House of the Hanged (17 page)

‘Nudists?'

‘A whole community of them. You can't see it from here, it's round the corner at the western end of the Île du Levant there.' She pointed into the far distance. ‘They even have their own beach.'

‘Hang it,' said Walter. ‘Let's go join the other boats drifting slowly by just offshore.'

It was the first time since their arrival that Ilse and Klaus had entertained, and they outdid themselves, laying on an impressive feast for lunch, which was served at a long table in the shade of a towering holm oak near the foot of the garden.

Tom made his excuses the moment the main course plates were cleared, claiming that Benoît had a batch of papers requiring his urgent signature, legal documents relating to the upcoming purchase of the ‘art nouveau eyesore'.

‘As long as you're back in time to mix the potions before supper,' said Venetia.

It was good to hear her make a jest. She'd spent much of the meal fretting about Lucy and Walter, convinced that they must have drowned. ‘It's just not like her to go off like that.'

‘Well, it's just like Walter,' Fanya had reassured her.

The house in Le Canadel where Klaus and Ilse were staying, the house belonging to the mysterious Swiss publisher whom no one had ever met, was a bland, brick-built affair embowered in tall pine trees and set on the rising ground between the beach and the coast road. The property gave almost nothing away about the owner. It was sparsely yet adequately furnished, and there were even some competent watercolours of Mediterranean coastal views on the walls. However, there was none of the usual telling clutter: no books, no photographs, no restaurant menus, no knick-knacks from foreign travels sprinkled about the place.

Tom might have been more suspicious had he not been so fixated on Yevgeny. And Fanya. Yevgeny made all the noise, but Fanya was the power behind the throne, the one who steered and regulated their lives. It was inconceivable that she wasn't also involved.

It had been a bluff; Tom hadn't spoken to the photographer, Baptiste Daumier. The operator had done a grand job of tracking down the number in Paris, but the telephone had gone unanswered. It didn't matter. He knew in his bones that the talented and painfully shy young man he had met back in May was not part of the conspiracy. Baptiste had snapped a photograph of him in St Tropez and passed it on in all innocence by way of thanks to his Russian hosts. The real question was how that photograph had then found its way into the hands of an Italian assassin.

On that score, Yevgeny had confirmed his own guilt, unable to mask the slight tremor of alarm in his eyes at the mention of Baptiste's name. In trying to recover, he had then over-compensated, adopting an exaggerated air of indifference to their conversation. Tom's impulse had been to swim over and throttle a confession out of him right there and then. Had they been alone, he might have done just that. Fortunately, his head had mastered his heart.

He didn't mind alerting Yevgeny to his suspicions; that had been his intention. He wanted Yevgeny to know that he was on to him. He wanted to turn the heat up under him. He remembered enough of his training to know that the enemy was more likely to stumble if coerced into action. He would, of course, have to be more vigilant than ever, but at least the game was finally afoot. Anything was better than the maddening uncertainty of the past thirty-six hours.

These were the thoughts that had been swirling around his head over lunch. The need to keep up appearances around the table, to keep up with the babble of speech, meant that he wouldn't be able to weigh the bigger questions until he was alone and heading for Le Lavandou.

Klaus had shown himself to be a gracious and attentive host, and he now insisted on seeing Tom to his car.

‘Thank you for what you said about my book . . . last night, at dinner.'

‘I meant every word,' replied Tom.

‘It is nice to hear good things. I am not a confident writer.'

‘That could be why you're such a fine one.'

Klaus gave a self-deprecating smile as he held open the garden gate for Tom to pass through. ‘In Germany we say a writer is only as good as their next book. And I don't have one.'

‘No ideas, even?'

‘One. Forgiveness.'

‘Forgiveness?'

‘Did you fight in the last war?' asked Klaus. ‘Yes. Briefly.'

‘France?'

Tom nodded. ‘Near Bouchavesnes.'

‘Our brother – Gustl – he was in France.'

‘Did he make it back?'

Klaus shook his head. ‘And yet here we all are . . . having lunch.' He paused. ‘People amaze me.'

