a bit suspicious of you, that’s all.”

  “Christ!” He drew a deep breath, and then relaxed slowly. “Phew!”

  “It wasn’t you?” She shied away from the proper question.

  “No. I was round the corner, in another car.” He shook his head, but more to himself than at her.

  The proper question wouldn’t go away, it had to be asked. “Who was in the car I saw, Paul?”

  For a moment she thought he hadn’t heard, as he raised his hand to wave back at the children. Then she thought it was more likely that he simply wasn’t going to answer the question.

  “It was a man who goes by the name of Fergusson.” He waved again. “A freelance journalist from Canada.”

  “A journalist?” Elizabeth was deeply suspicious of all journalists, both on principle and for their obstinate refusal to spell her name correctly in hockey reports and prize-lists.

  “Actually, he isn’t a journalist, and he wasn’t born in Canada in 1942—it was 1942, but it was in a makeshift hospital alongside the Krasnyi Oktiabr tank factory in a place they called Stalingrad in those days. And he certainly wasn’t christened Winston Fergusson. His real name is Novikov.”

  Novikov! The name came back to her clearly once she heard it pronounced for the second time, even though it had first come to her only indistinctly through the babel of her own thoughts beside the sitting room door—Novikov—

  If I hadn’t spotted Novikov—

  “Josef Ivanovitch Novikov.”

  The Russians, remembered Elizabeth—and this seemed the moment for them at last. “A Russian?”

  “A Russian.” He nodded. “You know what the KGB is, do you, Elizabeth?”

  That made it all fit, thought Elizabeth numbly, not so much without surprise as with an absence of feelings which was beyond surprise: it didn’t make sense—the people … not just the terrible snake-man, but Paul himself, and little Humphrey Aske, and David Audley, with his kind-brutal face … and the violence, which was beyond experience. It didn’t make sense, but it didn’t have to make sense, it merely had to fit into its own ugly pattern, like some do-it-yourself kit for a science-fiction monster.

  “Novikov is a KGB professional.” He took it for granted that her silence was a complete answer. “Like, you might say, PhD, Dzershinsky Street University, Moscow. First Class Honours in Intelligence, Counter-intelligence, Subversion, Manipulation, Disinformation, Corruption and Violence, cum laude and so on.”

  That PhD identified him as a Cambridge man—the very irrelevance of the thought steadied her. “Are you trying to frighten me?”

  “No. But if I am succeeding, that’s fine. Because the bastard certainly puts the fear of God up me, I tell you!”

  He spoke lightly, but Elizabeth stole another look, and saw the fighter-pilot’s grin—the sub-lieutenant’s deliberate false confidence which Father had written of, when the German Z-class destroyers had heavier armament and their E-boats were faster.

  Just as deliberately, she turned herself against her own feelings. “And what’s your … PhD in, Dr Mitchell?”

  “Ah! Good question!” He snuffled at the thought, as though it amused him. “History, for a start—The Breaking of the Hindenburg Line was a thesis before it was a book, to be exact … But after that, you could say that I’m a Secret Policeman—with the emphasis on policeman … Or, as David would say, I’m a submarine, and Josef Ivanovitch Novikov is a U-boat—would that be an acceptable distinction for Commander Loftus’s daughter?”

  “Father hated all submarines, indiscriminately.”

  “Hmm … destroyer captain’s prejudice … Then you’d better think of me as an anti-submarine frigate.”

  He was mocking her. And, at the same time, he was steering her back towards the seventh Vengeful. But that wouldn’t do any more, not after Josef Ivanovitch Novikov.

  “Those men, at the house … were they—?”

  “KGB? I wish to hell that I knew! They certainly didn’t behave like KGB—they were too bloody careless by half, thank God! Ugh!” He shivered at the memory. “But then Josef Ivanovitch was careless, too—he wasn’t lucky like me!”

  “What?” She almost bit her tongue on the question: if he was ready to be indiscreet then she mustn’t interrupt him.

  “Oh—he was careless! He let me get a sight of him, when he was just slipping into his car to follow you, round the back of the church at the fête … I was thinking of going for a quick drink, actually.”

  “In preparation for a boring evening?”

  Instead of replying he put his foot down on the accelerator and overtook the children’s car, and the next one, and the next one too, into the flashing lights of an approaching lorry which couldn’t quite work up enough speed for a head-on collision.

