House of the Hanged (25 page)

He owed it all to his great aunt Constance. She was the only member of his mother's side of the family he had ever met – and only then, on one occasion, when he was thirteen years old – although many years later he had set eyes on two uncles across a courtroom when Constance's will had been contested.

The Boltons were a dyed-in-the-wool Quaker family who had made a considerable fortune as merchants during the Victorian era, banishing forever the ring of the cash register with their purchase of a Jacobean pile to the northwest of Norwich. This was the privileged world of his mother's youth, a world abruptly closed off to her when she lost her heart to a young and lanky Anglican curate on his first posting in a nearby parish. The moment she ‘went over', her parents refused to have anything more to do with her, and she was shunned by the rest of the family. She endured this rejection with equanimity, rarely speaking about it, other than to say that her family's reaction said far more about them than it did their faith, and that Tom was never to think unkindly of Quakers because of it.

He, of course, was fascinated by the idea that he had a whole host of relatives out there, possibly cousins his own age, and not so very far away. Great Aunt Constance must have been experiencing something of the same curiosity, because soon after her husband's death she wrote a letter to Tom's mother asking if she could meet her only sister's only grandson.

It was the first time Tom had ever heard his parents raise their voices to each other; not that they knew he was eavesdropping, shivering in his pyjamas on the staircase landing. His father must have backed down, because a few days later the situation was presented to him. He went through the motions of weighing his decision before agreeing to go along with Great Aunt Constance's request.

He had been in a motor car before, but never one as grand as the Britannia landaulette sent to pick him up. It was a brisk spring morning and he felt sorry for the uniformed chauffeur exposed to the elements up front while he sat warm and cocooned in the cabin behind.

There were cows swinging their tails in the pasture beside the avenue of towering limes which led up to the house. He knew it was foolish to imagine a phalanx of long-lost relatives waiting to greet him warmly, and what he got was a lone footman who showed him through to an enormous drawing room where an elderly woman, shrouded in the full weeds of early widowhood, sat perched on a divan. He was barely able to make out the features of her face beneath her mourning veil, although she folded it back the moment the footman had retired. She also rose to her feet and greeted him warmly with a firm handshake. She seemed improbably old, her face as creased as crumpled paper, but she looked on him with kind lucid eyes, as blue as pimpernels. He knew from his mother that Great Aunt Constance now presided over the family, and although she was a redoubtable character, she didn't possess the same streak of tyranny in her which had marked her dead husband out for the monster he had been.

Tom couldn't recall much of their opening exchange, distracted as he was by the solemn gentility of the setting, the orderly sprinkling of pictures, lamps, china ornaments and other odds and ends which covered the walls and shelves and tabletops. It seemed to him that there wasn't one object in the room that had shifted its place in fifty years, and he said as much when Great Aunt Constance asked him what he was thinking. This brought an amused chuckle from her. When she suggested that they take a turn around the gardens, he was surprised by her nimbleness, as well as her passion for the plants and trees lining the paths and alleys she led him along.

The outdoors was his world and he was glad of the opportunity to shine in her eyes. He knew the names; he knew the cycles of life and of the seasons; he knew that the unseen bird roo-hooing in a tall oak was a collared dove not a wood pigeon, despite the similarity of their song. When they arrived at the kitchen garden, with its lean-to greenhouse and its hothouse, Great Aunt Constance became engaged in a discussion with one of the gardeners about whether it was safe yet to put the geraniums and fuchsias out in their tubs. They concluded that there was still a risk of a late frost.

Tom waited until they had moved on before saying, ‘The mulberry tree in your rose garden has just started to leaf.'

‘Has it? Well, it's that time of year, I suppose.'

‘It means there won't be any more frosts.'

‘Oh really?' she replied, sceptically.

‘Baint says the mulberry is a nonsuch tree and it knows these things.'

‘Does he, now? A nonsuch tree? And who, pray, is Baint?'

He told her. He must have told her a lot, because he was still talking when they returned to the drawing room.

‘Well, I must say, this Baint of yours sounds a remarkable character.'

