The Flowers of the Forest

1

‘Oh, the house?’ I said. ‘Yes. I’ve not been there for twenty years, I suppose.’ My face was still like a burnt pumpkin. It was painful to talk, difficult even to think.

‘It’s a beautiful place,’ the detective-inspector said soothingly, the two of us driving out alone that afternoon, up the lovely roads towards Glenalyth.

Though Rachel — and Madeleine who’d been at the station to meet us — had come to the hospital in Perth with me, they had gone on home after a while, leaving me there for a few hours ‘under observation’. And when I’d recovered the Inspector had come to see me, talking to me in a private room: Detective-Inspector Carse, the contact Fielding had given me in Scotland, head of the Perthshire County CID who had been in charge of the original investigation into Lindsay’s disappearance. I’d told him at once of the confidential nature of my visit to Glenalyth and he’d confirmed that he had been asked to cooperate with me in what he took to be simply another, if more clandestine, attempt to discover what had happened to the laird of Glenalyth.

‘I knew him, you see,’ I’d told Carse. ‘I used to stay with the family.’

‘Work in the same line of country, then?’ he’d said.

‘Yes.’

‘There’ll be an inquest, of course, on that fellow.’

‘Well, I didn’t push him out of the train.’

‘All the same, I don’t see how I’ll be able to keep you out of it.’

‘You may have to. We’ll see what they say in London.’

Carse was a genial Scotsman, a big broad man with a veined, weather-beaten face, more like a Highland farmer than a detective, the canny, friendly sort who would nose out local crime through long country intuitions and connections rather than through any police manual. He was obviously ill at ease in these distant, dangerous matters of espionage and national security. He looked unhappy now, fingering a lip thoughtfully as he drove with one hand up a long straight hill which led past the famous hundred-foot tall beech hedge just south of Blairgowrie — a well-remembered sign for me, in all the old years, that I was but minutes away from the small, granite-faced market town that lay beneath the moors and the winding single-track road that led up from there to the first of the white gates on the long drive into Glenalyth.

‘Who was the fellow?’ I asked. ‘Any idea?’

‘Not yet. I’d say he was just a gangland hit man by the look of him. London address on his driving licence, somewhere in the East End. But the Yard have confirmed that it’s just a squat. No one there now. The whole street is coming down. You were lucky.’

‘Yes. He was … tougher.’

‘I thought most of you people carried guns.’ Carse smiled wanly. ‘You’re going to need some protection if you’re staying up here. I’ll see what I can do.’

And then Carse had pointed out the obvious to me. ‘Whoever it was, they knew you were going to be on that train. When did you know you were getting it? Who did you tell?’

‘Only yesterday morning. And I told nobody. Only the girl, Rachel, knew.’

‘So he must have been following you, then. All yesterday at the least.’

‘Yes.’

I remembered the man in the Marylebone pub that Rachel had said she’d seen twice before that day. We had been followed — we must have been, she had been right — ever since my meeting with David Marcus in that deserted apartment off the Edgware Road. So it must have been him who had put the contract out on me. But why? Because I’d said clearly I intended going on looking for Lindsay. And it followed, therefore, that if Marcus was prepared to go to such extravagant lengths to prevent my finding him, he feared the discovery of Lindsay for some other reason than the rather tame one he had given me — about Lindsay’s involvement in an already aborted right-wing SIS plot to unseat the Prime Minister. In any case, you didn’t bump off outsiders on trains just to keep some inter-office strife tidily under the carpet in London; you didn’t widen the potential retributive evidence against yourself in this way just for the sake of keeping your bureaucratic image clean. You employed hit men in Intelligence only as a very last resort, when your own skin was in jeopardy, or when not to do so would be to put a whole vital and elaborate operation at risk.

It was clear, too, that if Marcus was prepared to take these great risks it was only because he thought I could find Lindsay and therefore he, at least, thought — or knew — that he was still alive somewhere. In all, my finding Lindsay would either compromise Marcus himself in some fatal manner, or else would do the same for some operation that Marcus had set up with him, a scheme so clandestine, so important that it justified the appallingly cruel deceit which Lindsay had imposed on his family by disappearing without a word one fine afternoon. I found it very difficult to believe that of Lindsay. Much more Marcus was the fly in the ointment: he was with the KGB, for instance. But then it struck me that both of them could have been with Moscow. It didn’t make easy sense. But it was possible. And if so, here was reason enough for getting rid of me, for if I discovered what had happened to Lindsay this might lead me to the evidence of their joint betrayal, that Lindsay and Marcus had been thieves together for a long time in the Citadel, for longer than Philby and the others and more important than they. If this were so, then the hire of any number of hit men would be justified to prevent such explosive intelligence coming to light. I suddenly didn’t care for my future.

‘Yes,’ Carse went on. ‘Someone must have stuck to you like a leech the last few days. The KGB, I suppose?’ he said. ‘Must have been them, working through some five-hundred quid lout. There’s plenty about these days.’

‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘The KGB, perhaps.’

‘Well, that’s your business. But I’d get back to London. Back among your colleagues. They can help — give you the sort of cover I can’t very easily manage up here for you.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘When I’ve seen round Glenalyth, thought out what may have happened to Lindsay that afternoon, then I’ll go back.’

I spoke with a decisiveness, even a bravery, which I didn’t feel just then. I was no real match for hit men. It was simply that I had given my word to Rachel and Madeleine and was determined to keep it. I suppose, too, I didn’t want to fail them again, or be part of a failure, at least, as I had been with them twenty years before. As I have said, cowardice is not so common as we like to imagine; we are just as often brave, way past loyalty, to the point of rashness.

We stopped talking then, going through Blairgowrie, past the white stucco of the Angus Hotel on the corner, opposite the small triangular, railed park, with its soldier war memorial and the round cattle-trough facing the bridge which led out of the town again, going northwards over the burbling stream of the Ericht. When we used to take the trap from Glenalyth to Blairgowrie, almost a day’s trip there and back during the war, the cob had been tethered to those same railings, next the trough, while Madeleine had shopped and Rachel and I had bullied the Angus hotel maids for lemonades in the chintzy lounge before lunch. After the war we had sped through or to the town in the green Wolseley and Blairgowrie had become less distinct to me, a place which had shrunk since the years of early childhood and become simply a brief anchorage without any thrall or excitement in it.

But now, so many years later, seeing it all from the peak of some kind of maturity, the town had become mysterious once more, something vastly remote and tempting where I felt, if I’d left the car at that moment and gone into the hotel, I might have walked straight into my childhood again, though this time starting to tease the barman over a dry sherry.

We crossed the bridge and soon had turned off the main road and were rising steeply through heavy trees, up a single-track lane onto the moors, the sun through the branches dappling the road ahead of us now, the leaves stirred by a summer wind, before suddenly we were out of the shade, on top of a first rise into the bright light. The whole moorland stretched ahead of us — and then, on the higher ground several miles away, I could see the great green spread of the pine forest, a few puffy white clouds running away above the sylvan fortress of Glenalyth.

Glenalyth, originally the site of a medieval chieftain’s castle, had been completely rebuilt in the mid-eighteenth century as a fort house, a domestic stronghold in an early Georgian mood, one of the very few of its kind in the British Isles, with walls five feet thick, a dry moat which ran beneath the huge Doric-columned portico and all the windows on the ground floor placed high above the level of the lawns, so that invaders, however intrepid or skilled with their muskets on the lower slopes, could never do much better than smash the gilded ceilings and the stucco cherubs holding up the corners of the rooms inside.

A renowned ancestor of Lindsay’s — a warlike and romantic Highlander who had survived Culloden — had built the new Glenalyth, this perfect mix of the impregnable and the beautiful, to the plans of an ambitious Edinburgh architect then developing that city in its Georgian phase — and had faced the house southwards down the moors, towards the border, still hoping for the sounds of battle drums from that quarter which, when they never materialised, had forced this incorrigible soldier to take command of a newly formed Scots regiment, in which he served with great distinction under the Crown, the first of many Phillipses who, failing to beat the English, had joined them.

