Paris Spring

by James Naughtie

  ‘Calm down, Pierce, please. You’re wittering.’

  Craven said the febrile first days of May might be casting a spell of confusion. ‘Forget the noise, and listen.’

  He began by noting that neither he nor Flemyng had been approached by the police since the first contact with the embassy. ‘In normal circumstances that would be odd. I don’t think so this time. I have no doubt that her notebooks contained many names, ours among them, and that M. Maigret, or whoever he is, is working his way through them patiently. We are not important to them. Meanwhile, this city is preparing for trouble and I imagine their minds are concentrated on the streets, not the cemetery of Père Lachaise and a dead foreigner. The Americans have done a good job with the authorities and the legal processes are going to be strung out.

  ‘My approach is the opposite one. Will is watching the streets – I should say that he reports to me that we can expect fireworks this evening – and I am thinking of what brought about the death of this woman. I suspect it’s less a question of who than why. Tell me more, before I continue, of what London is saying about the Sandy Bolder episode. Your people, not mine. He angered me, I should say, and I tore a strip off him.’

  ‘Naval language used, I’m sure, and bully for you,’ Bridger said. ‘You certainly spoke for me. He broke every commandment. Vague talk about leaks, no minute with proper detail, a journey to London of which the rest of the embassy was unaware, and – frankly – a thespian performance in my office that left people cursing him to high heaven.’

  ‘I suppose it would have been worse if they had laughed,’ Craven said.

  Bridger took a drink.

  Craven asked, ‘What substance remains?’

  ‘We all read your splendid warning, Freddy. Treat with exceptional caution. Appreciated by me, and circulated as widely as possible. I thought you might have mentioned Bolder by name – he deserved it – but there we are. There is still kindness in your heart, Freddy.’

  ‘Substance?’ Craven repeated.

  ‘Ingleby is sounding every alarm bell at his disposal and making a noise. Frankly, that is his nature, but he’s right. At a time of maximum sensitivity – you’ve seen the Moscow telegrams about Prague – this kind of rumour-mongering about leaks is the worst thing. The very worst. Try as we might, no one can find a shred of evidence to back it up – and even asking the question of the French would be an insult. That’s the point, Freddy. Substance, nil. Damage – a great deal.’

  ‘And what does Ingleby propose to do about it?’ asked Craven. ‘Apart from asking my people.’

  ‘He doesn’t know, which is giving him the collywobbles.’

  Conscious that he was repeating himself and had therefore lost command, Bridger poured a drink and said, ‘Please continue.’

  ‘Very well,’ Craven began. ‘As I told you when we gathered in your room, we believe it likely that she was killed by an agent, unknown, of another power. The Americans, I am told, are of the same view.’

  ‘That I can confirm,’ said Bridger, emphatically.

  ‘And then we had Will’s cemetery visit.’

  Bridger dived in. ‘And you will remember that on that matter I had to deal with the American number two last night. I warned you. As it turned out – we were in this very room – he was charm itself. My fears about interference, and Wemyss’s alarm, were somewhat relieved. Somewhat.’ Craven could see that his admission was tinged with disappointment. ‘Anyway, with some effort I was able to steer us through without mishap.’

  Craven saw his opening. ‘Did he complain that we had interfered with his embassy’s inquiry?’

  ‘Not in so many words, but…’

  ‘I see,’ said Craven. ‘I assume Will’s name was not mentioned.’

  ‘Of course not. Out of the question.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Craven said. ‘I indicated the other day that Will’s inquiries didn’t help us identify a culprit, and that remains true. However there are other developments.’

  Bridger said, ‘Good.’

  ‘I’m not sure that they are entirely good,’ Craven said.

  Carefully, with no reference to times or places, he introduced Bridger to the possibility that an East German operation might have been mounted in Paris and elsewhere, and that the embassy – no doubt one among several – could have been a target. Kristof played no part in his story.