‘Oh, he is. He sees things other people don't.' And then he foolishly blurted out the story of the horse dropping down dead in front of the stand at the Bungay races.

He only realized his error when she said, ‘Interesting. I wouldn't have thought your father was a racing man.'

He was trapped. To lie would be to cast his father in an unfair light, which was the last thing he wanted to do. So he told her the truth.

She was horrified by his story of bunking off to the horse races with Kitty when the two of them should have been playing on the beach in Cromer. At least, that's what he took her silence to mean. But then suddenly she laughed. She laughed long and she laughed loud. She couldn't stop herself. Even when she tried to suppress it, it came bubbling back out of her. He began to wonder if she wasn't mad, possibly with grief. She finally recovered, though, dabbing at her eyes with a black chiffon handkerchief plucked from her sleeve.

‘Well, I must say, your education has been conducted under far ampler skies than that of your cousins.'

He never saw her again.

She warned him that this would be the case, and she said he was not to be insulted. There were silly, grownup matters at play which one day he would understand. After that, he received a card every birthday, and they wrote to each other once or twice a year until she was well into her nineties and her eyesight failed.

The next communication he received from that hemisphere of his life was a letter from the Bolton family solicitors in London informing him that he had been remembered in her will. It was a considerable sum of money and it couldn't have come at a better time. The cerebral haemorrhage that had paralysed the left side of his father's body and turned his mother overnight into a full-time nurse had occurred just six months previously. Tom suspected that these two events – his father's stroke and the amendment which Great Aunt Constance had subsequently made to her will – were not unconnected. Either way, after he had won the bitter legal battle instigated by his uncles, Tom was in a position to see his parents set fair for life. He was also able to rescue his own faltering sanity and resign from the Secret Intelligence Service.

A new beginning. And now, it seemed, another might be required. It all hinged on how he played out his weak hand.

Paulette was upstairs, cleaning Barnaby's room. It was in a terrible state, with clothes strewn all over the place. This wasn't the reason for her dark mood, though. She was annoyed with herself for failing to resist Roche, for not turning him away at the door. She was convinced that she'd somehow let Tom down.

She brightened a little when he assured her that she hadn't. She brightened even more when he told her she could have the weekend off.

‘But how will you cope?'

‘We're out and about for most of it.'

This wasn't true, but he didn't want Paulette fussing about the place just when things looked set to come to a head.

He showered and changed for lunch. Pocketing the Beretta, he then went and concealed the Browning beneath the driver's seat of his car.

They were eight for lunch at the big table under the awning in the courtyard. The flagged yard sat to the side of the main building and was about the only pleasing feature of the ‘Art Nouveau eyesore', a fortunate moment of distraction on the part of the architect.

Yevgeny and Fanya couldn't make it, too caught up in the preparations for their party that evening. However, Walter had been released from his duties and he turned up with Klaus, Ilse, two bottles of hock and the scavenger hunt cup, which Yevgeny had won last year in a record time of three hours and four minutes.

‘He's pretty upset he can't defend his title,' explained Walter.

‘Mortified, I imagine,' said Venetia.

The rules of the scavenger hunt were fairly straightforward, in that there weren't really any. By fair means or foul, the teams of two had to search out and bring back six unusual items which had been chosen for the occasion by a disinterested third party. This year, it was Benoît who had drawn up the list, and the envelope had been grandly sealed with wax to prevent anyone tampering with it.

‘He obviously knows you better than we do,' observed Lucy.

‘How can we be sure it wasn't Tom who sealed it –
after
he'd examined the contents?'

Venetia turned to him. ‘My dear Barnaby, that says far more about you than it does Tom.'

Tom went and joined Leonard, who was cooking the big bream he'd caught yesterday over a low fire he'd cobbled together near the entrance to the courtyard. He might lunch at the Berkeley Grill and dine at Boulestin's but he was never happier than when out in the wilds preparing his own food, freshly caught, over an open fire. The sight of him crouched there – all knees and elbows, that intent expression on his face – brought to mind fond memories of their trout-fishing trips near Hungerford in the old days.

