House of the Hanged (8 page)

‘I've got a full house in a week or two, which means boarding a couple of guests here. Is there any chance of viewing one of the rooms on the top floor?'

One of them happened to be free, and Olivier was all for showing it to him. Tom told him not to worry; he was quite happy to check it over on his own.

‘I'm sure the consummate professional has better things to do.'

‘I'm sure the wife of the consummate professional would agree with you.'

Nadine had tossed a couple of disapproving glances the way of her husband while scampering around the terrace, attending to the breakfast requirements of the hotel's residents.

Armed with the key from Olivier, Tom made his way back up to the third floor, ignoring the vacant room and making straight for 312. He estimated that he had five minutes, give or take, before he'd be expected back downstairs. It wasn't long, and he'd used up most of it by the time he finally figured that Frau Wissmann must have taken the Italian's room key with her to the beach. Minguzzi's jacket was still hanging in the wardrobe, but the key wasn't back in the pocket, or on any of the surfaces, or in any of the drawers. This left him with little choice.

Fortunately, the reception area was deserted. Unfortunately, Olivier came hurrying into view just as Tom was about to help himself to the spare key to Minguzzi's room from the bank of cubbyholes on the wall behind the desk. Had Olivier seen exactly what he was doing? Probably not, Tom judged, and he made a show of returning the room key Olivier had given him to its hook.

‘Well? What did you make of it?'

‘Perfect. How much does it cost?'

‘More than most, but a trifle for a man of your means,' grinned Olivier.

‘Can we check availability for the week of the fifteenth?'

‘Give me a few minutes, I have to a put an urgent trunk call through to Paris for one of the guests.'

While Olivier was unlocking the door to the office, Tom surreptitiously pocketed the key to Room 104 from the rack.

‘Take as long as you need, I'm not in any hurry,' he said, strolling casually off, back towards the main staircase.

Minguzzi's room turned out to be half the size of the Wissmanns', if that: a dark, north-facing little box without a balcony. The curtains were closed, the bed made, unslept-in. Minguzzi had obviously been a fastidious type. His socks were grouped according to their colour in the chest of drawers, and in the bathroom his bottles of hair pomade (and various other ointments and unguents) were carefully arranged in ascending order of size on the marble-topped washstand.

Tom had been expecting to find the suitcase packed, ready for a swift departure, but the Italian had evidently decided to stay on, which suggested a certain self-assurance.

Pulling out his pen and pocket book, he noted down the name of the tailor in Rome who had cut the lightweight summer suit and the linen jacket hanging in the wardrobe. The shoes were ready-to-wear, but the Homburg-style Panama hat on the high shelf in the wardrobe offered up something intriguing. There was a name embossed in gold on the leather sweatband: Cesare Pozzi.

The name of the hat maker, or Minguzzi's real name?

Tom suspected the latter. He couldn't say why exactly. Somehow it fitted with the man he'd brushed with, briefly and violently.

Minguzzi was surely an assumed name, adopted for the job. It's what any professional would have done, and the Italian's professionalism, though not beyond reproach, was palpable. That much became clear when Tom made his way to the desk between the windows.

He had saved the best till last, but soon found himself disappointed. There was no pocket book, no address book, no cheque book, no incriminating names or telephone numbers scribbled on scraps of paper. In fact, there was nothing of any note in the desk drawer besides a brochure for a hotel in Biarritz – another job? – and a bundle of French francs. Tom thought about pocketing the money, but decided against it. Ideally, he would have searched the room more thoroughly. As it was, he did the best he could within the given time.

Pulling the door shut behind him, he removed his gloves, slipped them into his jacket pocket and made his way back downstairs.

Olivier was loitering in the reception area while a silver-haired woman, seated at the desk in the office, gabbled away on the telephone.

‘It turns out all she wanted was to check on her cat,' he announced irritably. ‘I think she's even trying to talk to it.'

