House of the Hanged (11 page)

‘Who is Andrey Vazov?'

Tom had evidently been done to a turn by the barman, who must have picked up the phone to the authorities the moment he'd left the bar.

How well do you know this Andrey Vazov? Are you sure he's Bulgarian? What does he look like? When did he tell you about Borgotaro? How long did he spend here? When exactly was he here? Where does he live now? How can we contact him?

They were good, never aggressive, just patient and persistent, repeating their questions every so often, wearing him down, fishing for inconsistencies. Tom stuck to his line, covering himself with the lie that he had met Andrey at a dinner party in Paris thrown by a mutual friend. If they wished to speak to Andrey, they would first need to get hold of Régis Arcady. This, Tom knew, would prove impossible. Regis, an interior decorator to the wealthy, always wintered in Tangiers.

Towards the end of his second day in custody, a third man suddenly appeared. Tom was well acquainted with the tactic – an excuse for them to begin the process all over again. By now, though, he was so immersed in the role that he almost believed his own stories. He had stopped by Borgotaro because it was just down round the road from Parma, and he had been travelling to Parma to research his next book – a history of the twelfth-century Norman kingdom of Sicily.

‘Parma's a long way from Sicily.'

‘The Norman knights rode to Sicily on horseback. Certain accounts suggest that they passed through Parma en route.'

‘Your Italian is very good. Why is that?'

‘I studied languages at university.'

‘Oxford University?'

‘Yes, like I said before.'

‘Remind me, when did you study there?'

On and on it went, over and over. They didn't deprive him of sleep, though, and he was well fed, eating in the cold, bare canteen where the Carabinieri took their meals.

He was released just before noon on the third day. There were no apologies.

‘Enjoy your time in Parma.'

‘You think I'm going to Parma after this?'

‘I can recommend an excellent hotel just off Piazza del Duomo.'

‘I'm going straight home, and the first thing I'm going to do is register a formal complaint with the British authorities.'

‘While you're at it you might want to contact the International League of Human Rights. I believe they're based in Paris.'

That, in many ways, had been the most revealing thing about the experience: their absolute belief in their ability to behave as they had. The State allowed them to act as they saw fit, and they had complete confidence in the power of that State to protect them.

It had been a chilling insight into the workings of Fascism.

* * *

‘Ah, Marseilles,' drawled Leonard.

‘In case you've forgotten, I was arrested and interrogated.'

‘I didn't ask you to go to Italy. You went at your own initiative.'

‘I'm not blaming you, Leonard, I'm just saying that they know who I am, where I live. And I'm pretty damned sure they know what I was doing there.'

‘That doesn't mean they want you dead.'

‘What about the upcoming trial?'

A trial date had been set for later that year in Aix-en-Provence, at which three members of the Croatian Ustasha were going to have to answer for their involvement in the assassination of King Alexander. ‘You think Mussolini wants it coming out that he's been harbouring the group responsible?'

‘I know he doesn't,' replied Leonard. ‘And it's not going to happen. The Hungarians are going to get the blame.'

Tom took a moment to digest this statement. ‘The Hungarians . . .?'

‘The Ustasha also had a camp in Hungary.'

‘How convenient. So Mussolini is exonerated.'

‘Come on, Tom, you know how these things work. We need Mussolini on side right now.'

‘Whatever the cost?'

‘He wasn't behind the assassination. He was a fool to welcome the Croatians into Italy, but he sees that now.' Leonard paused. ‘Look, Barthou was nudging him towards a new southern pact – France, Italy and Yugoslavia – a sort of Mediterranean Locarno. We're trying our damnedest to keep the thing alive.'

‘And what does
Il Duce
want in return?'

‘A guarantee that Hitler won't get his hands on Austria.'

‘Is that all? It doesn't sound like much of a sweetener.'

Leonard hesitated. ‘He also wants Abyssinia.'

It was the talking point of the moment – Italy's designs on the East African nation. All the other Great Powers had their kingdoms in the sun, and like some jealous schoolboy Mussolini wanted one too.

‘You're going to let him have it, aren't you?'

‘I'm not sure we could stop him, even if we wanted to.'

‘It's not yours to give.'

‘When did you become so bloody holier than thou?' retorted Leonard.

‘You're building a monster, you know that, don't you?'

‘No, Tom, we're doing our best to contain one. The greatest threat to the world order right now is Adolf Hitler. Have you read
Mein Kampf
? That man's territorial ambitions are laid out plain as day. They're as real as the rock we're sitting on.'

Leonard slapped his palm against the stone for effect.

