The Flowers of the Forest

by Joseph Hone

  *

  I thought how quick the police had been when I got back to the hotel – downhill all the way – half an hour later. Two plain-clothes men were in the lobby with Madeleine waiting for me. I was about to mention the battle in the forest but the smaller man, as if in a great hurry, got in first – a neat, precise little detective whose English was good enough, in an old-fashioned way, to suggest a senior position in the service.

  ‘Inspector Payenne,’ he said. ‘Welcome. But I must tell you that we have discovered suspicious circumstances in the death of your compatriot, Mr Parker.’

  ‘They think it wasn’t suicide at all,’ Madeleine put in wearily. ‘As you thought –’

  ‘Oh,’ Payenne interrupted, like a man trained in the old school. ‘You thought before it was not suicide, did you, Mr Marlow?’

  ‘I thought he wasn’t the kind to kill himself, that’s all,’ I said sharply. ‘What have you found?’

  ‘The post mortem shows few traces of alcohol in the system – and none at all of any barbiturates.’

  ‘The pills and whisky may have been a plant then?’

  ‘We think so.’

  ‘So what does the post mortem show?’

  ‘Heart failure. Perhaps.’

  ‘Is that enough to constitute “suspicious circumstances”?’

  ‘It may be. Your Embassy records show that Mr Parker had no history of any cardiac trouble.’

  ‘You’ve been in touch with them?’

  ‘Yes, with a Mr Huxley.’

  Of course, I thought, Huxley would have helped them, the soft-tongued conspirator finding a role at last – and it was then that I first suspected we were about to be framed. ‘Well, heart failure,’ I said. ‘What can one do? A tragedy.’

  ‘He may still have been poisoned or killed in some other way,’ Payenne said, holding up a neat, stubby finger like a cricket umpire. ‘Our laboratory is still considering that. And also one of your own Home Office pathologists who has come over. I must ask you all to remain here until we have completed the results.’

  ‘He thinks one of us killed him,’ Madeleine said, mockingly.

  ‘I did not say that, Madame Phillips –’

  ‘You think it, though.’

  ‘You were the last people to see him alive. Naturally … We must await our conclusions,’ Payenne added in his archaic English. Perhaps Kovačič had once taught him, I thought, after hours, in his language college down town. Certainly Inspector Payenne was pursuing a traditional line, straight out of Agatha Christie – with its talk of poisons, pathologists, post mortems and three equally suspect murderers. It was quite unreal. Yet it was just as I’d forecast: Willis’s death had a future in it now, a future in which, with Huxley’s connivance (and therefore also with Marcus’s) we were to be framed. Once more, I thought, Marcus had leant out over the channel to forestall our journey towards Lindsay.

  ‘For the moment I would like you all to keep yourselves in the hotel. I would be most obliged,’ Payenne said. And when he left I saw that at least one of his colleagues had remained behind, lurking now outside the big glass doors in the sunshine. What more severe incarceration would ensue, I wondered, when Payenne discovered the news in the forest – and learnt that I had been up there myself, on a racing bike, at the same time? He didn’t know this now, but the hall porter or the kitchen hand would be pleased to tell him. It was a good moment to leave – but how? And why should the two women agree?

  Rachel, who had been on the phone in her room, came downstairs just then in high good spirits. ‘I got through to Klaus – at last! He’s with the Bavarian State Orchestra on tour. They’re in Heidelberg now. Not far from here. But listen! He’s been trying to get in touch with us: someone approached him, in Munich yesterday, saying they know about Daddy – where he is, and would the family care to make a deal. Isn’t it extraordinary?’ She smiled hugely. I wished I could have made her so abundantly happy.

  ‘Who?’ I asked. ‘Who called him?’

  ‘Someone from the Free Croatia people, of course. Who else? The man said so. Klaus said for us to come on down to Heidelberg at once. They’re giving a concert tonight in the Castle. But he’ll be free afterwards and we can stay with him. He’s borrowed a house there.’

  ‘It won’t be so easy,’ Madeleine said. We explained the news about Willis. But Rachel laughed it off at once. ‘Well, we didn’t kill him. We were all in bed here.’ She looked at me briefly. ‘It’s ridiculous. Of course we can leave. We must!’