He was all smiles and kind words, though, the moment the woman had finished her call. While Olivier fussed around her, Tom took the opportunity to restore Minguzzi's key to its cubbyhole. As soon as the woman had wandered off, wet-eyed with emotion after her feline communication, the charade was followed through. The register was checked; a third-floor room with a sea view was reserved for the week commencing the fifteenth.

Strolling home along the narrow coast path, Tom struggled to draw any satisfaction from the success of his mission. Yes, he'd managed to gain access to the assassin's room undetected, but what exactly had he learned? Very little; almost nothing other than that one of Minguzzi's last living acts had possibly been to have sex with a Swiss German woman almost twice his age.

He could envisage Leonard's barely disguised look of disappointment when he got to hear Tom's account of the past hour. For all his skills as a back-room spymaster, Leonard had never been a convincing dissimulator in person; he wore his feelings far too readily on his face. His true talent had always lain in selecting operatives who didn't.

It had been there all along, but Tom became intensely aware once more of the Beretta tucked into the back of his waistband, hidden beneath his jacket. He knew that it would be on his person, or within easy reach, until this thing was over. He found himself wondering if he was being observed, even now, and he tried to estimate his reaction time based on a man stepping suddenly from the undergrowth up ahead and pointing a gun at him. He calculated that he wouldn't stand a chance. He would be dead, his blood leaking into the sandy soil before he could even draw his weapon.

He moved the Beretta to the hip pocket of his jacket, closing his fingers around it, narrowing the odds on the imaginary assailant.

It seemed like a deeply symbolic act.

It had taken him a good couple of years to shake off the paranoia which had ruled his life for so long, to learn to walk down a city street without checking to see if he was being followed, to not glance up every time a new customer entered a restaurant where he was dining, to accept the innocent attentions of a stranger for what they really were.

Depressingly, the same paranoia he had come to despise might once more prove the saving of him. He could list the moments in the past when it had come to his aid, just as he could identify the times when, had the other man been more suspicious or alert, things might well have turned out differently for both of them.

Paulette never appeared before ten, which gave Tom a little less than an hour to deal with Hector.

He smoked a cigarette on the terrace, steeling himself to the grim task. He then armed himself with a spade from the tool shed and headed for the gulley.

The low morning sunlight slanted through the trees overhead, dappling the rock walls around him. By noon, the building heat would have silenced the unseen choir scattered about the branches, but for now, the trilling birdsong rang loud and clear, a fitting accompaniment for the occasion.

Buried near the well
, the Italian had said, but when Tom surveyed the ground in the vicinity of the brick wellhead he saw no obvious signs of digging. For a terrible moment he feared he might be denied his final farewell, but then he found the spot.

Hector had been hidden in a sloping bank of debris at the base of the rock face, where it had slowly disintegrated over the years. He scraped at the scree and the stones with his hands, revealing the black pelt, usually so lustrous, now dimmed by dirt. He scraped till Hector lay fully exposed, stretched out, lying on his right side, as he liked to do in front of an open fire in winter.

The soil clung to the congealed blood at the back of his head. Tom ran his fingertips along the noble snout, up and over to the wound, feeling the depression where the skull had been caved in.

He could picture the scene. Poor Hector, all bark and no bite, so trusting. An extended hand, even that of a stranger, would have been enough to silence the low, rumbling growl. A few soothing words and he would have drawn closer, tail wagging, panting in anticipation of the tasty morsel contained within the closed and empty hand. His greedy eyes would have remained locked on that hand; they wouldn't even have registered the rock raised high in the other.

Was that how it had been? Maybe not. But probably something close to it.

He gently scooped Hector out of the earth and laid him in his lap, cradling the limp and heavy corpse, rocking him, smoothing his fur.

‘I'm sorry, my friend. It was me he was after.'

He wanted to say more, but a wave of emotion muzzled his lips. All he could produce was a sudden loud sob.

It seemed for a moment that he had it under control, but he was weeping now, all composure gone, hot childhood tears washing away the last vestiges of his self-possession.

Others came and went over the summer months, and some even stopped by out of season, but the two weeks spanning late July and early August – when Leonard, Venetia and family were in residence at Docteur Manevy's house – had always been sacred to Tom.