We came round the Hill of Alyth, the highest point in the area, and then for an instant I could see the four tall grey chimneys of the house, sticking up like the funnels of a ship in a green sea, before they dipped back into the trees again as we went down the other side of the hill. The bare moorland gave way to this forest a mile further on, where the road turned sharp right and ran along the edge of the estate. But we drove straight on here, through the first of the white gates, into deep shadow again, running along a bumpy drive beneath a thick canopy of old oaks and chestnuts, the pine forest rising up on either side beyond them. The avenue sloped gradually down towards the loch then, edging past a reed-fringed corner of it where little soapy waves flapped against the shore before we climbed, rising through another gate and along a rhododendron-bordered lane, until finally the house reared up ahead of us, the parkland opening up around it suddenly like a fan, huge copper beeches dotting the meadow. One of them, I could see now, was still there, the tallest of them by the path down to the loch, which Rachel had told me about in London — the tree she’d climbed when she was seven or eight, perched somewhere high up in its smooth branches, where she’d seen her father leaving the house alone that day with the rowlocks on his way down to the loch, only to find him later — in her memory at least — trolling for pike with Aunt Susan. Rachel had such a clear recall of these things, so many more years and memories of this house than I had, that I felt an interloper then, a distant cousin pretending to a great intimacy with affairs which, in reality, I had never had much to do with at all.

Then I saw her. Hearing the car she had come out onto the steps and was jumping up and down on them now like a child with impatient enthusiasm. And for that moment I shared her recall, seeing her waiting for me as the car crunched round onto the gravel forecourt: I felt I’d come home again then. Not at that instant as the car drew up, but thirty years before.

Madeleine had come out into the porch behind Rachel. There was no sign of the other house guests, George and Max, but they’d arrived: I could hear the sound of a furious piano somewhere in the background, the music stopping and starting abruptly, with anger almost, I thought, at my arrival. Miss Dorothy Parker, in the uncertain fits and starts of the lady herself, was edging her way into a musical re-incarnation.

The two women looked at me silently for a moment; my face must have been a swollen horror. Then Rachel, in lieu of any more intimate contact, touched my shoulder briefly with a finger — that way of hers of expressing more emotion than she dared show made conveniently appropriate now by my tender condition. And I thought, for the first time in years, is this what love is like?

Everyone started to talk at once then and we trooped inside to the big square hall, which, in the summer and when there was a large party staying, served as the drawing-room. And I had that unique smell then — a whiff that had always been at the heart of the house for me — of sun-warmed flagstones, I suppose, of old books and wax polish and of long-burnt tree stumps from the huge grate on the far side of the room: the dry, ageless smell of ancient content.

‘You’re in the flower room.’ Rachel had come up behind me. I turned and had to smile at her — though it was agony — for she had her own two cheeks puffed out in a huge breath, which she held for a moment, her eyes little ink spots now in what had become a great puffball of flesh. She came with me upstairs while Madeleine exchanged civilities with Carse before tea.

Turning from the window of the best guest room which gave out onto the flower-garden to the side of the house, she said, ‘You’re not going to get yourself killed looking for Lindsay, you know. You mustn’t.’

I had started to unpack my case. ‘No,’ I said.

‘We’ll have to stop it. It’s ridiculous.’

‘What?’

‘Someone doesn’t want you involved with us. It’s obvious.’

‘Who? George, do you think?’ I said lightly. ‘Do you think he hired the lout?’ I tried to smile but couldn’t manage it this time.

‘Be serious.’

‘Well, he didn’t exactly welcome me with open arms just now. It must be him.’

I put my pyjamas out on the bed and got out a pair of socks which I was going to put on before I found a big hole in the toe of one of them. I suddenly realised how few decent clothes I had.

‘Don’t worry about George.’ Rachel picked up the sock, put a finger through the hole and then dropped it from on high, like a bomb, into a waste-paper basket by the bed. ‘We can get some new ones. There’s a new shop in Gowrie that has some great wools and tweeds and things.’ She went back to the window again. The pleasure garden was a rage of warm colour, wafts of heat shimmering over the rose bushes, and the bedroom was like years of summer, as dry as an oven, smelling of sun-baked linen. Rachel opened the window and we heard the piano again now coming from the study downstairs at the back of the house, the same half-formed tune hardly more developed, a repetitive, questioning phrase, an endless hesitancy, like a cornered animal trying to escape out into the light.

‘Part of the overture. And one of the main songs,’ Rachel said leaning out on the sill. ‘Parker’s “Prologue to a Saga” — know the poem?’

‘I only know her one about not making passes at girls who wear glasses.’ Rachel turned and gave the words to the intermittent music beneath us.

‘Maidens, gather not the yew,

Leave the glossy myrtle sleeping;

Any lad was born untrue,

Never a one is fit your weeping.

Pretty dears, your tumult cease;

Love’s a fardel, burthening double.

Clear your hearts, and have your peace –

Gangway, girls: I’ll show you trouble!’

‘Sounds a winner all the way,’ I said. ‘If they can get the music right. It’ll suit Max, too — Miss Parker has already done all the lyrics for him, I’d say: that speechless fellow.’

‘They’re all right, don’t worry about them. They’ve sworn to lock themselves up six hours a day. That’s why they weren’t out to meet you. Drinks at six. That’s when they stop. You’ll see them then.’

‘Thanks. Are they casting yet? Dottie had a lot of lovers, didn’t she? Maybe they could fit me in.’

‘Why not just get on with them, Peter?’

‘Yes.’ I went on rummaging in my case. ‘I can’t find my sponge-bag — all that expensive aftershave I brought up. I must have left it on the train.’

And then, reminded thus of the morning horrors, Rachel took up her first theme again. ‘Exactly — that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you: will you try and forget Lindsay for a while? Can you? Just get better, be here and do nothing. Do you understand?’

‘Not really. I came here to help —’

‘Peter.’

Rachel came over to me now, quietly, with a kind of tip-toeing concern — thin white blouse, linen jeans and a pair of torn sandshoes, someone as light and warm as the sunny room, so much a part of it and of the house: a dark-topped flower, born and nurtured here and flourishing now in her own native soil — which she knew best, where all things could be ordered to the good, if only I would listen.

‘No. I don’t understand,’ I said.

‘I meant the hell with helping for a bit,’ she said vehemently. ‘Just live here — be with, do things — with us. Not the past any more or the future, but just now for a while. Don’t you see the chance? Half of life is done with for us. But can’t we start filling the rest of it well now? Haven’t both of us just been thinking about getting by for too long? About not losing, just hanging on. Well, I’m tired of that. I want to win for a bit. Don’t you? Do you see? Because we can. We’ve given up the will to win and I’m fed up —’ She gestured towards the huge landscape outside. ‘I want to go out there — the lakes and woods and walk and walk — or drink or swim or talk. Or anything. And you too — and let George and Max work those bloody ivories to the bone if they want. I’m done with music for a bit, and people trying to kill each other. This morning, you know, when you fainted in the corridor of that train, I thought you’d died — just like that. Someone else gone for no possible reason. And when you weren’t dead I knew we had to be bright — we have to be very bright before it’s too late.’

‘Yes,’ I said. I had a pair of underpants in my hand. I didn’t know quite what to do with them now. Rachel opened a drawer for me. The piano started up again downstairs and someone — George, it must have been — let out a roar, of approval it seemed. ‘They’ve got it right at last,’ I said. ‘What was that line of Parker’s? “Love’s a fardel, something double: Gangway, girls — I’ll show you trouble!”’

‘Well, will you?’

‘Be bright? Yes.’ I closed the drawer and turned and ran a finger down Rachel’s cheek. ‘Yes. I’ll try.’

Now I knew what Rachel had meant when she’d insisted that love slowed you up: the finest thing to share was brightness. Love wouldn’t matter then for it would be implicit, already achieved, and could be put away as ballast for the happy voyage. Yet there was, I felt even then, quite another side to Rachel’s bright proposals: in taking up the good life with her so I might the more readily forget Lindsay’s pain, Lindsay’s absence, which was something — I was certain now — that for some dark reason she wanted me to forget.

‘So what did your friend Fielding say?’ I asked George when we had a moment together that evening during the six o’clock drinks, sipping tumblers of single malt and water, Lindsay’s tipple, decanted from a small barrel of it, sent from one of the Western islands, which he always kept in his study.

‘He said he knew you, vaguely,’ George said shortly. He was dressed in what he must have thought appropriate country clothes for someone who yet wished to maintain a few hints of the bohemian life about them: a pair of blue and white striped linen trousers which were far too tight round his bum and a T-shirt with a portrait of Beethoven die-stamped on it. He came out hugely round the middle and tapered sharply at both ends — so that with a cap, and with his ever-boyish face, he would have been the image of Tweedledum. His friend, Max, was Tweedledee on the other side of the hall: minutely smooth in perfectly creased tropicals, a gold chain rattling beneath a cuff and a look of princely boredom on his sallow features. He was talking to Tommy MacAulay, of the whisky MacAulays — the elderly Brigadier and neighbour of Lindsay’s who had been his CO during the war, and had come round among some other neighbours, to share drinks with us that evening — a sharp old dodderer now whose wife, Rachel told me, had crossed Jordan in an alcoholic stupor some time before, freeing him to fight a happy rearguard action on the near bank.

