Dunster (16 page)

‘I'm an accountant. Not the programme controller.'

‘I know but you have the ear of the bloody management. And you can tell Jaunty was gripping my arm now. I could feel the surprising strength of his old fingers. ‘You can tell my present son-in-law, tell your successor...'

‘I haven't got his ear. I haven't got any part of him.'

‘He'll listen to you. No bloody good my talking to him. Tell him he's just asking for it, that's all.'

‘Asking for what?'

‘Disaster. For himself. For the whole family. You'll put a stop to it, won't you?'

‘I can't promise anything.'

‘You'll do it, won't you? You'll do it for Beth?' He leant back in his chair then, less rattled, sure of his ground. ‘After all, you owe me something.'

‘Do I?'

‘Have you forgotten? Who found you your job? All those years ago. I had this connection at Megapolis.'

‘Yes, of course. So you did. I was very grateful.'

The Major finished his brandy and his eyes seemed to film over, as though he'd lost interest in the entire subject. The ex-superintendent, or whoever he might have been, had left his table and was at the bar chatting to Tina. He had an impressive head, like the damaged bust of a Roman emperor, with a nose that had been broken at some time in his career and iron-grey hair as a fringe to his naked scalp. He looked in our direction, as though curious about what we were doing together. A few other couples had arrived and music for dancing came unsteadily out of a speaker in a corner of the room, like warm water dripping from a rusty tap.

‘Look here,' the Major said. ‘If you've got something else on, I really don't want to keep you.'

‘I must get back.' I wanted to go to sleep and try, for a night at least, to forget everything he had told me.

‘Sure you don't want to stay? That young Tracy behind the bar looks as though she might be friendly.'

‘No, really. Got to work tomorrow.'

As I left the Dandini club, a middle-aged couple, looking at each other hungrily, were bopping to a crackling tape playing, in the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight.' I saw the Major get up and leave our table, and I thought he was about to join the man who had been eyeing us from the bar.

After this meal certain conclusions were. I'm sure you would agree, obvious. Jaunty, in his cups, had hinted at some discreditable incident in the Apennines. Dunster had received this information eagerly, researched it further, touched it up a little and was about to produce a story in which Beth's father – a man who, for reasons best known to herself, she loved – was to be accused of a war crime, heaven knew how serious, during the Italian campaign in 1944. Cris wanted me to join that sartorial enthusiast Peregrine Gryce in an effort to control Dunster, an activity which required the hopeless optimism of King Canute giving orders to the tide.

I had woken early and lay waiting for the grey start of the day. Then I decided to drive to work before the traffic, but at half past six the container lorries were already rattling down to the Angel and queuing where the road was up. From the car radio I learnt that the oil wells were flaming in Kuwait and that half-starved Iraqi conscripts were surrendering. Soon the war would be over and quite soon forgotten. Nothing would be left but the choking clouds, the burnt-out and twisted buildings – and the uncomfortable revelation that those we fought for hadn't been much better than the enemy. When Natasha was my age it would be a part of history, the names of generals and places and participants buried, as were the details of the Italian campaign, in a few books which not many people read. There would be other fears, different sufferings, to fill the
Today
programme. As I was driving, I was thinking about Beth, wondering whether she knew about Dunster's script and if there were any way of preventing the Jaunty story being beamed into ten million homes.

I got to Megapolis far too early and had breakfast in the canteen among the security men and a few people who'd come in for the early chat show. And then I waited for Cris to come in and tell me, I hoped, exactly what I ought to do.

‘Jaunty Blair!'

I was sitting in the conversational part of Cris's office and he was standing looking out over the river, showing me his back in its white shirt and crossed braces.

‘As a matter of fact he used to be my father-in-law.'

‘I know,' was what I thought Cris said, and I was puzzled because I'd never told him. And then he turned slowly with the sun behind him making a silvery halo on his head, his face in shadow. ‘He told me when you and Beth got married.'

‘How long have you known him?'

‘Since 1942. He arrived in Egypt with the yeomanry. One of the new boys. I was sent back from my regiment to give them some basic training in tank warfare. That's when I first met young Second Lieutenant Jonathan, usually known as Jaunty, Blair.'