That sunstruck fortnight was the one fixed point in his calendar. It was also his gift to them, a hopelessly inadequate ‘thank you' for all their kindnesses to him over the years. There was more to it than mere gratitude, though. Leonard and Venetia had nursed him through the worst of times, and he wanted them to see that their efforts hadn't been in vain. He wanted them to know that he was all right now.

All this, he imagined, was lost on the two boys, if not Lucy. What were they to know of his troubled past? What did they care? Young minds were not inclined to unpick the tangled histories of their elders. Maybe that would come later, but for now Tom was simply an old friend and former colleague of their father's who happened to be much closer to their mother in age, and whose company they were obliged to share for two weeks every summer.

He assumed that they favoured their fortnight in Le Rayol over the annual springtime pilgrimage to Aix-les-Bains, where they twiddled their thumbs and took French classes while their mother subjected herself to every conceivable form of water torture, from skin-wrinkling immersions through to high-pressure pummellings. Leonard was spared this annual mortification of the flesh by the ‘sudden and pressing work commitments' which seemed to materialize as if by magic every Easter, shackling him to his desk at the Foreign Office.

Leonard's devotion to Le Rayol had never been in question. He had fallen hard for the place during their first visit five summers ago, and each year he threw himself headlong into his ‘annual brush and polish on the Riviera' with characteristic gusto. He was an outdoorsman by nature, surprisingly slim and sinewy for a man just shy of his sixtieth birthday, and although he wasn't averse to a bit of loafing on the beach with a book, he was at his happiest when fishing or boating or bathing. He swam vast distances with no apparent effort, never fearing currents or cramps. He also spent endless hours prowling the craggy headlands with his fishing rod, as sure-footed as a mountain goat. He had once described life in Le Rayol as ‘a foretaste of paradise', which wasn't entirely true. Leonard's perfect paradise would have included a grouse moor, a shallow chalk river for fly-fishing, and a golf course.

There was nothing to be done about the grouse moor and the chalk river, but the golf course was near at hand, in Cannes, and from time to time he would disappear off there with Yevgeny, usually overnighting because they both enjoyed a flutter at the tables, although they always swore blind to their spouses that they never darkened the steps of the Casino Municipal.

In recent years, Leonard and Yevgeny's relationship had transcended the rarefied summer confines of Le Rayol. Whenever Yevgeny found himself in London, usually when buying at auction or courting the custom of some artist or other for the gallery in Paris, he would stay with Leonard and Venetia at their house in Warwick Square. Likewise, on the odd occasion when Leonard's work carried him to Paris, Yevgeny and Fanya would welcome him into their home, an exquisite
hôtel particulier
on the rue Barbet-de-Jouy. It was compact compared to the buildings just around the corner on the rue Varenne, although its main staircase was still broad enough to take a four-in-hand. Over the years, large numbers of wealthy American collectors had trooped up that marble flight to dinner in the salon, and they had brought their cheque books with them. They knew that Europe, broken by the Great War and groping to put itself back together, was where it was at. And if they didn't, then Yevgeny was on hand to convince them of that fact.

How many heavyweights could the United States field against the likes of Picasso, Braque, Villon, Picabia, Matisse, de Chirico, Dalí, Dufy, Léger, Ernst, Miró, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Brancusi and Duchamp? Very few, maybe just three: Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper and Man Ray (who was, to all intents and purposes, a Parisian).

Yevgeny always said, ‘The French buy with their eyes, the English with their ears and eyes, and – thank the Lord – the Americans with their ears only.' He felt no shame at talking himself into a small fortune, convinced that the lofty prices he charged his clients would one day prove to be mere pittances. He was, he genuinely believed, simply assisting the wealthy to become even wealthier.