  ‘There’s someone outside the hotel door right now,’ I said. ‘And others inside probably. And anyway, if we did get out, they’d stop us at the border very easily. Remember, Heidelberg is in Germany.’

  ‘Excuse me butting in,’ a pleasant American voice said suddenly from nowhere. And then a man in a candy-striped summer suit stood up from behind a group of high-back chairs next to us. He came over to us, smiling, apologetic – a nice, old-fashioned American, I thought, not recognising him at once. ‘I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation. But I’m going down to that concert in Heidelberg myself this afternoon – I could take you with me. I don’t know if you remember me, Mr Marlow?’ He smiled across to me, his hand on the chair above Rachel. Of course, it was Pottinger. Art Pottinger – Professor Allcock’s American academic friend who had disappeared in front of my eyes so successfully a few weeks before opposite the British Museum. I introduced him. ‘Ah – Rachel Phillips,’ he said in a slow admiring way. ‘We spoke about you – Mr Marlow and I – when we last met. Are you playing over here, on tour? I’d love to hear –’

  ‘No. We’re looking for my father,’ she said abruptly.

  ‘Sit down, do,’ Madeleine said, by way of apology.

  The candy-striped linen suit had been pressed recently and Pottinger had become a well-groomed academic now – if that’s what he was at all. But I didn’t question his bona fides just then.

  ‘You seem to be in some trouble,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t help overhearing … you must forgive me. I’ve been over on the continent a few weeks – in Amsterdam with the Professor, and now I’m staying here. Sort of sabbatical tour – of the music festivals, among other things. I was going to take in this concert tonight in any case, then on to Salzburg. So if I can help …?’

  ‘What’s happened to Brian?’ Madeleine asked.

  ‘Oh, the Professor went on back to London, as far as I know. And I came on down here. I don’t want to interfere, but I have a car in the underground garage –’

  ‘So have we,’ Rachel said. ‘But we can’t use it.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Madeleine said. ‘We wouldn’t want to get you involved.’

  ‘Why not, Mummy?’

  ‘Rachel –’

  ‘No, no, that’s quite all right. I’d be very pleased to be of help. Your father, you say – he’s disappeared? The Professor didn’t mention it – but then I’m not that close a friend. And now they say you’ve murdered someone!’ Pottinger smiled slowly. ‘You don’t any of you look the type.’

  We explained the position to Pottinger then and I must say I saw no real reason not to trust him. He’d hardly have presented himself to us if he had been with the CIA or the KGB – and his whole attitude seemed so much more straightforward than anyone else’s I’d come across in the past few days. ‘What do you suggest?’ I said.

  ‘I suggest you come out with me – in my car. They won’t have their eye on that. And if they do spot us, well, I’ll just say you asked me for a lift uptown.’

  ‘And the border crossing?’ I asked. ‘They’ll check our passports there. They’ll be looking for us by then.’

  Pottinger smiled once more, with a lazy, archaic American confidence. ‘Oh, I know this part of the world pretty well. I did some research at the University of Louvain over here a few years back. There are half a dozen small roads – beyond to the east – where we can get over. No checkpoints. I did it quite often when I was here.’

  ‘But the whole thing – it’s ent
irely illegal,’ Madeleine said, perturbed.

  ‘Do they have a warrant to keep you under house arrest?’ Pottinger asked, leaning forward incisively, like a small-town attorney. He was a big, chumpy man, I noticed again now, something of the wrestler in him – apart from the face, which might have belonged to someone else altogether with its sharp-featured intelligence and mobility.

  ‘No. There was no warrant or anything.’

  ‘So it’s not illegal then. And if they catch us at the border – well, we’ll just say we strayed over. Lots of people do. It’s not an indictable offence, Mrs Phillips, leaving your hotel.’

  ‘But why take the risk on our behalf? No, we couldn’t.’