The big double hall doors were open in the evening heat and George and I took our drinks out onto the porch where I could still see a shimmer in the air above the loch and the grass beginning to wilt in the long meadow. They’d make hay from it any moment, I thought, as they had in the old days — or would life go on in any way here as it had before, without Lindsay’s directions and energies? Since we had not evidence of his death it was still possible to stand on the porch then and wonder if he might come up the drive at any moment to join the party, a late guest, delayed three months for some perfectly explicable reason — come, as he had so often before, suddenly, out of the blue in a green car, home from the wars or from some cancelled event in London.

It was then that Rachel’s offer struck me as unreal, for it proposed only one truth, and that entirely at the expense of another: she took her brightness from Lindsay’s absence, while I at that moment, standing on the porch of his house and drinking his whisky, was suddenly aware of his presence — here, quite close to us possibly, so that the hair prickled on the back of my neck as I thought about it and I turned involuntarily, as if Lindsay himself had just come up behind me. Instead I saw his dog, the little terrier, Ratty, who just at that moment had come out from the hall and was standing now on the threshold of the house, looking up at me quizzically, unaccountably shivering.

‘Yes,’ I said, turning back to George, who had put his whisky tumbler on the balustrade with his foot up on an old cannon ball, and was looking out on the world as if from a four-ale bar. ‘I knew Basil Fielding, vaguely. He was in my section. Mid-East Intelligence. Did he help any?’

‘Not much. Said in fact you’d be more help, especially as you were coming up here.’

‘Did he indeed.’

George looked at me, and then carefully round my swollen face, with an air of provocation. ‘Yes, he said you’d be the one to find him. That you were clever that way. Rather you than I, after what happened this morning. In the sleeper,’ he added derisively.

I could see that it had crossed George’s mind that his suit with Rachel might soon prosper again — with my likely demise, for if someone had gone so far as to try and evict me from a speeding train, other more certain, less exotic attempts on my life must surely be in the pipeline for me.

This was a point taken up by the bibulous Brigadier when I talked to him later, a caricature of an old army man, a little deaf as well, so that I had to speak close to his badly veined earlobes, as if into the mouthpiece of a telephone. Tommy was enjoying his whisky and it struck me I might turn his thirst to my advantage. He had already heard of the morning’s adventures — and heard, too, from Madeleine I suppose, that I had once worked with British Intelligence.

‘Don’t you fellows carry any weapons?’ he asked brightly. ‘Trained, I suppose? Small arms and all that? I should have seen that chap off pretty quick in my day: always carried a little ’un inside my jacket, as well as the service.45.’

‘I’m afraid I’ve no skills there. I only worked for Intelligence Research, going through a lot of old Arab newspapers.’

‘Well, you’re in the front line now. It’s interesting: someone doesn’t want poor Lindsay found, it seems.’ The Brigadier sneezed then, a great bluster of a sneeze. ‘High pollen count,’ he said after he’d wiped himself up with a hanky, glancing round the hall, seeking some floral reason for his nasal discomfort. There was a big vase of fresh lavender on a table near us. ‘Might be that,’ I said. ‘Shall we go outside?’ We moved out onto the porch.

‘Yes,’ I said, in the relative quiet, Rachel occupied inside with some other neighbours, a school friend from Perth with her husband, who had come to visit as well that evening. ‘I can’t think who would want to prevent him being found. I offered to help —’

‘It’s an outrage,’ the Brigadier interrupted angrily. ‘Intelligence chappies in London told Madeleine he’d probably just lost his memory and wandered off somewhere — some cock-and-bull story. Lindsay would never have done that. He was abducted, kidnapped — and it must have been the Russians.’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, who else? Of course Lindsay was involved with them. Never really spoke about it. But one knew. A messy business. He should have stayed in the army: he was a fine officer, first-rate — never knew why he went back to Whitehall after the war, all that cloak-and-dagger nonsense. And now look what’s happened. Never could follow it — chap like Lindsay tied up in all that back-door politics. Not like him at all.’

‘Yes, exactly … remembering him.’

‘Doesn’t add up. He was the most straightforward man I think I ever knew. Only once heard him tell a lie. But we all had to lie then.’

‘Oh, when was that?’ I asked innocently.

‘After Monte Cassino when we’d got up into the Po valley, Tolmezzo, and then into southern Austria. Just at the end of the war.’

‘What happened?’

‘Had a lot of fascist Croats on our hands. Pavelic’s rag-tag army, must have been three or four hundred thousand of them who’d come over the Yugoslav border, chased by the Partisans. Landed up in a little town called Bleiburg, just at the edge of our command, on the Yugoslav frontier. Unpleasant business.’ The Brigadier drank again and smacked his lips, his faint blue eyes looking out over the loch, but narrowing now over some indelible memory from his past.

‘Yes?’

‘Well …’ the Brigadier turned and humphed and I could tell now that he was the kind of old soldier who bloomed in face of an attentive audience. ‘Well, the war had just ended, two or three days before, but this was the worst thing in my war. You see, these Croat fellows, and their families too, women and children — close to half a million of them in all — well, knowing they’d get the chop in the biggest way if Tito’s chaps ever got their hands on them, they made hell for leather across the border to surrender to us, but looking simply for our protection in fact. Sort of mass emigration of the whole province. Said they could never live under the commies. True enough, as it turned out: they didn’t.’

He paused, brushed his lips with a hanky, remembering carefully now, going back through the outlines of the story into the precise facts of the time, living them again. ‘Well, there we were, a little to the north, in the Drau valley, with thirty thousand fully armed Cossacks on our hands which we didn’t know what to do with either — except we knew they’d eventually have to be sent back to Russia under the Yalta agreements — which didn’t apply to the Yugoslavs. So then this other crowd cropped up, fifteen miles south in Bleiburg, and we couldn’t spare more than a platoon or so to deal with them. Impossible situation. Anyway, I went down there — taking Lindsay with me of course, since he was fluent in the Croat lingo.

‘Well, they were camped out all over the village and all the hills for miles around, like some exodus out of the Bible. And just across the border in Yugoslavia was a whole assault division of the Partisans getting ready to come over and slaughter them. Well, Lindsay managed to bluff our way out of that little holocaust. We met the two rival commanders separately, insisted on fair play and all that, got the thing off the boil. And then we received precise instructions from HQ to repatriate all the Croats. Every damn one of them. Tito was our ally by now after all — and these others had fought with the Germans. So we had to do that. Packed them all into cattle waggons for several weeks and sent them back over the frontier. No one knows exactly what happened to them — so they say now.’ The Brigadier laughed drily. ‘But I needn’t tell you. They were put to the sword in the next few weeks and months, we heard the news afterwards, we were still in the area — upwards of half a million of them: throats cut, machine gunned into mass graves, dumped in rivers, forced marches — the lot. Unbelievable. No one talks about it these days, least of all the Yugoslavs. But it was the biggest slaughter of the war. After the Jews and Poles.’

The Brigadier finished his whisky abruptly, as if to wash away the unpleasant memory.

‘But Lindsay,’ I said. ‘You said something about his lying?’

‘We all lied. That’s when I had to use the little ’un, inside my jacket.’

‘What —’

‘Lindsay and I were down by the waggons one morning, seeing them in. We tried to make it all as pleasant as possible — though you can imagine what I felt like when I got home afterwards and saw those Nazi transports en route to the camps on the newsreels. Of course it wasn’t pleasant at all. It couldn’t be: we had to lie to them, telling them they were all going off to Italy, else we’d never have got any of them near the damn waggons. Anyway, that morning one of these Croats — with his wife and child — broke ranks and came up to Lindsay, recognised him apparently — a friend of Lindsay’s when he lived in Zagreb before the war. And this chap knew they were all being sent back into Yugoslavia and that Lindsay had been lying to everyone. The two of them started to argue on the siding. And then this fellow took out a revolver he must have hidden somehow, and I thought: the bugger’s going to shoot Lindsay. Well, he wasn’t, Lindsay told me afterwards. He was going to kill himself and his family: sooner dead than red you know. Anyway, I got in a shot at him first — and missed, can you imagine? But my sergeant was onto him in a flash. Lindsay just stood there, frozen, couldn’t do a thing. We put them on a later transport — I dealt with it. Lindsay couldn’t face him again, naturally enough I suppose. It was all a disgraceful business. But we had absolutely no alternative. Orders from the top — all in aid of jollying along Stalin and the rest of his bloody crew, which of course included Tito then.’