  ‘This is vague, Pierce. But, unlike Bolder’s story, it has some substance. At this stage I can go no further. You and I must respect our boundaries. My feeling is that what has been going on is probably rather workaday – the usual prowling around. But Quincy makes a difference. I cannot believe that these indications are unconnected with her death.’

  It had the effect he intended.

  ‘Good Lord,’ Bridger said, and, displaying some of his quickness at last, added, ‘Had she found out?’

  ‘Well, she’d found out something.’

  Bridger stood up, as if he had to. ‘I must ask you this, Freddy, without wishing to sound too formal. Has anyone here been compromised?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You are sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not Bolder?’ Bridger asked.

  ‘This does not come from his rumour mill, I repeat. And although you may have turned against him, Pierce, I have no doubt about his loyalty. None. Nor, for most of the time, his competence.’

  ‘Judgement is another matter,’ said Bridger.

  ‘Perhaps. But Sandy does have instinct. It has been his passport.’

  ‘Flemyng?’ Bridger said. ‘Let’s get back to our Will.’

  Craven said that he was right to be concerned about Flemyng, because he shared a feeling for him. ‘There is family business that I believe may be difficult. I learned something of that in Scotland. And you’ll know that he has taken some time to get over Isabel, the girl who left just after you arrived here.’

  ‘He should certainly settle down,’ Bridger said. ‘He’ll be forty the year after next, like me. I’m so relieved to have Grizelda.’ He turned to the door as if she might appear.

  ‘But he is so valuable,’ Craven said.

  ‘Just so. I hope he isn’t entangled in this affair, whatever it is.’

  ‘He is his own man, as you know, Pierce. He avoids entanglements when he can.’

  About Abel and Kristof, Maria and Flemyng’s confessions about Quincy, Craven said not a word.

  But when he took his leave an hour later, after a simple lunch of soup and cold fish with Grizelda, who sparkled briefly and who kissed him enthusiastically on both cheeks at the front door, his mind was on everything he hadn’t said.

  He walked to Place des Ternes to find a taxi and asked it to wait for him at his apartment building while he fetched his bag. Locking up, and checking that he had packed his hip flask, a heavy tiredness flooded in. He reminded the driver that he was going to Orly, and fell asleep.

  Sam Malachy, soon afterwards, was on the metro, taking his own bag to Gare du Nord and the Brussels train. Craven’s instructions, delivered in his apartment the previous evening while Flemyng and Abel were dining, were specific, but they also allowed some play time for Sam. ‘Make a social appointment with Jonny Hinckley before you go. Old Vienna friends, and so on. I am going to give you some names, and I want you to show them to him. Don’t warn him. Just ask if they mean anything, and please don’t say that they came from me. As far as he should be concerned they may have dropped on your doorstep in Vienna. This must seem informal, Sam. Please.’

  He had produced a list from his inside pocket. They were German names, three of them from Craven’s imagination and one from an obscure opera, just for fun. The three others were remembered from Flemyng’s list, including the one that had triggered a memory. On the previous night he had spent two hours in the darkness before he slept, listening to jazz and smoking hard, playing with the consequences.

  ‘I can’t tell you where these come from, and they may prove to have no significance,’ he told Sam. �
�But worth a try. I shall come to Brussels on Tuesday morning, off the night train from London. Breakfast? Only if you’re in a decent hotel, mind you.’ He smiled. ‘Try the Amigo.’

  Sam had arranged his lunch with Hinckley for the next day, well away from his office in the NATO mission, and had phoned a German friend in Brussels to propose a Sunday night out. ‘Get your drinking boots on,’ he told Sam.

  The third journey on Sunday night began at almost the same time as Flemyng returned to the Café Tournon, to find police at the door and a heaving crowd inside that was eager to spend a night in the streets.

  *

  Far away, in the cool of a Highland evening, with the warmth of the day spent and a breeze sending a shiver through the ranks of spruce and larch along the lochside, Mungo Flemyng prepared to leave home.