  It was a point that had crossed my mind too. But Pottinger smiled once more, a smile of genuine concern. ‘Mrs Phillips, any friend of the Professor’s – well, I needn’t say. Besides I was going to Heidelberg anyways, so why not help out? Listen, put a few things into some overnight bags after lunch, then take the lift down to the basement garage. I’ll be waiting for you. It couldn’t be simpler.’

  He stood up, beaming. He was an easy man to like.

  ‘What about the hotel bills?’ I asked. ‘They’ll have warned them about us.’

  Pottinger shrugged. ‘You’ll be coming back here. So just phone up and ask them to keep your rooms – after you get over the border: say you decided to take in this Heidelberg concert on the spur of the moment.’

  ‘Oh, Mummy, we really ought to get down there. Any way we can.’ Rachel was eager again, the spur of action gleaming in her face.

  Half an hour later we left our rooms. I shared a small holdall with Rachel, emptying the contents of my briefcase into it – a change of pants and socks, my Baedekers and Maria Von Karlinberg’s diary which I hadn’t yet read properly – and we took the lift down, one by one, to the underground garage without anyone noticing us. Pottinger was waiting for us like a chauffeur, in a hired Peugeot. By two o’clock we were out in the lovely afternoon, on the motorway, going eastwards towards Louvain.

  Pottinger drove easily, only one hand on the wheel, and we were free once more, gliding across the flat green countryside with its geometric fields and small white farms and distant church spires, spread out around us as neatly as a picture in a child’s book: free of Huxley and Payenne – and the little holocaust in the forest, which I hadn’t mentioned. But, of course, I should have remembered it. There was a queue of cars at a road block some miles outside the city and we were trapped in it before we could turn back.

  ‘Stay calm. They can’t have gotten all this show together, in so short a time, just for you people. It has to be for something else.’ Pottinger was admirable, taking off his linen jacket casually as we waited in the burning heat.

  We showed our passports, they checked the boot. ‘Just tourists, going to see Louvain,’ Pottinger said in response to the enquiry. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Rien. Rien de tout,’ the patrolman said, waving us through. But there was a radio in the car and Pottinger turned it on. ‘That’s a full-scale alert,’ he said. ‘Something big has happened.’ Then I told them what had happened – that morning, in the forest. I could hardly do otherwise. And ten minutes afterwards a news bulletin confirmed it. What I didn’t know was that it was Radovič, the exiled Croatian army officer, the man I’d gone to see, who had been the principal victim in the killings.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I should have told you.’

  Pottinger turned to me, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘And you were on a racing bike too?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. But I didn’t kill him. I borrowed it from one of the hotel staff.’

  ‘No. I shouldn’t think you did kill him. I know something of the background to this Croat business. That man Radovič. The SB – Tito’s secret police – they’ve been gunning for him for years. He’s the top man of one of those exiled Croat groups.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s why I was trying to see him –’

  ‘We didn’t tell you,’ Madeleine interrupted from the back. ‘It’s one of these Croatian terrorist groups who’ve taken Lindsay. We’ve had letters from him, one from Munich, in fact. The “Free” something or other.’

  ‘Free Croatia – “Hrvatska Slobodna”?’ Pottinger asked, turning off the motorway now, against an exit sign for Louvain.

  ‘Yes – those are the people.’

  ‘I see.’ Pottinger nodded his head carefully. ‘I see how it is,’ he said, as if he’d found the answer to a lifetime’s search. ‘Well, that does make it all a little more difficult. But tell me, your husband, Mrs Phillips, you say he was in the British Foreign Office, and that you’ve had these letters from him for some time: well, are you looking for him entirely on your own? Surely your own people – at the Embassy or your intelligence services – aren’t they helping you?’

  Pottinger looked straight ahead, concentrating on the road.

  ‘I’m afraid … we’ve not had a lot of help from them,’ Madeleine said.

  ‘None at all. They’re trying to stop us, if anything,’ Rachel added. ‘I’m pretty sure they’re trying to frame us – with our friend’s death. It’s all crazy. They don’t want to be involved.’

  ‘But why? Your father had an important position –’

  ‘They say they can’t deal with these Croat terrorists; it would upset Tito,’ Madeleine said shortly. ‘That’s more important than all my husband’s work.’