‘What happened to the man?’ I asked.

‘Who?’

‘The Croat who knew Lindsay.’

‘Expect he ended up in a lime quarry. The big cement works outside Maribor took a lot of them, we heard.’

‘You don’t remember his name, I suppose?’

‘No idea. Lindsay said he was a teacher of some sort, at some university. Why?’

‘I’m still hoping to find out what happened to Lindsay. Perhaps that man survived. He’d certainly bear Lindsay a grudge.’

‘Yes. I see. But it’s unlikely. They all got the chop.’

‘Not everyone, surely? There were survivors even in the worst of the Nazi death camps.’

‘Perhaps, but it’s a hell of a long shot. Wish you luck. It’s my view the Russians took Lindsay — and Whitehall doesn’t want to make a fuss about it for some political reason. Just like they did with Stalin over those poor bloody Croats.’

Rachel came out soon after and we dropped the subject. I asked her when they were going to cut the hay in the long meadow beneath us.

‘Cut it with me tomorrow, if you like. There’s a small tractor you could drive and we could bale it. It might be fun.’

‘Need a gallon or two of ale for that job if this weather keeps up,’ the Brigadier said, looking up at the cloudless evening sky.

‘Why not?’ I said, going along with Rachel’s brightness.

The heat had died at last; the shimmer had gone from above the loch and the water had become a darker, plummier blue, while the tall copper beeches began to reach across the meadow, filling it with long shadows. The guests were ready to leave, bumping about with goodbyes on the porch — and Ratty stood amongst them curling his lip and whining slightly, jumping up and down in front of Madeleine, pleading for an evening walk.

I went off with her and Ratty when they’d all left and Rachel had gone inside to see to the supper.

‘I won’t take you along the Oak Walk,’ she said, ‘where the bees are.’

‘No, let’s go that way. I’d like to see where … The bees will have gone to sleep.’ And so we set off across the croquet court and into the first of the woods, where the evening had arrived earlier than elsewhere, with swarms of midges and pools of warm shadow.

‘There. He was dealing with that second hive — you can see it clearly from the morning-room, where I was. That’s where I last saw him.’

The hive was between two oak trees and there was a small stone wall behind them which gave on to the vegetable garden. The oak walk ran away westwards for about a quarter of a mile before the pine forest started and we took this course now. But Ratty was disinclined to follow us, stopping before the first of the beehives and looking back anxiously towards the house.

‘He doesn’t like the bees,’ Madeleine said. ‘He always hangs back here. Come on Ratty,’ she called.

‘Was he with Lindsay that afternoon?’

‘He wasn’t with me. But, as I say, he’s never liked the bees. He was probably nearby, though. Ratty was crazy about Lindsay, of course. He was his dog.’

‘That’s interesting — he’d have followed him, you mean?’

‘He usually did — everywhere. Inside and out.’

The dog had taken evasive action now, going behind the row of beehives and running along by the garden wall when suddenly he stopped, putting his front paws up on it, as if trying to climb it. Again, my spine prickled all the way down my back.

Madeleine turned to me, quickly, her face suddenly sharp with pain. ‘How could a dog tell, Peter — three months afterwards — where anyone went?’

‘Dogs have memories. If he could speak, he could tell us.’

Instead Ratty simply howled at the gathering night, his shrill cries piercing through the empty garden, floating away into the emptier forest beyond.

2

The fine weather never really broke that summer. But around the heights of Glenalyth, at least, the heat was spiced with pine and cooled with water, when Rachel and I — and sometimes Madeleine — walked up the long dry corridors through the pine forest, or bathed from the small island in the loch, while George and Max, before their wives broke up the party that weekend, remained tied to their repetitive themes and variations in the study and Madeleine gave me directions to all Lindsay’s old papers, stored in the morning-room or in trunks and boxes up in the long attics that ran almost the length of the house, and in the tiny, white-washed bedrooms beneath them under the eaves: rooms like dog-kennels, filled with lime dust and dead butterflies, rooms that had been servants’ quarters in more severe times.

But each day’s vivid brightness had its shadow counterpart every evening when I went back into Lindsay’s past, shuffling through his papers, making notes of names from old letters or faded carbon memoranda; sifting through inexplicable loose sheets of paper that had long since come adrift from their original context — letters that began half-way through some vital or casual event: ‘… and wasn’t it unbelievable that he should have behaved in that way …’ with nothing left of who he was or what he had done; thumbing through a forgotten address book which I found curled up in the attic heat — a spider running from a nest under the letter J and a whole gallery of distant people elsewhere between the pages — dead, or perhaps still living down the road or in another country, early friends or just acquaintances of Lindsay’s — one couldn’t tell which — marked out clearly here in his neat hand: ‘John Botting, 23 Abercromby Place, Edinburgh.’ Someone called simply ‘Maria’ — with the address: ‘32 Reisnerstrasse, Viena 3’, ‘Miles McGough, 12 Smith Street, London, SW3’, ‘Sally Haughton — SLOane 2798’ — no address, but the old Chelsea telephone exchange proposing itself brightly once more, after a lapse of more than forty years — a temptation come to life again now in the dry attic: ‘Shall I phone her? Shall I not’ … I could almost hear the young Lindsay speaking. Though perhaps Sally Haughton had been a deaf old cousin or his nanny’s London sister to whom he had a present of oatcakes to deliver, back from a summer in Glenalyth before going to the Foreign Office, walking up from Sloane Square and down the Mall one glittering October day.

The meagre little address book with its stained, bent covers was in fact the key to an empire, the world of Lindsay’s youth.

These long evening investigations were like playing Scrabble in an unknown language or trying to make up a huge jigsaw puzzle that might never, in fact, have had any picture imprinted on it — where some of the pieces in front of me, a railway ticket or a negative in a yellowing Kodak folder, could be vital clues to the puzzle: and other bits and pieces, an ornately die-stamped bill from a pensione in Florence in 1934 or a bank statement from the same year, might be irrelevant. For the moment I had no way of distinguishing between them, of giving this detritus any exact hierarchy of importance in Lindsay’s life. At times I gave up any attempt to establish a precise chronology or location to the events in some folder or suitcase and simply trusted to luck, hovering like a clairvoyant in the small dry rooms, a necromancer among the dusty cobwebs, my hand spread out over the papers, selecting them quite arbitrarily — by touch almost, or picking them out in random sequence, as in some elaborate card trick, hoping that so chancy a method would correspond to, and release, the kind of lucky magic I knew I needed if I was to find anything which bore on Lindsay’s disappearance in all this mass of ancient material.

Thus a day would start in the sun, with a Glenalyth honey breakfast on the porch, hay baling until midday, and afternoons in the limpid water. But each evening would bring me back into some pre-war continental darkness, for here in the violent thirties, I soon realised, lay the events which had formed Lindsay’s life and given it a far more complex and contradictory character than I had ever imagined: an existence light-years away from that of the traditional Scots laird walking his grouse moors and patronising the annual Highland games, which was how I had seen much of Lindsay’s essential life in the old days.

But the evidence I got together over the first two or three evenings pointed to some very different, if entirely conflicting political absorptions; in the first instance, an apparently deep and sympathetic involvement with all the socialist tragedies in Europe between the wars — and on the other and far larger hand, an almost outright condemnation of those same socialists and all their doings throughout the same period.

Here was something I couldn’t follow at all — this far earlier confirmation of something which Marcus and Fielding had told me a week before in London: that Lindsay had been both left-and right-wing at the same time, information which I had taken then as no more than part of some bureaucratic trickery towards me in London. But here was the evidence, from Lindsay’s pen itself, of the apparent truth of their statements to me.

At least, at that moment, I saw no other way of interpreting some of his papers, both quite opposite in their political enthusiasms — and most notably in two sets of letters which I discovered in different attic rooms — one collection written to Lindsay’s mother at Glenalyth, and the other (only one letter, in fact) addressed to Eleanor before Lindsay married her obviously, while he was a junior secretary in the Diplomatic Service and she was still at Oxford in her last year reading Modern Languages, apparently. This latter note, though it was without date or heading, I could place and date fairly readily: it must have been February in Vienna, 1934, for it dealt with the outbreak of brief civil war there when Chancellor Dollfuss, together with the fascist bully-boys in the Heimwehr militia, had started shelling the workers’ apartments in the suburbs of the city, killing off hundreds of people, trapped in their fine new municipal estates: February, 1934 — a classic date in the destruction of European democracy and the rise of the dictators.