‘Young?'

‘Four years younger than me.' It was hard to believe. Cris was straight-backed, hardly lined. Jaunty's face was etched like a map of Spaghetti Junction, his hands peppered with those brown marks which are said to be signs of approaching death.

‘Of course, I didn't really get to know him then. I was a desert rat who went over to the Special Air Service regiment. Jaunty had the best of the war in Egypt. We were actually winning in his time there. But he got trapped in a burning tank. Lucky to get out alive. After that he said he had a sort of horror of closed spaces. So he was keen to get into the SAS. Fresh mountain air, that's what he said he was after. No more being cooked in a tin oven in the desert.'

‘You were up there, in the Apennines together?'

‘Some of the time. Only some of the time. The situation was pretty fluid, if you understand me. But, yes. I suppose that's where we got to know each other a little better.'

I had got up early and the sofa was too comfortable. My eyelids were heavy during his account of an ancient campaign, but now I was awake to a situation that seemed inexplicable.

‘You met Beth. Often. We came to stay with you. When we were together.'

‘Which is why I understand, I think, exactly what you felt about her.' His smile was gentle, as always. He moved then, to sit near me.

‘She never said you knew her father.'

‘Perhaps' – Cris carefully straightened the trade magazines and the heavy marble ashtray on the glass-topped table between us – ‘her father never told her about me.'

‘And you never told her you knew Jaunty.'

Cris was still smiling, which encouraged me in my unusual role as a cross-examiner.

‘No point in opening up old wounds. The truth of the matter is, Jaunty and I never got on particularly well together.'

‘I can understand that.'

‘We parted on pretty bad terms, as it happens. Let's say we didn't see eye to eye on the way wars should be fought. That is, if you have to fight them. Then he wrote to me. Out of the blue. It was rather a pleasant letter. He said we'd been through some hard times together and had our differences in the past. Well. That was putting it mildly. But his daughter was marrying a young economist, a man with a terrific head for figures who'd played the part of Hamlet at Oxford.'

‘Jaunty wrote to
you!
I mean, I know he wrote to someone at Megapolis. I imagined it was someone in accounts. But when I asked Gary Penrose about it he was a bit vague. Said whoever it was must have left.'

‘I suppose it was such a curious idea.' Cris looked up at me again. ‘The Hamlet of the balance sheets! I found it irresistible. Or did I admire Jaunty's cheek, asking me for a favour? I told Gary to get you in for an interview.'

So I had been Cris's choice from the start, because of what I'd done before he met me. I said, ‘There's something I should have told
you
, long ago. I suppose it's just that, well, since Beth and I broke up I don't like talking about him.'

‘Just as I don't like discussing Major Jaunty Blair.' He gave the military rank a mocking emphasis.

‘I suppose,' I said, ‘something like that."

Cris lay back in his chair, his legs crossed, his hands clasped across his stomach. ‘You're talking about Dunster, of course.'

‘You know?'

‘Naturally. When he was doing this job. I made a few inquiries.'

I suppose I should have expected Cris to know everything. ‘I really can't explain why I didn't tell you that Beth left me for Dunster. I should've told you as soon as you said he'd written the scripts.'

‘Don't worry. I can understand exactly why you didn't.'

‘And now,' I said, ‘Dunster's found out what Jaunty got up to in the war.'

‘Is that what you think?'

‘That's what I know.'

‘Tell me.'

Cris moved again and sat in a more official position behind his desk and I gave him a condensed account of dinner with my ex-father-in-law at Dandini's. This was followed by a silence. Then he asked me, ‘Do you think Jaunty's frightened of being exposed?'

‘Don't you?'

‘I suppose it's likely.'

‘And you must know what it's all about.'

‘I've got an idea or two. I'm not sure until I know what Dunster's written.'

‘But it could be very bad for Jaunty?'

‘What I can't understand is, now Dunster's married your Beth' – Cris frowned – ‘why the hell should he want to call her father a criminal?'

‘If you knew Dunster, you wouldn't wonder about that. He has a habit of telling unpleasant truths about his nearest and dearest. It makes him feel heroic.'

‘An odd sort of character.'