  ‘I see. It’s a bad business –’

  Madeleine leant forward. ‘Why don’t we go back? We can go back,’ she said apologetically. ‘Just see Louvain and go back. Wouldn’t that be best?’

  ‘If someone saw you – or knows you were on that racing machine, Mr Marlow – going back would be out of the frying pan, into the fire. On, on I’d say: never apologise, never explain.’

  Pottinger enjoyed his idioms, I noticed, like someone who’d just learned a language, and I was tempted once more to try and confirm his bona fides. ‘It’s a pity we haven’t got time to see Louvain,’ I said. ‘Were you there long?’

  ‘Just a semester. There,’ he said, pointing to a spire on the horizon, sticking up beyond some dull suburbs. We were taking a ring road round the town. ‘That spire, that’s the Louvain University Library, the one the Germans burnt down in World War One. But the town hall is more interesting – finest example of late Gothic in Belgium. If you like that sort of thing. Personally I found the whole place rather … provincial.’

  ‘What were you researching? I thought you specialised in Soviet studies. I saw that typescript of yours in the Professor’s rooms.’

  ‘A paper on the history of the reformed church in the east – in Prussia. That’s East Germany now: Louvain has the best collection of books on that topic in Europe.’

  ‘The reformed church? Surely Louvain is a Catholic foundation?’

  ‘Indeed. But they keep all the texts on their enemies, Mr Marlow. Complete files, you might say.’ He smiled easily. ‘And what do you do?’ he asked, neatly turning the tables.

  ‘Oh, I write histories too,’ I said. ‘About Egypt. I was a teacher there years ago.’

  Pottinger nodded politely. ‘Were you? That must have been quite something. Do I know your books – under your own name?’

  ‘No. I’m afraid they’ve not been published yet.’

  After Louvain we took a secondary road for Hasselt and then Maastricht, a small town near the German border. From the map it seemed we were going too far north conveniently to hit the Cologne-Heidelberg autobahn. But Pottinger obviously knew his way.

  ‘What sort of road are you going across on?’ I asked. ‘A track? I thought the Germans were very efficient – checkpoints everywhere.’

  ‘There are tracks. But even better, there’s a few miles of old turnpike – a motorway they never completed. It’s not used. Leads right up to the German border, between Visé and Eisden. Stops at a farm this side. There’s a track across from there on. It’ll be as hard as rock in this heat.
I’ve used it before.’

  ‘You make a habit of illegal entry and exit?’ I smiled. Again, as outside the British Museum, I sensed a too clever will-o’-the-wisp in Pottinger, a man who could appear and disappear with a skill that was more than academic.

  ‘No,’ he said deprecatingly. ‘I just used it once, to see what would happen. Hell, it’s all one Europe now anyway. Same as state lines. What’s the odds?’ He spoke like a cowboy from the new world, about to rustle a few cattle.

  The land rose gradually as we neared the border – turning south now through Tongres – and afterwards a few hills began to appear, at last a break in the long flat land. But by the time we got to Visé the countryside had sloped again; it was rougher now, marshy in places.

  ‘Here’s the river Meuse,’ Pottinger said, as we crossed over the wide expanse of water before passing through the small market town of Visé. ‘The old motorway is next. It’s as swampy as hell round here – floods in the winter. That’s why they never completed it.’

  Beyond Visé we turned north again and now there were rows of pine trees on either side of us, small plantations running up the side of the valley. The sun was behind us, slanting a little and shadowed here and there by the greenery. But it was still hot and we’d been travelling for more than two hours.

  ‘I could do with a break,’ Rachel said.

  ‘So could I. But I don’t know if it’s the right moment.’ Pottinger was looking up into the rear mirror now. There was a car following us, a good way behind. But it was there: on this isolated, empty road. We turned a corner and the trees hid us. Pottinger increased speed and by the time we saw the car again it was a long way behind.

  ‘Nothing. Just some farmer.’ Pottinger shrugged.

  ‘If they were following us – they don’t have to go fast,’ I said. ‘There doesn’t seem to be any turn off this road till we get to Bereneau.’