Tom had a lot of respect for Yevgeny, possibly because he had witnessed the desperate flight of White Russians at first hand all those years ago. Some had even turned up at the embassy in Petrograd begging the British authorities to smuggle their jewels out of the country, convinced that the Bolsheviks would rob them even of these at the border. Yevgeny had lost almost everything in the Revolution, not least of all his parents, dragged from their motor car by a rampaging mob and beaten to death. He had stepped off the train in Paris in 1918 with one suitcase and a string of his grandmother's pearls sewn into the lining of his jacket. In this respect, his story was not so different to that of many others, but few of his compatriots had managed to turn around their fortunes so swiftly, and those who had were not generally inclined to help out those who hadn't. Yevgeny was an active member of the displaced White Russian community in the French capital, known for his generosity.

Venetia was more circumspect about the ‘funny little Russian art dealer' and his nervy, wasp-waisted wife, Fanya. She found them far too eager to please, which meant little coming from a woman who made almost no effort whatsoever on that score. Privately, Tom suspected that Venetia was jealous, not so much of Leonard's relationship with Yevgeny, as of Fanya's quite justifiable claim to be even more neurotic than she. Pretenders to that particular throne were never welcome, although Venetia was big enough to rein back her more hostile instincts for one fortnight a year. Why rock the boat when it was such a very fine boat to be aboard?

Summer in Le Rayol moved to a pleasing, if somewhat repetitive, rhythm. They would all gather mid-morning at the cove between the two houses for a spot of bathing, boating and leaping off the rocks. The tight demilune of sand was, in effect, a private beach, even if the law said otherwise. Every so often, a sailboat would anchor off the beach and a band of interlopers versed in their rights would row or swim ashore.

They rarely lingered.

It wasn't that they were subjected to a frosty reception; quite the opposite, in fact. They would be showered with attention and offers of food and drink, quizzed to within an inch of their lives, asked their opinion on Schoenberg's atonal Second String Quartet blasting from the gramophone (the disc was always at hand for such occasions). If none of this worked, then they would be exhorted to join in a vigorous game of volleyball – ‘I'm ever so sorry, but you don't really have a choice in the matter. You see, you're lying on the court.' On one memorable occasion, Leonard had resorted to stripping off his bathing costume and searching for shells in the shallows. Normally, though, the invaders were long gone before then, convinced that they'd just slipped the clutches of some sinister cult bent on enlisting new members.

Luncheon was usually provided by Venetia and Leonard – a light meal of cold cuts, cheeses, salads and the like, prepared by Paulette's surly sister-in-law, Blanche, and served up at Docteur Manevy's house beneath the vine-threaded pergola in the courtyard. A hock-induced siesta inevitably followed, which took care of the least hospitable time of the day, when the heat was at its most prodigious.

Around four o'clock, they would all emerge from hibernation, blinking into the sunlight, and congregate once more at the cove for a bracing dip to bring them round. Later, once the heat had subsided sufficiently, the cove would be abandoned for the tennis courts just below the village bar. If they weren't invited elsewhere for the evening then cocktails and dinner were generally hosted by Tom at the villa. Numbers fluctuated according to which of the guests had guests of their own staying with them, but there were rarely fewer than ten around the table on the terrace, and often nearly twice that number.

Paulette was a peerless cook with a seemingly endless repertoire of fish and shellfish recipes. Carnivores went hungry; she made no allowances for those who didn't appreciate the bounty of the sea. Tonight, lobster pilaf was on the menu in honour of Lucy's arrival. Lucy had always adored lobster, and in Paulette's eyes Lucy could do no wrong. In fact, aside from her own daughter, who was sometimes drafted in as a
sous-chef
, Lucy was the only person allowed in the kitchen while Paulette was working her magic. Even Tom was banned, until it was time to start bearing the platters of food to the table.

Paulette was running late today. By half past ten, long after Tom had laid Hector to rest, she still hadn't appeared at the villa. This wasn't unheard of – she relied on her unreliable husband Claude for a lift to and from work – but given the recent turn of events Tom felt an understandable clutch of concern.

He was about to lock up and head for the cove when he heard the crunch of tyres on gravel.