Maybe it was the memories of the futile carnage dressed up as military expediency, of the mud and the fleas and the foot-rot, or maybe it was simply the need to remain focused on his immediate predicament, but Tom found himself looking to terminate the conversation.

‘Well, as long as they do, you'll always have something to say.' He extended his hand. ‘Thank you, Klaus, and I'm sorry I have to rush off.'

At this hour of the day the sun was a furious ball and the hills seemed to tremble in the searing heat. Everyone was either at lunch or sleeping it off, and the twisting coast road was as deserted as the communities he passed through, although he still kept a wary eye on his rear-view mirror.

If, as the photograph suggested, Yevgeny and Fanya were involved in the plot to have him killed, then he had to discard all thoughts of the firm friendship which had sprung up between them in recent years. He couldn't allow sentimentality to cloud his judgement. He also had to lay aside everything he thought he knew about them. Evidently, they weren't all they purported to be. So who were they?

That Yevgeny was an art dealer of some considerable renown was beyond any doubt. That both were Russian could also be relied upon; he knew from Parisian friends that they were respected pillars of the large community of Russian émigrés in the French capital. But that's where the verifiable certainties broke down. Who had they been before they showed up in Paris in 1918 – displaced victims, supposedly, of the Bolshevik revolution?

Was there any truth in Yevgeny's story of wealthy parents slain by a rampaging mob, of stitching family jewels into the hem of his jacket before fleeing abroad? It was well known in intelligence circles that the Bolsheviks had attempted to infiltrate the White Russian exiles in Paris right from the off, fearing the influence they might bring to bear on foreign powers to intervene back home. Some of these Soviet agents had been exposed; others, presumably, had gone undetected. Did Yevgeny and Fanya fall into this last category? If so, had they been working for the Soviets all along, or had they been recruited at some later date?

Either way, Leonard's misgivings still held: How could the Soviets possibly know for sure that it was Tom who had done for Zakharov in that darkened stairwell in Petrograd in 1919? And why had they waited sixteen years to exact revenge for his murder? He knew there was an explanation; he just couldn't see it yet.

He turned his mind back four years to the moment when Yevgeny and Fanya had first appeared in his life, drifting into the cove below the villa on one of the Hôtel de la Réserve's pedalos, coming ashore and spending the whole afternoon on the beach. There had been no reason at the time to doubt their story: that they were staying at La Réserve while searching for a house to buy.

A few days later, they had invited Tom, Leonard, Venetia, Lucy and the two boys to drinks and dinner at the hotel, repaying the hospitality that had been shown to them. And they had then gone on to buy La Quercia, high on the headland towards Le Canadel, a house which, though not officially on the market, Tom had tipped them off to, knowing that the owners were in tight financial straits. He had even accompanied them on their first visit to the property, delighting in their wild enthusiasm for the place, as well as his own good fortune that such an unusual and entertaining couple might soon become his near neighbours.

There was no avoiding the stark truth: that he'd been played for a fool from the beginning, that there'd been something altogether more contrived about their seemingly chance appearance on a pedalo that sunny, windblown afternoon four years ago. But assuming he'd been targeted by them, why had they followed through with the charade of buying La Quercia, and why had they then waited four years before acting against him?

The answer came to him suddenly as he was dropping down towards the long white sweep of Cavalière's pine-trimmed strand.

He was a bloody fool – so blinkered, so besotted with the notion of his own victimhood that he had failed to grasp the bigger picture.

Yevgeny and Fanya hadn't turned up in Le Rayol looking to cultivate a relationship with him; they had come for Leonard!

Leonard was the real prize: a high-ranking official at the British Foreign Office, right-hand man to Sir Robert Vansittart himself. How much was such an acquaintance worth to the Soviets? How much information about British foreign policy had Yevgeny already managed to inveigle out of Leonard under the guise of innocent friendship? Leonard had hardly been discreet during the discussion over dinner last night about the looming clouds of war. How much more candid was he when alone with Yevgeny?

It was a devilishly simple idea. Exiles of a Communist regime reviled and feared by the major Western powers, intensely vocal critics of Stalin, Yevgeny and Fanya were beyond suspicion.