‘Oh, he's changed his tune – he's had to – but Barthou wasn't fooled by him, and Barthou was right: boxing him in is the only way.'

Tom stared at his friend. Maybe Leonard was right about Hitler. Maybe empowering Mussolini would bring the Italians into the fold. But Tom's thoughts lay elsewhere. He had never heard Leonard speak in such terms before; he had never seen him so exercised. The cold pragmatism of his words and the fire in his eyes made for an unsettling cocktail.

‘Aren't you worried I'll blow the whistle?' Tom asked.

‘You'd never do that.'

‘Not if that fellow out there had had his way last night.' He nodded towards the islands.

The insinuation wasn't lost on Leonard. ‘How dare you!? We would never . . .' He trailed off, not lost for words, but because they both knew that the British government was not above sacrificing its own for the greater good. ‘You couldn't be more wrong.'

‘So who, then?' Tom demanded. ‘Who the hell wants me dead?'

‘A cuckolded husband, for all I know.'

It sounded facetious, but it was said in a spirit of conciliation.

Tom heaved an apologetic sigh. ‘That's about the one area where I'm entirely innocent.'

‘Well, let's run through the others and see what we turn up, shall we?'

It was a disagreeable prospect, dredging up past misdeeds long since overlaid if not forgotten.

‘After lunch, while the ladies are napping,' said Tom, glancing across the bay towards the cove. ‘They'll be wondering where we are.'

They clambered down off the rock and eased into the limpid water.

‘You should know . . . Lucy saw me last night down at the cove.'

‘What!? How?'

‘Bad luck. She couldn't sleep. Don't worry, she assumed I was dealing with Hector, and I obviously didn't say anything to disabuse her. I told her I thought he'd died from eating rat poison.'

‘Poor old Hector,' said Leonard distractedly, pushing off, out into the bay.

Lucy hurried along the pathway, aware that she was late.

She was always running late. Even when she had time enough in hand, she would inevitably squander it until she found herself bicycling like fury across town, bustling breathless into crowded lecture halls and tutors' rooms, forever mumbling excuses to friends in pubs and cinema foyers. It infuriated Mother, who was a stickler for punctuality and who ascribed her tardiness to youthful affectation, which it wasn't. Tom didn't seem to care too much. In fact, he had once said she was at her most beautiful when flustered.

As she climbed towards the villa the welcome shade fell away and she felt the sudden sting of the sun against her skin. She had overdone it on the first day, as she did every year. She should have avoided the cove after lunch. Everyone else had resisted, but she had wanted to take the
Albatross
out again and now she was paying the price. Her bare arms and legs flamed in protest against the white of her tennis outfit.

She arrived to find Tom deadheading petunias on the terrace, making the rounds of the pots spread along the balustrade.

‘Sorry I'm late.'

‘By your usual standards this is positively early,' he smiled, pinching off a few more spent blooms.

‘That looks like fun.'

‘You just wait. Gardening makes considerably more sense when you're older.'

‘As does a team of gardeners, I imagine.'

‘There are only two of them,' came his indignant reply. ‘And besides, they spend most of their time arguing.'

Fernand and Alphonse were two bull-necked brothers from Le Canadel whom Tom had inherited with the house. They'd given him little choice in the matter, simply turning up and setting themselves to work one day as if nothing had happened. They were always quarrelling and Tom had dubbed them Cain and Abel, convinced that it was only a matter of time before one of them dispatched the other with a shovel.

‘I don't know why you don't replace them,' said Lucy.

‘I do – fear.'

‘Fear?'

‘Would
you
want them as enemies?'

‘I'm not sure I'd want them as friends.'

‘Well, there's no danger of that, not since Paulette let slip my nicknames for them the other day.'

‘She didn't? Oh dear.'

‘Actually, I think they were rather amused by it,' said Tom. ‘Although they're still bickering over which one of them is Cain and which is Abel.'

Lucy laughed.

‘Lemonade?' A jug and two glasses stood on the table beside a couple of tennis racquets. ‘Paulette made it especially for you.'

‘Do we have time?'

‘A quick glass. We need to talk tactics. Yevgeny and Walter make quite a formidable pairing.'

While he poured she filched two of his cigarettes, lit them both and handed him one. It was an intimate gesture – not one she would have permitted herself with any other man. He didn't appear to notice, though, wordlessly placing the cigarette between his lips and raising his glass.

‘Tinkety Tonk.'

‘To victory.'

They clinked.

‘I hope your backhand's improved since last year.'

‘Oh, a lot,' she replied. ‘It's almost as bad as your serve now.'

He laughed.