  Then he cleared his throat. “I was going for a drink, but he was going after you. It was careless of him to let me spot him … But if he
took the risk that meant he couldn’t afford to lose you—and you weren’t routine after that—d’you see, Elizabeth?”

  She saw—half-saw, didn’t see at all, but saw enough to imagine his moment of truth, when this terrible Russian had surfaced in the wake of the dull Miss Loftus at the parish church tower restoration fund sale and fête: it was one of those enlivening occurrences which might have been amusing if she hadn’t been at the other end of it.

  “And we still don’t know why—I suppose your burglars may have been contract labour, and he was keeping his eye on his investment … but I don’t go very much on that—it doesn’t have the right feel about it… But we’re checking them out, by God! In fact, Elizabeth, after our mutual acquaintance Joseflvanovitch we’re checking everyone out—“

  “Including me?” She tried to match his tone, even though now she was out of her depth.

  “Including you, naturally! And for the second time … In fact, I did you this morning, Elizabeth—you’ve been double-washed, and wrung-out and dried on the line … and you’re what we call ‘clean’—“

  “ ‘Clean’?” It was a reflex, not a question: she knew it was true, but the thought of being ‘double-washed, and wrung-out and dried’ stung her. “Are you sure?”

  “We’re never sure.” The joke was lost on him—if it was a joke. “But we have to draw the line somewhere. Your closest known security-risk is two removes away, and that passes for white in our book. Which … presumably … is why you are privileged to meet Mrs David Audley in the very near future, as I’ve already said.”

  Meeting Mrs David Audley, clean or dirty, wasn’t something she wished to think about. “You make me sound very dull.”

  “Dull…” He tripped the indicator, swinging the car out of the line on to a side-road. Just in time, as the road sign flashed by, Elizabeth caught the legend Upper Horley—5 and Steeple Horley—5½. “Dull …”

  Horley? She screwed up her memory, from the Book of Wessex Villages and The Parish Churches of Sussex and Hampshire in the bookcase in her bedroom, on the shelf dating from her childhood voyages of exploration in Margaret’s company during the holidays, by bus or bicycle.

  “Yes, I guess you could say ‘dull’,” reflected Paul.

  The Horleys, Upper and Steeple, had been just outside their range, tucked under the Downs away to the east, or east-nor’-east, unserved even then by any traceable public transport.

  “Or maybe ‘wasted’,” murmured Paul.

  But they had been on the list; or Steeple Horley had, for its gem of a church, complete with recumbent stone crusader and the re-used Roman bricks it shared with the much-decayed manor house built on the site of a Saxon hall mentioned in the Domesday Book—

  Paul’s last murmur registered suddenly, breaking her concentration. “ ‘Wasted’? What d’you mean—‘wasted’?”

  “Ah … well, you haven’t exactly spread your wings for long flights since you came down from Oxford, have you, Elizabeth?” He raised one hand off the wheel defensively before she could reply. “Just an observation, that’s all.”

  “I don’t see that it’s any of your business.” She felt herself bristling, but then the bleak truth submerged her anger as another signpost pointed them to the Horleys, in preference for a No Through Road to some unnamed farm.

  “Someone had to look after my father.”

  “Sure. And a house-keeper did that perfectly well when you were at school and at Oxford … Mrs Carver, No. 3, Church Row. And she’s still hale and hearty—don’t tell me he couldn’t have afforded her, because we both know bloody well that he could have done.”

  “I didn’t know that. I thought we were … not exactly poor, but not rich.”

  “Doesn’t matter—forget it—“ he shook his head “—he wasn’t an invalid, your esteemed father, that’s what I mean. He may have had a heart condition, but he didn’t need a First-Class honours graduate to … to—how did you put it so graphically?—to ‘type his bloody books, and cook his bloody meals, and wash his bloody laundry’—eh?”

  He knew too much—too bloody much—about Father, and Mrs Carver, as well as about the foolish Miss Loftus, who had let slip far too much under the combined pressures of fear and self-pity and brandy.

  “But I suppose you thought it was your duty—right?” He slashed the word at her, almost contemptuously. “You had to do your duty by him?”

  Another signpost: Upper Horley left, Steeple Horley right—and it would have to be left here, because there was only the church and the “much-decayed” manor the other way, the book had said.

  Pride came to her aid. “So what if it was—my duty?”