‘Remember Hungerford?'

Leonard looked up at him. ‘Of course.'

‘Do you still fish there?'

‘Not as much as I'd like to. I keep up my membership, though. We can go there when you're next back in England, make a weekend of it.'

‘Assuming I get through this.'

Leonard glanced over at the table before rising to his feet. ‘You've been in tighter corners than this,' he said, for their ears only.

‘Have I, Leonard?'

His astringent tone wasn't lost on Leonard. ‘And what's that supposed to mean?'

‘It means you've been holding out on me. It means we need to talk.'

It hadn't been Tom's intention to forfeit the element of surprise so cheaply, but he was worn down, beyond caring.

The fish were done to perfection, the flesh barely coming away from the bone, and the moment they were served Tom announced that this year they would not be pulling the names randomly from a hat to determine the teams for the scavenger hunt.

Klaus, Ilse and Walter, relative newcomers to Le Rayol, were at a disadvantage, and it was only fair that each of them be paired with someone better acquainted with the area. The teams he therefore proposed were: Klaus and Venetia (acceptable), Ilse and Barnaby (more than acceptable), Walter and Lucy (ditto), and Leonard and he (which drew a swift, knowing glance from Walter). Four teams, four cars, and almost four hours to complete the mission. The deadline was six o'clock, when they would all reconvene on the terrace at Villa Martel for well-earned refreshments and the prize-giving. It only remained to open the envelope, and Tom broke the wax seal.

‘A horseshoe,' he read from the list.

‘Easy enough,' declared Venetia, the others nodding in agreement.

Tom smiled before reading out the second entry. ‘A lady's whalebone corset.'

‘What?' groaned Barnaby.

‘An ashtray from the bar of the Hôtel des Bains in Cavalaire. Twelve Madonna lilies. A postcard of Place Victor Hugo in Collobrières. And finally . . . oh Benoît, you wicked man . . .'

‘What?' demanded Ilse.

‘Three male
préservatifs
.'

There was a puzzled silence.

‘Does that mean what I think it means?' enquired Venetia.

‘I fear so,' said Walter.

Venetia squirmed. ‘That's not just wicked, it's disgusting.'

‘It's also impossible,' put in Barnaby. ‘France is a Catholic country. Where on earth are we going to get three . . .?' He waved his hand about, unable to bring himself to say the word.

‘Le Lavandou, apparently,' said Tom. ‘Benoît kindly provides the name of a pharmacy where they can be bought under the counter, with a little persuasion.'

Klaus was smiling broadly. ‘The poor pharmacist,' he said in his thick German accent. ‘What will he think of us foreigners after today?'

Tom waited for the laughter to die away before distributing the typewritten lists.

Half an hour later, he and Leonard were zigzagging their way up the hill behind Le Rayol, the car's engine straining against the incline. The sun beat down on them, and the back of Tom's shirt was already lacquered to the leather seat. The tacky asphalt beneath the tyres seemed on the point of melting clean away and trickling off down the slope, through the trees.

So far the conversation had valiantly been kept to the question of which route they should take. Benoît had them heading in three quite different directions, and there was a case to be made for both a clockwise loop and an anti-clockwise one. A little disingenuously, Tom had argued that they should instead make a headlong dash northwards to Collobrières.

It was a picturesque village buried deep in the hills of the Massif des Maures, well back from the coast. Known for its chestnuts, there was little chance they'd be picking up a box of
marrons glacés
today along with a postcard of Place Victor Hugo. In fact, Tom couldn't see them returning with any of the items on Benoît's mischievous list.

The Col du Rayol was a barren outlook set high on the hill above the village. They would sometimes come here after a day on the beach to fly big box kites in the offshore evening breeze. It afforded an unrivalled panorama of the looping coastline and the islands laid out like stepping stones in the far distance. It was an extraordinary view, more Theocritan than anything Tom had come across during all his time in Greece, and yet he didn't even glance over his shoulder as they cleared the summit.