She liked it when she made him laugh. He had put over so much of his time down the years to amusing her that it always felt good to return the favour. She could clearly recall the first occasion when she had set off his deep laugh, the real laugh, not the indulgent godfatherly chuckle she'd grown accustomed to. It had been just before her fourteenth birthday – a terrible age for any child, that cruel and uncertain limbo before adulthood, but worse, far worse, she suspected, for girls than for boys. George and Harry had embraced it as a necessary rite of passage which couldn't come too soon. The body hair, the deepening voice, the extra inches of height, even the pustules, all were badges of honour to be worn with pride at school. The taller, the hairier, the more malodorous the better, it seemed.

Not so for her. She had been quite happy with the way things were. She had no desire for breasts, and yet they had sprouted on her chest like two malignant growths, declaring themselves to the world, demanding to be seen, entitling people whom one hardly knew to remark upon them as casually as they might point out a pair of swans on the Serpentine. The sheer embarrassment of that first fitting for a brassiere at the little shop in Knightsbridge where the staff could judge your requirements at a glance . . . the favourite shoes and cherished items of clothing, still with plenty of life in them, which had to be discarded as one's bones stretched out at an alarming rate . . . the face of a stranger in the bathroom mirror every morning, distorted, misshapen. No, for her it had been a catalogue of sheer misery, even discounting the monthly cramps and the blood.

By the time of her fourteenth birthday, everything was in place, but somehow none of the parts belonged to her. She felt as if she had been hastily assembled by some mad inventor. This was the rough and gawky creature who had greeted Tom at the door of their house, who had barely been able to look him in the eye, who had dreaded the prospect of spending the day out and about with him for fear of the embarrassment she would inevitably cause him. To make matters worse, he had just returned from a posting in Athens, lean and tanned and immaculately turned out in a cream linen suit, his blond hair bleached whiter than she had ever seen it by the sun.

He hadn't mentioned the swans on the Serpentine, although he must have felt them pressing against him when he took her in his arms and kissed her oily forehead. Maybe he had also sensed her hesitation about venturing forth, because he had swept her off without further ado, bundling her into his motor car before she could resist.

Her days out with Tom had always been shrouded in mystery; she never knew what lay in store. This one was no different, except that it had soon become apparent that there were to be no boat trips along the Thames, no visits to London Zoo or Madame Tussauds wax museum, no lavish meals at Quaglino's. Only when they had cleared the city limits and were well on the road to Henley had he announced that they were headed for Oxford.

She remembered it as a faultless day: the cloudless skies and the warm, liquid breeze; the young green of the rampant hedgerows as they motored through the Chiltern hills before dropping down into the Vale of Oxford; the lazy stroll through the University colleges scattered about the city centre; the gobbets of history and the tales of Tom's wild escapades during his time as an undergraduate. They lunched in the shade of a weeping ash at a riverside pub, and afterwards he taught her how to punt. Teetering on her stilt-thin legs at the back of the boat, she gripped the pole and wrestled them up the Cherwell on a zigzag course.

All this, though, was only a distraction to throw her off the scent, a prelude to the big surprise. They were maybe fifteen minutes from Oxford, back on the road again and supposedly heading for home, when he sprung it on her.

The airfield consisted of little more than a rough grass landing strip and a scattering of low huts on the outskirts of a honey-stoned hamlet. Apparently, the airfield had been developed since the Great War, which made you wonder what it must have looked like before. Maybe the limp windsock had been a different colour back then; maybe there had once been two tatty aeroplanes standing around instead of the four now on show. And if she had known that Tom was lying, that he wasn't simply dropping in on an old friend in the Royal Air Force, she would have insisted that they turn the car around and hightail it immediately.

By the time she realized that they were to take to the air, it was too late; an oil-smeared mechanic was shoving some overalls into her hands and waiting for her with a leather helmet, gloves, and some goggles. Tom did his best to reassure her: he'd accumulated many hours of solo flying time while in Greece, and the biplane they were going up in was a notoriously reliable beast. In fact, the first solo flight from England to Australia had been achieved earlier that year in an Avro Avian.

‘Don't worry, she won't let us down.'

‘He's right, miss,' quipped the mechanic. ‘She'll take you right along with 'er if she goes.'

The moment the tyres left the turf her fear vanished, washed clean away by a sudden flood of exhilaration. She was flying! Flying!

They soared and swooped about the heavens for almost an hour, Oxfordshire laid out beneath them like a map, its shallow contours thrown into relief by the westering sun. Every so often Tom would turn and grin at her and give her a thumbs-up, or he would point out some landmark far below, banking the aircraft to give her a better view. On a few occasions they flew so low that she was able to track their hedge-hopping shadow and return the waves of the Lilliputians on the ground.