  He and Babble had walked that afternoon over the high hill behind Altnabuie, on the zigzag path that made the climb easier, into the mouth of the next glen. They looked north-west across a panorama of hills and high tops that drew the eye to the mountains beyond, on a landscape lit by spring sunshine where the brown moorland was beginning to lose the drabness of the cold months, and new colours were painting the scene with brightness that matched the freshness in the air. There were streaks of yellow on the slopes and patches of greenery in the gullies where the water ran.

  They carried wooden staffs, prepared for a long tramp, and spent two hours on a high circuit that took them back through the woods running down to the house and Mungo’s garden. They watched deer and found a carcass they thought a wildcat had left behind, spent a while on a slope where they could watch a pair of buzzards hunting, and for an hour followed the course of a burn that worked its way between the hills to join the waters that poured at the last into their own loch.

  As usual when they were together outside, they enjoyed long periods when they said nothing. Both knew the land well, and watched for signs of life and death with the eyes of countrymen who felt a rhythm in the landscape as clearly as if it had been music in their ears. Each long walk was an adventure and a restoration. Babble watched for young trout in the burn; Mungo looked for new nests on the edge of the wood. When they spoke seriously, as they finished with the steepest part of the path and paused for breath, it was about Flemyng.

  ‘I assume that the reason Freddy Craven sent his message asking me to go to London tonight is that he has news of Will,’ Mungo said. ‘Or questions.’

  ‘A telegram is usually bad news,’ said Babble.

  Mungo asked what he had concluded from Craven’s brief visit ten days before.

  ‘I think it was a mighty effort to make. He’s not a well man.’

  Speaking as if his mind had been elsewhere, Mungo said, ‘He said something troubling to me when he was here. That he knew Will wasn’t telling him the truth. What do you make of that?’

  Babble, whose loyalty to his three boys was absolute, said that it might have involved girlfriends. ‘A reasonable excuse.’

  ‘He wouldn’t come all this way for that,’ Mungo said. ‘I’m wondering if there may be a new job in the offing. A move. But I don’t see how I can be told. He asked me to look through the boys’ letters from the last two years before going down to London, and I have. He knows I keep them in date order. But they are about family things, nothing more.’

  ‘That was nosey. Why did you say yes?’

  ‘He’s a good man,’ Mungo said, ‘and Will thinks of him as a father figure. So I have no qualms.’

  ‘Here’s what I think,’ Babble said. ‘He’ll be talking about something that’s perplexing him. He needs to settle it.’

  They fell silent again as they took the last path home, winding round the lochside to the boathouse from where they could see the herons working on their jumbled nests in treetops that were still bare. Returning up the slope to the house, they caught the smells of fresh growth and saw a black cloud of bees at Mungo’s hives. ‘I’ll be ready in ten minutes,’ he said. ‘Is the car filled up?’

  They drove quickly to Pitlochry, Babble letting himself go, and they pulled into the station car park half an hour before the train from Inverness was due. Mungo checked his sleeper ticket, and Babble suggested a glass of beer.

  Mungo’s nervousness had come to the surface, and he returned to his puzzlement about Craven’s purpose. ‘I hope I can help, without betraying anything. Will is so precious, and I hope it is good news, not bad.’

  Babble put his glass on the table where they sat and they watched the sun drop behind the hills. ‘I’ve been turning it over in my mind, like yourself, since we were on our walk.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I’ve got a strong feeling. A conclusion.’

  Mungo waited for him.

  ‘I’m a cheery soul, like you.’

  ‘Indeed you are,’ Mungo said.

  ‘But not tonight.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Mungo said and reached across the table to his old friend.

  ‘This must be bad for the boys. For one of them, at least.’

  TWENTY-NINE

  Kristof rang late in the evening. ‘This time, you come to me.’

  Flemyng said, ‘I will,’ and nothing else, wrote down the address of Pascal’s bar on a pad beside the phone and replaced the receiver. He found the street in his red book that mapped the city par arrondissement and studied the surroundings. He sat in his chair for a while, thinking about Kristof’s voice – had it relaxed? – and arranging his thoughts in order. He made some preparations, and a few minutes later he was in a taxi heading east. They skirted the Latin Quarter where he could see streets blocked off by police barricades that were strung with flashing lights. As they turned to cross the river, Flemyng rolled his window all the way down and heard a chorus of sirens rising in the dusk, then falling away as the taxi left them behind. Looking back he saw smoke and a flicker of flame. A convoy of police vans sped past them, going the other way.