‘…we knew something was up, because I could see from the Legation window that two trams had come to a stop, blocking the junction out to the Schwarzenberger-platz — and that, of course, was the agreed sign for a general strike throughout the city — and a sign for the Schutzbunders, too, to take up their hidden arms. So I hung about in the Legation most of the morning, doing nothing, trying to ’phone people — and I was mad with frustration by lunchtime — and though H.E. had told us to keep indoors I crept out by the chauffeur’s exit and just as I got outside I heard what sounded like thunder from the east, sort of drum rolls which shook slightly over the inner city. And then I knew — but I couldn’t believe it! They were shelling the workers — Howitzers and trench mortars as we learnt afterwards: no small arms fire at all — just a massacre. There were Heimwehr and police all over the inner city but just a few shots here and there, nothing serious. Obviously they were intent on flattening the workers’ blocks and leaving it at that — and I was determined to get out to the Floridsdorf or Ottakring where we heard the worst of the fighting was, and see for myself what was going on, and I did that evening. Of course the British press will say how the workers started it all — stabbing poor little Dollfuss in the back just as he was establishing some sort of Austrian independence from the Nazis. But that is just untrue. Must run now. I’ll finish this later …’

Yet in a subsequent letter to his mother, a week or so after these bloody events, he had taken quite a different line:

‘…the fighting was severe out in the workers’ suburbs. But it didn’t last long and the bark was worse than the bite — for the damage, as I saw myself afterwards, was mostly just to the masonry of their great fortress-like blocks of flats, which the workers originally built, of course, as military redoubts from which, when the time was ripe, they could sally forth to impose their own socialist dictatorship — something which, thankfully, little Dollfuss has prevented them doing — indefinitely, I should say …”

There were other letters (and notes for some official memoranda) in the same vein, condemning the socialists throughout Europe for rocking the boat and proposing that Herr Hitler’s activities, if not entirely justified, were of an understandable nature and that, when all else was said against him, he did appear to be the only bulwark left against a fast-encroaching Red peril — a line which followed almost exactly British official foreign policy at the time. Yet it was only, I discovered, in his one letter to Eleanor that Lindsay showed himself to be clearly socialist himself. Someone was being lied to: but who, and above all, why? And then it struck me that, of course, it was Eleanor, his girl-friend, with whom he had shared the truth; for the others he had put up a front. And if this were the case then she too must have had socialist inclinations, at the very least. That made sense: a whole generation of Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates had gone pink, if not bright red, during the thirties. But why the need to lie about his beliefs to his mother and his other friends? Presumably it had simply been a means of securing entry and maintaining his position in the Foreign Office. Yet if this were so Lindsay had been working for them under very false colours, for they would certainly never have employed any acknowledged left-winger in the sensitive positions he afterwards came to occupy for them. And the answer here seemed clear to me as well: Lindsay must have intentionally misled the Foreign Office, either to subvert its policies, or — like his contemporaries Philby, Burgess and MacLean — he had joined it on behalf of the Soviets in order to spy on it. My experience the week before with old Professor Allcock and his mysterious American visitor now formed a natural part of this elaborate ploy. In sum, I was left with the vague confirmation of my earlier conclusion: that Lindsay had been working for the KGB for most of his life.

Yet I couldn’t really believe it — that Lindsay could be such a traitor. Surely, I thought, climbing down the narrow attic stairs that evening, his sympathy with the Viennese workers could be put down to nothing more than a well-developed Scots social conscience — or that Lindsay perhaps, like so many others of his generation at that time, had momentarily shared the sweet dream of Marx, all the bright socialist fevers of the time, but had not been smitten with either illusion permanently. Yet I remembered how they’d thought just the same things about so many others in British Intelligence over the years — such true men, all of them — until they had turned up in Moscow one day: all of them, just as Lindsay had, having gone to earth completely before surfacing at the Moscow Press Club a year or two afterwards. Philby and MacLean, at least, had been two such utterly trusted secret servants: was Lindsay the last of their mould? — caught out fifteen years after them, the man who had stayed the course longer than any, and who had now, at last, been helped on his way, over many borders, home?

I was left with the entirely unsatisfactory conclusion that Lindsay’s likely innocence was exactly balanced by his probable guilt.

Rachel didn’t care for my grubbing round the attics in this way each evening. Yet she stifled the complaints I’m sure she would have otherwise have made, since we so fully shared the days together. I was left curious only by George’s lack of interest now in our close association: he had quite given up the role of jealous lover. It struck me that this might have been because of something that had passed between Basil Fielding and him, when they’d been in touch in London, some hint about my future which Basil had given then; or perhaps, as I’ve said, it was simply that George clearly saw my end in view if I persisted — as I appeared to be doing in the attics — in looking for Lindsay. For whatever reason, George regarded me almost with condescension over the summer breakfast table, as if rivalry with me was something entirely wasted — I, who would not be long for this world.

But here, to forestall such unhappy ends, I had taken secret steps myself. I remembered that Lindsay’s father, the old general, had been presented once with a small ivory-handled silver-plated.22 revolver, kept in a gilt morocco presentation case: I had once seen this fabulous toy as a child in Glenalyth, brought out one day by Lindsay to show a visiting army colleague, and I knew exactly where it had been kept: the middle compartment at the back of his roll-top desk in the morning-room. Which was where I found it on my second evening, using Madeleine’s keys. I got it out, replaced the box and locked the little door again. It was a beautiful object — small enough to hide almost entirely in the palm of one hand, or to pin down into a breast pocket which was where I kept it — but with sufficient weight and such exquisite balance, I thought, as to make it a completely effective weapon. I looked along the chased silver barrel, eased the trigger a fraction, saw the chamber turn and felt the satisfying pressure. A drop of oil and some ammunition was all it needed — and the.22 shells I took from Billy’s estate office in the yard where the guns were kept, opening the gun cupboard with the same bunch of keys, the next day when he had gone out for the afternoon.

We were rowing one afternoon on the loch, Rachel and I, making for the small island at the far end, in one corner of it, where we sometimes bathed, out of sight of the boat house: Water Lily Island, for in summer it was surrounded by a thick carpet of these crimson-streaked flowers, their creamy petal cups nestling in leaves like huge green plates, leaving only a sandy channel between them giving access to a small wooden pier where one swam from.

The island had been created in the late nineteenth century by Lindsay’s grandfather, an amateur horticulturist and eminent Indian Civil Service Administrator, who had hammered a large circle of stakes into this shallow part of the loch, filled it in with stone and soil and then planted it out with exotic trees and flowering shrubs, brought back from his sunny travels, which had now come to full maturity and bloom. The island was a miniature botanical garden and arboretum in this sheltered, hidden part of the water, set a hundred yards or so from the shoreline and protected from the northerly winds by the huge pineclad hump of Kintyre Hill immediately behind it. As children we had used the place as a refuge in games of aquatic tag and hide-and-seek, or sometimes as a naval base or gun emplacement in other water-borne battles with local children who had come up to Glenalyth to play with us for the day.

But that afternoon it stood up out of the still, heat-hazed water like a deserted coral island, a thick, silent clump of exotic greenery from some adventure tale by R.M. Ballantyne, where Martin Rattler might already be watching us through a deep filigree of leaves as Rachel took us towards it, rowing in a floppy linen hat and bathing costume, her skin more bronzed than ever now in this long heat spell, like something from the South Seas herself, while I sat in the stern with a pair of binoculars, scanning the shoreline every now and then and the huge green pine hill behind.

She stopped rowing, while I had the glasses raised, looking at a forester’s hut half-way up the hill, and all I could hear was the slow dripping from the oar tips and the dying slap of water under the bows as the boat gradually came to a halt. The heat settled down on us, seeming to suck up all the air around as the small breeze of movement died in our faces. I put the glasses down.

‘What have you found?’ She leant on the oars, holding them together with one hand, while she rubbed some insect off her nose with the other.

‘Nothing. Just a forester’s hut. Empty, I think.’

‘Yes, they were here in the spring. But I meant the attics.’

‘I thought we weren’t talking about that.’

‘Well, you’ve taken no notice — when I told you not to bother looking for Lindsay. So why not?’ She took off the floppy hat and wiped her brow with it. ‘You’re going to go on looking for him then?’

‘Obviously.’

‘I should be more gracious, shouldn’t I? He was my father after all.’

‘Yes. Why aren’t you?’

We’d stopped entirely now and the boat was like something frying in the soft liquid of the water. ‘Recently,’ I went on, ‘I’ve felt you didn’t want him found somehow.’

‘Recently — I’ve had you. And didn’t want you killed.’ She looked at me candidly, inspecting me, almost, down the length of her long straight nose, her big inky dark eyes calm beneath the loose, raven-sheened hair, her arms resting easily, professionally on the oars: she was like some deft warrior heading a flotilla of tribal catamarans, waiting for a sign, about to lay waste some rivals on a tropic isle.