Eventually, they bumped back to earth, and the eerie silence once the motor had been cut seemed to reinforce her sense of forlornness at returning to the real world.

‘Is it a secret?' she asked as they drove off from the airfield. Somehow she couldn't imagine Mother sanctioning such a thing.

‘I told Leonard.'

‘I understand. Mum's the word.'

He had laughed, but the real laugh came a little while later, when they stopped in Thame for dinner on their way back to London. Tom had warned her that the proprietor of the Spread Eagle Hotel was an eccentric character, downright difficult at times, and John Fothergill didn't disappoint. He spent the first five minutes at their table railing against the Royal Automobile Club, which he held unreservedly to blame for the endless procession of motorists looking to use his lavatories for free, and the next five minutes bemoaning the state of British politics. The country needed a leader of Lloyd George's stature and dynamism. Better a randy old Welsh goat than a spineless pencil-pusher like Baldwin.

Lucy, still abuzz with the thrill of her time aloft, piped up that she'd heard a funny story about Lloyd George, instantly regretting the use of the word ‘funny' as Fothergill turned his quelling gaze on her. Mumbling a feeble disclaimer that she only had it second-hand from her stepfather, she launched in.

Some years ago, when he was Prime Minister, Lloyd George was driving back late one night from his home in Wales when his car broke down near Epsom. Finding himself right outside Horton Asylum for the Insane, he roused the porter, who demanded to know who was beating on his door at such an ungodly hour. ‘I'm the Prime Minister,' Lloyd George announced. ‘Oh, that's all right,' replied the porter. ‘Come on in. We've got eight of you here already.'

Fothergill exploded, baring his long yellow teeth like a chimpanzee, and Tom nearly matched him for the loudness of his laugh. The other diners stopped and stared, mainly in bewilderment, Lucy later learned, because the curmudgeonly old innkeeper had rarely been known to crack a smile, let alone sound a laugh.

For a child who had spent her life silently observing the performance of adults, it had been a significant moment, a thrilling step from the shadowy stalls into the bright lights of the stage. Yes, she had gone on to make mistakes, tempted above herself into youthful errors of judgement which still made her blush with shame when she thought back on them, but Tom had always been there, a quiet presence at her side, leading her through the painful metamorphosis into adulthood. Despite the sporadic nature of their friendship, no one had helped her more than he had, showering her with unconditional support and affection over the years.

Would she ever have summoned the courage to go against Mother's wishes and apply for a place at St Hugh's if it hadn't been for Tom's unswerving (and sweetly misguided) faith in her intellectual abilities? It seemed unlikely. So much of who she was, of what she had become, she owed to him. Maybe she had always known it in her bones, but she was of an age now when she could admit it to herself, acknowledge the debt. In fact, she had determined to do just that on this holiday, to tell Tom for once what he really meant to her.

He, of course, would attempt to silence her with some wise-cracking comment – that was his way – but she intended to persevere and tell him just the same. She would have done it yesterday if she hadn't broken down in hopeless floods of tears on hearing that the
Albatross
was hers. And she thought about doing it now, as they strolled together up the twisting lane from the villa to the tennis courts.

It was the wrong moment, though. Tom seemed strangely tense, distracted, his eyes darting around them while they walked and talked.

It didn't matter. She could wait. There would be other opportunities.

The grandly named Club de Tennis boasted three tennis courts, a croquet lawn, a
piste de boules
and a small tea pavilion. Hacked out of the slope just beneath the Maurin des Maures, the main bar in the village, the club was a relic of a dead dream to turn Le Rayol into an exclusive holiday resort for the wealthy. Had the property company behind the scheme not gone bust after the Crash of 1929, the slopes around the bay would now be blanketed with hotels and public parks and endless kilometres of tree-lined avenues wide enough to take motor cars two-abreast, the whole thing topped off by a reconstructed Provençal village.

As it was, all that remained of this ghastly prospect was the Hôtel de la Réserve down on the beach, a wooden pergola up in the village, a monumental stone staircase splashed with flower beds, and a tennis club where one never had any trouble getting a court.

Yevgeny was already there, trading shots on the lower court with a tall and tousle-headed young man who was standing at the net, calmly volleying away.

Puzzled, Lucy turned to Tom. ‘Where's Walter?'

‘That's Walter.'

‘What happened to short, fat and balding?' she hissed. ‘Must be the Mediterranean air,' grinned Tom. ‘How does he compare to Hugo Atkinson?'