‘Unusual. Yes. I think you might say that Peregrine Gryce asked me to be an associate producer on
War Crimes.
He wanted me to check Dunster's sources. That was your idea, wasn't it?'

‘I can see we should never have asked you.'

‘Why?'

‘It was too much to expect.'

‘I might want to stop him doing any more harm. To the company. And to Beth.'

‘Do you think you'd have any sort of influence over him?'

‘I might do something. If I spoke to both of them.'

He looked up at me. ‘You're still concerned about Beth, aren't you?'

‘And always will be.'

So I moved from accounts on to the production side. I was now in the world of make-believe – or drama that was telling the truth. I would have to discover which when I became associate producer on the
War Crimes
series.

‘I'm afraid Perry's not here.'

‘Shopping?'

‘On a recce for a new series of
Neighbourhood Watch. Crimes
isn't the only thing we're doing at Streetwise, you know.' The tall and determined woman was Pippa Marching, Peregrine Gryce's PA, who looked as though she'd been the captain of cricket at Cheltenham Ladies' College and no doubt served Peregrine with undying loyalty. She had been trying to put me in my place ever since I told her I was the new associate producer

‘You mean, you're the chap Megapolis put in to keep an eye on us? We just don't know what they're in such a panic about Perry's last six productions came in way under budget.'

‘It's not the money I'm concerned with,' I said. ‘It's the artistic quality.' At which she gave me the sort of look the man who comes to read the meter might get if he'd suddenly offered to do an audition for Musician of the Year.

‘I'd like to start by going through the files.'

‘I suppose you can,' she conceded, after a long moment of doubt. ‘But don't get them in a muddle, will you? Perry's very particular about his files.'

The offices of Streetwise Productions looked like an extension of the Malibu Club next door; the same white walls and chromium, the same cream sofas and blown-up stills and prints by American photo-realists. Peregrine Gryce's certificates of nomination for various awards were framed in gold. Pippa Marching banged me up in a small room with an interesting view of the dustbins outside the Malibu kitchens. Then she left me alone to discover exactly what Dunster was planning to do to Jaunty Blair.

The files had been divided into various countries. Some of them contained scripts I had read in Cris's country house, their second or third drafts, long research notes and treatments. The slimmest was the BRITISH IN ITALY, with most of the work apparently still to be done. I sat looking at the cover of it for a while, listening to the traffic and the kitchen noises, breathing in a faint smell of left-over monkfish and decaying vegetables. But the telephone didn't ring, no one brought me a coffee, and so I had nothing to do but open the brown folder.

The first thing I found was a large-scale map of the territory between Florence and Bologna, with a place called Pomeriggio ringed in felt-tipped pen somewhere in the brown-shaded part of a mountain range. Then there were photographs: the main street and square of a small town, and a rough path leading precipitously up to what seemed to be a pile of rubble on a promontory perched high over a valley. There were also five pages of the chronology of the Italian campaign from 1943 to 1945, and no more than a page of somewhat inaccurate and much corrected typing. BRITISH WAR CRIMINALS? was the heading, and I felt grateful, at least, for the question mark which didn't seem entirely characteristic of Dunster.

‘Victorious armies never commit war crimes, because if they're victorious no one dare call them criminals.' The thought had been Cris's, but the words were Dunster's:

But what exactly happened in the town of Pomeriggio in the High Apennines on that long-ago Sunday in the autumn of 1944? It was the Feast of Santa Magdalena in Lachrimae, the village's patron saint, traditionally celebrated in the Chiesa Nuova, which was strange as it may seem, the older of the two churches, built in the fourteenth century on the edge of a precipice just above the village and only used on one day a year. Certain facts can be established. A German SS officer had been found garrotted in a field outside the village walls just before the massacre of Pomeriggio. On the saint's day, the whole village processed, in the evening, up to the Chiesa Nuova carrying banners, candles, the saint's statue and her Holy Relic – a fragment of her little finger in the Reliquary. Half-way through the service the church was dynamited, presumably with a timing device. The building was reduced to rubble and Pomeriggio to a ghost town, the incident has passed into history as yet another German outrage, a savage reprisal for the murder of one SS officer.