Tom's instinct was to turn the car right around, but something stayed his hand. It was an uneasy feeling, low down in his gut, difficult to diagnose at first.

Leonard's insistence that the Soviets couldn't possibly be behind the attempt on his life had struck him as strange at the time; Leonard wasn't known for closing off any avenue until the matter was well and truly settled. And as for his assertion that it made no sense for them to have waited so long before moving against Tom, well, he was right.

But what if they hadn't been waiting all this time? What if they had spent the past sixteen years in complete ignorance?

Christ, it was so glaringly obvious now.

If the Soviets hadn't acted before now, it was only because they hadn't known the truth about Zakharov's death. Which meant that someone had only just told them.

How had he missed it? Was he really so far off the pace after only five years out of the game? Clearly. Or maybe it was something else. Maybe his unconscious mind had denied him access to the realization, knowing that the only logical conclusion to be drawn from it was too painful to bear consideration.

His conscious mind, however, had no difficulty in settling on another thought, more of an image: Leonard and Yevgeny far away in Cannes together, conveniently absent, the night the Italian assassin had come visiting.

Benoît operated from the first floor of a stuccoed building adjacent to the town hall, right in the heart of Le Lavandou. The rooms were large and light, their fireplaces of white marble, their lofty ceilings trimmed with elaborate stuccowork.

Tom fully expected to kick his heels for half an hour or so before Benoît and his minions returned from lunch, but the door downstairs was on the latch and he let himself in.

Benoît's office ran the entire width of the building at the front, with three tall windows offering a far-reaching vista over the crowns of the lime trees to the sea, and the islands beyond. His monumental desk was backed by a wall of books, as was the seating area at the other end of the room. Objects and curios of all sizes and descriptions littered every available surface, which together with the books, lent a distinctly scholarly whiff to the place.

Benoît was at his desk, poring over some papers. He removed his spectacles and rose to his feet when Tom entered.

‘Thomas . . .'

‘Am I disturbing you?'

Benoît fluttered a disdainful hand at the papers on his desk, the same papers which had, presumably, kept him from his lunch. ‘It's nothing.'

‘I was passing.'

‘That's good, because I was just about to pour myself a small cognac.'

Untrue, of course, but Benoît was never one to let urgent business get in the way of the important things in life, such as friendship and fine cognac, of which he kept an unrivalled selection. Tom allowed himself to be ushered towards the divan and armchairs, the uneven parquet creaking beneath his feet.

In large towns, notaries were little more than scriveners. Out here in the provinces, they wore a variety of different hats: financial adviser, usurer, banker, land-agent, house-agent, even marriage-counsellor. The roles were rich and diverse.

Benoît, it seemed, had recently added ‘dealer in antiquities' to the list. As soon as they were settled with their tulip glasses, he pointed out a polychrome figurine on the table behind Tom, maybe two feet in height.

‘What do you think it is?' he asked.

It was a woman of Asian appearance with gently composed features. She stood tall and slender, dressed in long flowing robes which descended to her bare feet.

‘Is it Chinese?'

‘Bravo. It's Quan Yin, the Buddhist goddess of mercy.'

‘Where did you find her?'

‘She found me. A sailor came by a few days ago, just back from the Far East. He wants me to find a buyer for her. He thinks she's worth a fair bit, maybe even two thousand francs. I told him I'd look into it while he's visiting relatives down the coast. He'll be back tomorrow.'

‘Okay,' said Tom, ‘why the big smile?'

‘Well, yesterday I had a wealthy gentleman in here. He's looking for a large property to buy in the area. Yours would be ideal for him, by the way. As you know, prices have picked up considerably since you bought. You'd clear a very tidy profit.'

Benoît was ribbing him; he knew that Tom would never consider parting with Villa Martel.

‘Tell him twenty million francs.'

Benoît laughed at the exorbitant sum. ‘He might just say yes. I have the feeling money is no object to Monsieur Dufresne.'

He offered Tom a cigarette, lighting it for him.

‘Anyway, while we were talking, he spotted the Quan Yin standing there and he became very excited. I said I was holding it for the owner, who was considering selling it, at which point he became really quite agitated. What do you think she's worth to Monsieur Dufresne?'