They had clearly had a blazing row in the car. Claude wore the look of a man still smarting from the lash of his wife's tongue, and he sheepishly mumbled some excuse when Tom appeared from the house.

Paulette didn't speak; she stomped inside, leaving the two men to unpack the provisions.

‘She sometimes wonders why you aren't married,' said Claude.

‘Does she?'

‘I don't.'

Lucy was alone on the beach, stretched out on a straw mat, reading a book.

‘Good morning,' Tom called as he approached.

Lucy twisted to look at him. ‘Morning.'

She was a wearing a skin-tight black
maillot
, cut high on the thigh and open at the back, the very height of risqué beachwear fashion.

He deposited himself beside her. ‘I like your new bathing costume.'

‘Mother hates it. She says it leaves nothing to the imagination.'

Venetia's things were laid out nearby, but she was nowhere to be seen.

‘Has she gone off and drowned herself in protest?'

‘Sadly not. She's taken the kayak out.'

‘Excuse me?'

It was a preposterous notion. ‘She woke up this morning and decided she was fat, so she's resolved to be more active.'

‘That rather scuppers her theory that all women who take exercise are lesbians.'

Lucy smiled, but there was something unconvincing in the curl of her lips, and it very soon became clear that she was carrying something she wanted to say.

Raising herself up so that she was sitting cross-legged in front of him, she reached across and gently took his hands in hers.

‘Tom, I know what happened last night. I saw you.'

He felt his heart lurch.

‘I was here. Well, there . . .' She nodded behind her, up towards the headland. ‘I couldn't sleep. I kept thinking about the
Albatross
– my wonderful present from you – and I just had to get up and come and have a look. That's when I saw you down here.'

He stared deep into her dark eyes, trying to calculate just how much she could have seen from up there on the headland. Enough. Damn the moonlight.

Sweet relief followed moments later.

‘It was Hector, wasn't it?'

He lunged at the excuse she'd offered him, an explanation he would never have had the presence of mind to conjure up on the spur of the moment. He lowered his gaze by way of affirmation.

‘What happened?' she asked.

He was safe now, working ahead of her, already putting the finishing touches to the story.

‘I think it was poison. They lay a fair amount of it around these parts against rats. God knows where it happened. I suppose it's best I don't know who's responsible, or I might just do something I regret.'

Don't over-egg the pudding
, he told himself.

‘Where did you find him?'

The pain in her eyes was palpable, and he opted for the gazebo. If he mentioned the gulley, she was liable to make a pilgrimage there. She might even find the fresh grave he had just dug for poor Hector.

Lucy glanced off at the islands. ‘A burial at sea . . .'

It wasn't a question, but she sounded as if she was trying to make sense of it.

‘You know how much he loved the water.'

That was the truth. If Hector had been there now he would have been clawing impatiently at the sand, eager for them to join him in a bout of jumping off the rocks.

‘You could have taken the
Albatross
, you know. I'm almost insulted you didn't.'

‘The thought crossed my mind.'

‘Why didn't you?'

‘I'm not sure. Perhaps because it wasn't a boat he knew.'

She nodded, accepting the explanation. ‘Our secret, Lucy. I don't want anyone else to know.'

‘Why not?'

‘I don't want his death hanging over the holiday.'

‘But it is.'

‘You know what I mean. Promise me. I'm not sure I could cope with all the sympathy.'

‘Not even from me?'

‘Not yet.'

She nodded.

‘Say it,' he insisted.

‘I promise.'

Her voice cracked as she spoke the words, and he thought for a moment she might be about to break down in tears. She didn't, though; she just gripped his hands more tightly.

‘Ahoy!' came a distant cry.

It was Venetia, rounding the headland in the kayak, rocking wildly as she thrashed inexpertly at the water with the oar.

Lucy released her hold on his hands, discreetly manoeuvring away from him.

‘Ahoy!' Tom hailed back, waving.

But even at a distance he could see from the shift in Venetia's bearing that she had registered the moment. She knew that she'd caught them unawares, intruding on something private. And Tom had little doubt that he'd be held to account for it before long.