‘That’s … nice,’ I said. ‘But is it really that simple?’

‘Yes it is.’ She smiled now. ‘You’ve lived so long alone you’ve forgotten how very simple some things are, lovey.’ With that she stood up on the seat, poised herself there for an instant and, just before the boat started to tip, she dived over the side into the greeny-blue depths, her body rippling just under the top of the water for twenty yards like a great fish before she surfaced and swam off towards the island. I thought then how common a longing for simplicity was; and how, since it was so rare a thing, we were usually in the end forced to invent it.

She was lying out flat, soaking up the sun, a little way up from the jetty on a sliver of grass between the trees, when I got to the island and had tied up the boat — stretched right out with her eyes closed, her bathing costume dispensed with, drying beside her, a dark ornament in the light. Some rare Indian tree had shed its papery bark nearby, the minute wood twirls lying about her head like cigar ash. Beyond, the thick greenery spread all around and above, forming a seemingly impenetrable barrier to the centre of the island — and leaning right round over the water to either side of us, enclosing this small area we’d brought picnics to as children, inviolate then as it was now.

‘So?’ I asked.

‘“So, so — break off this last lamenting kiss, that sucks two souls and vapours, both away”.’ She quoted the lines abruptly, still with her eyes closed.

There was silence then. A dead silence filled with heat. The world had gone to sleep for the afternoon. I sat on the wooden pier with my feet trailing in the water.

‘I was thinking,’ she said after a minute, ‘of how much people want to be together, yet how really very bad they are at it. A complete conflict, somehow.’

‘To be bonded yet free — the old irreconcilables.’ I looked out over the water. ‘We should have brought some fishing things, trolled for pike.’

‘Not in this heat. There’d be nothing. In the evening perhaps.’

I turned back to her. She was sitting up now, playing with a twirl of bark, feet drawn towards her face, chin on her knees, looking through me vacantly.

‘You remember,’ I said, ‘when you told me about Eleanor — how she didn’t like the diplomatic life with Lindsay, that she was a countrywoman at heart: were you suggesting they had irreconcilable attitudes?’

‘No — I was thinking of us. When we lived together.’

‘Oh, we just had juvenile rows. But what about Eleanor?’

‘What about her? I never knew her —’

‘Was she … left-wing, socialist in any way?’

‘I don’t know. You found something in the attic?’

‘Yes, a letter Lindsay wrote from Vienna years ago, sympathising with the workers there.’

‘Well, Lindsay wasn’t socialist, you know’ she said firmly. ‘As for Eleanor — well, Aunt Susan might know.’

‘I’ll try and see her.’

‘If you have to. I won’t.’

‘I’ll swim,’ I said. ‘I’m baking.’ And I pushed myself slowly down from the jetty into the water — which swallowed me up gently, curling over my skin like warm mercury.

I swam out to the first clump of water lilies, where I could still just put my feet on the bottom, and ducked my head under then, watching the rising lily stems sway vaguely in the opalescent water; and above them the green hats of their leaves shading the sun but ringed with haloes of dazzling light, so that when I swam forward under water now, pushing between these long green tendrils, the sun burst down in glittering shafts, illuminating the sandy bottom before it sloped away sharply, out into deeper, darker water.

I surfaced and swam out towards the middle of the loch before stopping a hundred yards or so from the island and turning back, treading water for a minute, letting my feet sink into the chillier layers beneath me, while the sun baked my brow.

Suddenly a small fountain burst on the water 20 yards ahead and to my right, and with it came a sound like a stick breaking very sharply, a minute echo over the water bringing an awful change to the miracle of the afternoon. I could see Rachel on the edge of the jetty. She was firing at me with the little silver revolver.

‘Stop it, Rachel — for God’s sake!’ But she took no notice and instead raised the revolver at me once more, like an executioner in the dazzling light.

I had a sudden spasm of thought — ‘She’s gone mad’ — before I ducked under water, going down deep this time and making for the nearest clump of water lilies which would give me cover. And now I was really annoyed and frightened too — for the water was suddenly cold and I wondered if my breath would keep and quite simply I didn’t want to die.

But when I surfaced very carefully, underneath a lily pad still some distance from the island, she’d disappeared from the jetty and only a slight stirring in the thick greenery behind showed where she must have gone.

‘Rachel? Come out! — for goodness sakes,’ I shouted, my nose only just above water. I waited there a minute but there was no reply. The loch was quite still and nothing moved now on the island. The afternoon had died again in the heat.

Instead of landing at the jetty, which I thought she might be covering with the gun from some hiding-place behind the Indian tree, I swam round to the other side of the Island, bobbing in and out among the water lilies, ready at any moment to duck back into the water again. But the whole green clump was quite still and when I got out of the water the far side, pulling myself delicately ashore along the branch of an overhanging tree, I realised that if I ventured into the centre of the island, disturbing the thick undergrowth, I would immediately become the hunted once more — unless I could crouch down and move inch by inch without a sound.

I thought about it for a moment — and thought how preposterous the whole thing was, that I shouldn’t lend myself to this mad game any more, stalking someone — someone loved — like an Indian on all fours; I should simply call out to her in a calm voice and ask her to put down her gun. But I had already done that without result — and it was anger that came then and made me move forward, inch by inch, without a sound: anger and a need to know what I thought at last I could learn in this instance: why twice in a week someone should want to kill me. So I crawled off on my knees, upwards through the bushes, testing every move ahead with my hands, clearing any noisy twigs away, determined to hunt myself now, and do it properly.

About five minutes passed, with several false alarms, before I suddenly saw her ankles several yards ahead of me, my own face almost touching the ground at this point. She was standing beyond a thick, sweet-smelling mock orange-blossom bush — standing quite still to begin with, her two feet like the remains of some discarded surrealist statuary in the greenery. And then, as I froze for a long minute, she began to circle round the bush, as if she’d heard something but wasn’t quite sure where. Finally, making her mind up, she walked straight towards me.

It was a lucky break: she couldn’t have expected me to come up at her out of the earth, as I did, grabbing her by the ankles first and then pulling them both viciously so that she collapsed like a ninepin in a cloud of white flowers right into the middle of the Philadelphus bush, where I straddled her, pinning her down, the two of us flaying about in the hot, confined space which suddenly smelt like a hairdresser’s shop.

She didn’t seem to have the gun with her now. But she struggled like fury in my arms instead for a minute, saying nothing, looking up at me with a fierce smile — which annoyed me all the more, so that eventually I pinched one of her wrists that I was holding down in fury.

‘Ouch! Don’t hurt.’ She spoke at last, aggrieved now, like a child losing a struggle with an older companion, sensing a dangerous viciousness in the other which they know they can no longer deal with. ‘Can’t you play without hurting?’

She tried to lift her head up but I forced her back against the broken branches of the bush. ‘Du calme, du calme,’ she said then, accepting matters, her heart beating furiously, making her small breasts jump in strange spasms.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Du bloody “calme” indeed — with live ammunition!’

‘It was a game — I left the gun on the jetty for you — didn’t you see it?’

‘I came round the other way. I knew you’d say it was an accident or a game. But how do I really know?’

I began bending her arm. ‘What on earth do you think you’re bloody well doing firing guns at people, you bitch.’

‘Please — you’re hurting!’

‘I mean to. So tell me: the truth — go on.’ I twisted the arm a little more. ‘Why? Why try and kill me?’

She turned her face away and the smile had gone.

‘I — wasn’t!’ she screeched. ‘I was terrified myself when the thing went off. I was just playing with it. I found it in your pocket —’

‘And why don’t you want Lindsay found — or for me to go and see Aunt Susan. Why have you been lying —’

‘I haven’t.’

‘No? Well, not telling me the truth then.’ I gave another twist. ‘That’s worse than lying — when I’m trying to help. It’s all too serious now. You better tell me!’

I was furious. But I knew I’d really hurt her if I kept on turning her arm. So I relaxed my grip a fraction. And taking this as a first sign of my relenting, Rachel started to cry suddenly and I let her go entirely as streams of anguished sound filled the afternoon, a well of some terrible emotion breaking out as she lay in the bush covering her eyes, trying to wipe them with one arm, the other lying numbed beside her — so that I felt I’d be sick with horror — and the hatred I now felt for myself in hurting her so, someone loved, that I had stalked to a death, it seemed, lying like a broken doll now in the Philadelphus bush.