  “Then do your duty now!” He fed the wheel to the right, to Steeple Horley and another No Through Road which had to end in half-a-mile under the steeple and the shoulder of the high downs curving above them. “Stretch yourself for us, Elizabeth.”

  It wasn’t the thought of duty which stretched her—she had never even thought of duty in relation to Father: he had been there, sitting at his chair in the study, when she had come down from Oxford for the last time, and Mrs Carver had already been given her notice, and everything had been taken for granted, herself included … but perhaps that was what duty was—the thing that happened, and the state of mind which made it happen, without any conscious thought on either side, the giving and the taking being equally automatic.

  But it wasn’t that which stretched her now, it was the certainty that Mrs Audley was waiting for her half-a-mile ahead, or less—and that she needed Paul to help her—

  God! What a mess I am—hair, clothes, face—!

  The Vengeful—Father had gone back to France, to re-write the chapter—

  But not back to France … that first writing had been just routine— just as she had been just routine when she’d first glimpsed Paul in the mirror, and he had seen her—

  The car was slowing down—it was turning past a little cottage, into a gravel drive—past the cottage garden, with its apple trees already heavy with fruit, and the runner-beans, bright with their harvest to come, festooned over their bean-poles—and banks of blackberry bushes now, on either side—but Father had gone to France to re-write the chapter—

  “It has to do with the survivors. The Fortuné sank somewhere off the Horse Sands, but that was at night, and no one knows where exactly, and there were only four survivors. But there were also survivors from the Vengeful—they came ashore on the Normandy coast—he had a footnote about them … But …”

  “Good girl!” He braked, slowing from his snail’s-pace to stop altogether between the blackberry bushes, with the curve of the drive still ahead. “But what?”

  “They all died. Or the French shot them when they were trying to escape—there was a scandal, anyway … But—I don’t know …”

  “Don’t know what?”

  “Just… don’t know. But that’s the only reason he could have had for going to France—the survivors who died in France—or how they died.”

  “That’s my good girl!” The car began to crawl forward again. “That’s what I needed to put you finally in the clear.”

  “What—what you needed?” She caught a glimpse of a house ahead. “What?”

  “Because they didn’t all die. At least one of them lived to tell the tale—and a very curious tale too, so David says.” The car crunched and slithered on the thick gravel as he braked finally. “And here’s Faith waiting to welcome you.”

  VI

  THE SOUND AT the bedroom door disconcerted Elizabeth twice over: first because she was hardly ten minutes out of her bath, and was wondering what to do with her hair, never mind her face and her clothes; and then because it didn’t sound like the sort of business-like knock she would have expected from Faith Audley—it was more like the tentative tap of a scholarship pupil who hadn’t finished her essay-on the Eleven Years’ Tyranny of Charles I and hoped against hope that Miss Loftus wasn’t in, or wouldn’t hear if she was.

  Only this time it wa
s Miss Loftus who wished she wasn’t in, or hadn’t heard. But she was, and she had, and once again there was no escape.

  “Come in!” She saw the lips of her bedraggled reflection in the dressing-table mirror pronounce the invitation.

  The door opened slowly … too slowly, and not far enough before it stopped opening.

  Oh God! thought Elizabeth. Not Paul Mitchell—?

  But neither Paul’s face nor Faith Audley’s ash-blonde head came through the gap—though an ash-blonde head was coming through, but at a level she had not anticipated.

  A child—a child’s face, like and yet unlike—like for its thinness and pale colouring, but unlike, with the gold-framed spectacles magnifying the eyes and the metal brace disfiguring the mouth which opened to speak.

  “Mummy says—I’m sorry to disturb you, she says—but I heard your bath go down the plug at the back—she says, would you like the hair-dryer? And … and, she says—we can do your things … Clarkie can wash them, and tumble dry them, and iron them, and all that… Clarkie—that’s Mrs Clarke—and … and … Mummy says there’s this—“

  This, and the hair-dryer, and more of the miniature Faith Audley— like and unlike—slid unwillingly into the bedroom.

  “It’s a caftan.” The child juggled with her burdens the better to display the garment, allowing its material to ooze silkily over the hair-dryer. “Daddy brought it back from the East somewhere years ago, long before he even met Mummy, and she’s never worn it … Only, she says it’ll fit, and she hasn’t got anything else that will … But she says it’s very beautiful.”