  A few minutes later they were rattling over the cobblestones at Bastille, and Flemyng felt dampness in the air. He leaned back and turned his face and allowed the light, cleansing rain to fall on his cheeks. Refreshment. The driver knew the turnings, and worked his way through a warren of streets, sometimes turning back. Flemyng said nothing. On one corner, he glimpsed a sign pointing up the street they didn’t take – Cimetière du Père Lachaise. He brought to mind the lugubrious figure of M. Lebosquet, and remembered the warmth that was revealed underneath. The driver told him they were nearly there, and he looked out at the passing street names that Quincy must have known.

  He had given the driver an address on a corner about two hundred yards from Pascal’s bar. After paying him off he took a coffee in a run-down café on a roundabout where there was no conversation and he could watch the street without interruption. Traffic was thin and the rain that now fell steadily was clearing the pavements. A few people stood in doorways for shelter, and it was quiet. When he walked towards Pascal’s on the next corner, down a narrow street with its shops closed up and a hotel that seemed to be closed for business, though the red-lettered sign above the door was blinking hopefully, he saw that there were only a few cars parked near the bar. Each was empty. He paused a few yards away at the door of the hotel, as if he wanted to see what had happened to it, and looked around him for a minute or two. If the bar was being watched, they were good. He saw nothing.

  Two old men came out and stood together on the pavement, putting on hats. They raised arms in farewell and left in different directions, pulling their coats around them. Flemyng walked quickly to the corner with his head down against the rain, pausing outside the bar to look inside. There were five men, two sitting alone and three talking to the man he took for Pascal, red-faced and fierce, who was in full flow. No Kristof, but he could see the ragged red curtain and the back room beyond.

  Walking in, he nodded towards the corner, and Pascal waved him through without a word, giving a rough smile. Flemyng pulled the curtain back behind him and walked to the table where Kristof sa
t alone.

  ‘Thank you, Will. You don’t mind me being familiar?’ He didn’t stand up.

  Taking his seat at a scarred wooden table, Flemyng looked dark in the dim room. He was wearing a black polo neck and a navy jacket, the shoulders damp with rain. He smoothed down his hair, wiping his hands on his jacket lining and throwing it over the back of his chair. Without smiling, he said, ‘I’ve come.’

  ‘That tells me something,’ Kristof said.

  ‘Does it?’ Flemyng came closer.

  ‘Yes. We can talk.’

  Flemyng was prepared, and was thinking of Craven, who had helped him without knowing it. ‘Not in the way you want, I think. I have news. Freddy Craven’s in London.’

  ‘No whisky tonight,’ Kristof said, pouring wine from a carafe into two glasses. Flemyng expected it to be quick, without small talk. ‘That’s very good. When the cat’s away…’

  ‘No, you’ve got it wrong. I’ve told you I’m not going to go behind his back,’ Flemyng said. Thinking of the keyring locked in the box in his apartment, he said, ‘How can I find the diary without his help?’

  Kristof said, ‘He mustn’t know.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘That’s the deal,’ said Kristof.

  ‘The threat, you mean.’ Flemyng added, ‘Kristof.’ His voice hadn’t altered, the tone was neutral, and the dark furrows made his face look longer. But the atmosphere between them changed with the one word.

  The German said, ‘Friends at last.’ He was drenched in relief.

  ‘I can hardly call you a friend when you’re blackmailing me.’

  Kristof was smiling, bright-eyed and alive, as if a light had been switched on. His emotions were on the move, fear and exhilaration struggling with each other, and Flemyng recognized a man on the edge.

  ‘But, Will, we’re talking and we’re together. This wouldn’t happen if we were enemies. All I am doing is saying that if you can’t get what I want, I may be destroyed.’