And then, as in the past — when some blazing row had finally released each to the other — we found the threads once more that held us together, quicker now than before, when several days might pass without a word. Anger became a key to peace in a matter of minutes here and I wondered if we might be growing up at last.

‘I’m frightened,’ she said eventually, sitting up in the orange bush and brushing the petals off her tummy.

‘I can see that — drinking that way in London, letting off revolvers at me. But why?’ I touched the tip of her nose, then ran my thumb gently down from the corner of her eye, taking the last moisture away.

‘I suppose I wanted to find Lindsay in my own way. And when you turned up — I knew I couldn’t.’

‘Yes. But why?’

She licked her lips in the dry heat, as if tasting something. ‘In the past,’ she said. ‘It must have been when you started talking about Aunt Susan — just before you swam off.’

‘That was why you fired at me?’

‘I told you I didn’t mean it. It scared me much more …’ She looked at me vacantly. I could sense that at any moment she might stall, go back on the truths that I felt were just about to emerge from her.

‘Come on, Rachel. It must be more than an accident. You told me in London how you had this terrible sense of insecurity and didn’t know why —’

‘I still don’t know!’

‘But you were close to it — just then, before I swam out, when I mentioned seeing Aunt Susan.’

‘Yes — yes, I was,’ she admitted.

‘You have such recall — over other things. But not this. The classic case of a block.’

She nodded. But then she said, ‘A block?’

‘Yes — I was talking about fishing, you remember — about our trolling for pike and you said it was too hot. And before that we’d talked about people being incompatible, even though they so wanted to be together. And then I mentioned Susan. That was the sequence: affairs going wrong, pike-fishing and then Aunt Susan.’ And I rushed on now, certain that I had isolated something important. ‘And remember in London — that day you told me about: you were up in the copper beech and you saw your father going down to the loch and you followed him and saw him — alone — trolling for pike. But afterwards, you saw Aunt Susan with him in the back of the boat. It was she who was fishing for pike and it suddenly all made sense to you, because Lindsay never went out in the boat fishing alone. You saw all this in your mind afterwards, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ she said doubtfully.

‘Well — yes — so it’s because of something to do with Aunt Susan that you don’t want Lindsay found. Or at least, you don’t want him found in any way through her. That’s what it amounts to: she knows something — and you know it too, unconsciously — to Lindsay’s disadvantage. And I know all this — or sense it at least — which is why you felt like shooting me just now.’

‘I didn’t! It just went off!’

I thought I was losing her then, that she had become afraid of the truths she felt rising in her, was finally unable to face them. So I leant forward to kiss her, as if to rescue the truth in this way before it drowned again — and draw it out, once and for all, from that darkness which she had maintained for so long about her father.

And she kissed me, too — putting her arms about me, so that we both fell into the broken orange bush.

Afterwards, when we’d pushed our way back through the undergrowth to the jetty and she was putting on her bathing costume, while I was untying the boat, she said ‘When you first kissed me then I had such a surprise, such a strange feeling, my mind going all woggly.’

‘The earth sinking?’

‘No. When you kissed me, I saw —’ She stopped. ‘Can you clip this up for me? I can’t —’

I came up and fixed the straps at the back of her costume and then she said, ‘Of course, it was all clear back there — when you kissed me: it was Aunt Susan who was being kissed. That’s what I saw when I went down to the lake that afternoon as a child — that’s what Lindsay was doing, there — in that boat.’

She turned and we both looked with surprised disbelief at the old green rowing boat which had drifted out a little from the island while our backs were turned, as if inhabited by some life of its own now — or by some other life — moving gently away across the water.

I picked the little revolver up from the jetty and opened the chamber. She had only put one shell in. Had she really wanted to kill me, I thought, she would surely have filled the chamber up, waited until I’d swum nearer the island and then had six shots at me. I had to suppose, in the event, that she’d told me the truth, that it had been an accident — or a game — taken from childhood and spiced here with a more elaborate, adult danger: a dangerous charade which we had finally defused and whose message we had interpreted at last in the shape of Aunt Susan being kissed in a boat thirty years before. Yet there remained, for all that, some ambiguous residue about the events of the afternoon — a matter left still undecided, some unresolved notion or frustration on Rachel’s part, a kind of madness which our renewed loving hadn’t cured.

3

All the same, Rachel took up the search for Lindsay again, there and then. At least, she came with me up to the attics that evening and together we sorted through more of her father’s papers.

‘It’s funny,’ I said, as we made our way through the minute, white-washed maids’ rooms before going up the narrow staircase into the attics themselves, ‘Lindsay used to keep his old train sets up here, all those wonderful big black clockwork engines and yellow carriages. But there’s none of them around at all here now. Just a few rails.’ I prodded a rusty example lying on the floor with my shoe. ‘And a broken signal.’

‘They must be somewhere about.’

‘No. I’ve looked.’

‘In some cupboard, then. The house is full of cupboards.’

We’d come up into the first of the attics then where I’d put a box aside with one or two things I thought might be important in it. ‘This is the only railway thing I found — this membership card.’ I showed it to Rachel. ‘You see — “The Oxford and Cambridge Model Railway Society, 17 The Rise, Bow Brickhill, Bletchley, Buckinghamshire.” With Lindsay’s name. And the date at the bottom: 1932. I don’t follow it.’

‘What is there to follow?’

‘Why is the Society in such an out of the way place? Why not in either Oxford or Cambridge itself? And why was there such a society in the first place? For children, yes. But for undergraduates?’

‘Daddy was always mad about trains. And I suppose the two Universities joined together — there wouldn’t have been enough members otherwise.’

‘But why in Bletchley?’

‘Why not? Maybe it was halfway between Oxford and Cambridge. Buckinghamshire, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, of course.’ I suddenly saw the reason for this unlikely site. ‘It must have been on the old Oxford to Cambridge line, so the members could get to it equally well from either university.’

‘Probably.’

‘That explains it.’ Yet still there was something unexplained about this society which irked me. ‘Even so, it must have been quite a trip to make just for a club evening. A train journey each time you wanted to play with your model engines.’

‘Part of the fun, surely, if you were train-mad.’

Afterwards we started through some more old cardboard boxes and suitcases, squatting on the rough wood, a single light-bulb above us. I’d been looking, without success, for some evidence of the Yugoslav in the Brigadier’s tale, of the Croat who had tried to kill himself on the rail siding in Austria just after the war: Lindsay’s friend from his time at the Zagreb Consulate in the thirties — a teacher, the Brigadier had thought. But there had been no sign of him anywhere, not even in a case full of Yugoslav papers, and I’d given up trying to identify him.

But then I came on some old folders packed tight with papers dealing with Lindsay’s bee-keeping activities before the war: Ministry of Agriculture pamphlets and other advisory texts for the most part, together with a number of catalogues from bee suppliers in the home counties. And it was while thumbing quickly through one of these that the letter dropped out: a neatly folded but badly typed letter, in English, with the heading ‘Harvatski Narodni Univerzitet’ and dated April, 1936.

It was written to Lindsay in his official capacity at the Consulate — a formally polite enquiry asking him if he could send the address in London of the appropriate library or Ministry where the writer could obtain some bee-keeping information he needed not then available in Yugoslavia — and particularly instructions on how to deal with a new variety of foul brood. The letter was signed: ‘Dr Ivo Kovačič’, Assistant Lecturer in English at Zagreb University. Here, I thought, must be the Croat whom Lindsay had betrayed on the rail siding thirty years before — who’d then been sent packing, back over the border, into the merciless arms of Tito’s partisans. There was nothing else on him, however. Rachel had never heard of him and I had to assume the Brigadier had probably been correct: this old Croat nationalist had ended up in a lime quarry thirty years before.

Throughout our searches that evening we were looking, too, for some evidence of Lindsay’s apparently close relationship with Susan.

‘It may have been nothing more than a friendly peck on the cheek you saw in the boat that afternoon,’ I said, as we went on through the boxes.

‘But they weren’t friends — that’s the whole point. She always loathed Daddy. I can remember the silences when they were together, like ice.’

Rachel wiped the sweat off her hands with a hanky. We were close together on our knees, perched under the eaves and the long day’s heat had made it oppressive. ‘We thought Susan an old dame, all dressed in brown like a stick,’ Rachel went on. ‘But that’s only because we were very young then. In fact, she can’t have been more than forty — she was a year or so older than Eleanor. To an adult she would have seemed quite young and attractive.’

‘You think she had some affair with Lindsay, that he dropped her? And that’s why she was so cold with him?’

‘Might explain the awful unease I felt at the time — some sort of great stress in the household then.’

‘Don’t forget, Patrick died at the end of the war.’

‘This was before Patrick died, I’m sure.’

‘The kissing in the boat?’

‘Yes.’

‘Which means Lindsay must have been up here on leave — which means, if they had any sort of relationship or affair, it must have started before the war.’

‘Yes,’ Rachel said decisively.

‘I’m not so sure I believe it, you know. Much more likely just a placatory offering, that kiss. Not important. Or you’ve got it mixed up and it was Madeleine you saw in the boat that afternoon.’

Rachel eased herself on the bare floorboards and folded her hands in her lap. ‘You think I’ve invented Susan as a rival for Lindsay’s affections, don’t you, in order to justify what you see as my own insatiable love for him? That I’ve set Susan up as a wicked temptress taking Lindsay away from me.’

‘You’ve put it better than I could, I think.’

‘Well, who can tell?’ Rachel looked as if she truly couldn’t. ‘But I don’t think I’ve done that,’ she went on.

Certainly there was no documentary evidence in the attics to substantiate Rachel’s claim. I don’t know what we seriously thought there would be. What did we expect? Old love letters, a diary? Certainly there was nothing of the kind. There was only one particular photograph in a trunk among a lot of others in old yellow Kodak folders — the excess snaps of three or four decades that hadn’t made it into the family albums downstairs in the drawing-room. I’d looked through this trunk quickly before. But now, with Rachel with me, I studied the photographs more carefully, helped this time by her comments and interpretations.

The photograph was on its own, not part of any sequence, as though it had slipped from a folder or had been sent to the family as a holiday memento by some outsider who had taken it. It showed Lindsay as a young man (his hair combed sideways and quite dark, while I had always known it straight back and half-white) with two women on the deck of a river steamer somewhere. It looked like the Rhine, for there were steeply rising hills, criss-crossed with vines, on either side of the water.

‘Yes,’ Rachel said. ‘That’s Lindsay. With Eleanor and Susan.’

The two women were sitting at a deck table, with Lindsay standing between in a Fair Isle sweater and a baggy pair of pants that looked like cricket flannels, his hands lightly on the women’s shoulders, bending down towards the camera with a confident, almost cheeky smile.

‘Some jolly holiday down the Rhine, that’s all,’ I said. ‘Mid-thirties, by the clothes.’

‘So — they had the opportunity. Didn’t they?’ Rachel looked up at me enquiringly. ‘Just the three of them.’ She had changed subtly, I thought, from her father’s supporter to being his prosecutor. And so I reversed my own role and became his advocate.

‘How do you know? There were probably four of them — the person who took the snap as well. A friend of Susan’s.’

Rachel picked up the photo again and I leaned over her shoulder, the yellow light above us illuminating this forty-year old holiday more sharply. The two women looked remarkably alike without somehow giving the impression of any similar temperament. They seemed divided, each in her own world — as Lindsay divided them physically, standing between them. One of them — Eleanor — was smiling slightly, while Susan’s face remained severe. Both of them in long cardigans and rather full-bodiced dresses, dark hair parted precisely in the middle, they nonetheless seemed to come from different worlds, as if the figures for rain and shine in a weather house had both come out at the same moment.

Behind them were other groups at deck tables just visible. And here I could just see a man in uniform in the background, standing against the ship’s rail: a tightly belted jacket with a single line of braid right round the collar and a steeply raked, peaked cap. It might have been an SS officer’s outfit, I thought. And then I wondered: what were these three doing holidaying in Germany at this time? Especially Lindsay and Eleanor with such apparent socialist sympathies. It must have been about 1935, only a year after the fascist atrocities in Vienna which Lindsay had described in his letters to Eleanor. Why holiday in Germany just then — with such recent and unpleasant memories of what the Nazis were capable of? And if Eleanor was a serious socialist at that time, what of Susan? Was she socialist too? I asked Rachel.

‘Just the opposite, I’d say. Tory to her bones. She was very fond of Eleanor. But they were quite different.’

‘You can sense that in the snap: they feel different.’

‘Susan didn’t hold much with gadding about the place: very much the vicarage girl, the stay-at-home potential Lady Bountiful of the Manor. I’m sure she’d have been pro-Hitler then, at least to begin with — until Chamberlain said we’d have to fight him. She thought Eleanor was going to the dogs with her university life: quite the wrong thing. They were chalk and cheese.’

‘Then what were they all doing on that boat together — in the middle of Nazi Germany?’

‘Trips down the Rhine would have been all right for her. And the Dutch tulip fields. And she’d have gone with Eleanor. She had this thing about saving her.’

‘From Lindsay? Surely he’d have represented every fine Tory, land-owning virtue for her — the Laird of Glenalyth.’

‘No. Saving her from … well, I don’t know.’ Rachel looked genuinely blank. ‘The perils of thought, I suppose; and perhaps you’re right — perhaps Eleanor was left-wing at College. And Susan would certainly have been annoyed by that.’

‘When were they married, Lindsay and Eleanor?’

‘End of 1935 I think. Or 1936. Patrick was born at the beginning of 1937 — the same year as Eleanor died.’

‘So when that snap was taken they weren’t married?’

‘No. I don’t think so.’

‘I wonder if your kissing in the boat on the lake doesn’t make some sense now,’ I said.

‘Why?’

‘When you said Susan was a potential Lady Bountiful of the Manor: it’s possible, isn’t it, that’s why she wanted to be with Lindsay? You said she was keen on “saving” Eleanor: well, that’s what she may have been trying to do — going down the Rhine, saving her from Lindsay, so that she might marry him. And hence her sour look in that photo: she obviously wasn’t succeeding.’

‘She’s rather a formal old party, you know. She’d never have thought of marrying Lindsay unless he’d given her grounds for thinking it possible.’

‘Perhaps he did. And perhaps unwittingly. There’s often that sort of trouble between a man and two sisters.’

And then it suddenly struck me what might have happened: Susan and Eleanor were alike in their striking, if rather severe good looks, yet quite opposite, it seemed, in their political views. If Lindsay, as I’d established, seemed to have embraced both the left and right wings at this time, what more natural than that each of these sisters should have become attracted by these quite separate parts of his personality: Eleanor reaching out for what was socialist in him, while Susan had taken to all the Tory elements in his nature. Yet there remained a startling flaw in this proposal: what person, by nature, can honestly embrace two utterly opposed political dogmas at the same time? By nature — and especially given Lindsay’s formal dispositions here — holding such political faiths simultaneously was surely as impossible as actually making love to two women at the same time. It followed, of course, that Lindsay had assumed one of these faiths — and that only one was natural to him. But which one? And which of the two sisters, given the truth of Rachel’s memory of the boat, had fallen for the genuine article? Aunt Susan herself was the only person who might help me to a closer view of the truth.

Susan Bailey’s father had been the Church of Scotland vicar of a parish outside the small cathedral town of Dunkeld, some twenty miles west of Glenalyth. And though, as Madeleine had told me, the living there had long since withered and died and the church had become a part ruin, Susan still lived there in the old rectory, a small, white-faced, Georgian house, surrounded by rook-infested trees on a rise above the Tay, looking out over the railway bridge down the valley where it crossed the big river, taking the main line northwards.

I’d phoned her the day before and she remembered me at once, in a crisp voice — not aged at all, it seemed, the anglicised Scots tones of another age giving precise commands down the line. And I thought then how unlikely it was that she would tell me anything about Lindsay, so that I mentioned nothing about him on the phone, hoping to find my chance when we met in person.

Apart from some daily help from the woman in the gate lodge she lived entirely on her own, but not without money and with two Scots terriers, one black, the other a Highland white — just like the whisky advertisements. All three of them came out of the glass porch to meet me as I drew up in the black Volvo Estate. The rooks cackled fearfully in the upper branches of the tall chestnuts and the terriers barked.

We shook hands and I felt like a doctor with bad news from the big dark car, the photograph I’d taken from the attic burning a hole in my inside pocket. But she took my hand in both of hers with an unexpected warmth and a smile that was affectionate as well as simply cordial.

‘Peter! Here you are: twenty years to the month since I last saw you. I was looking in my diary. 1956 — that summer you were up here, you’d broken your heel, it was all in plaster — do you remember? It’s so nice of you to have come and seen me. Come in, come in. Or shall we walk?’

She was over seventy. But something — exercise and the moorland life — had kept her young. And though the dark hair of the old photograph had turned quite white, the rest of her appearance was that of a woman at least ten years younger. She had an extraordinarily good complexion for someone her age — fine and pale, the skin barely wrinkled apart from vague indentations at the corners of her eyes and mouth, the mere tracings of age. Whatever pain and disappointment she’d suffered was not apparent here, so that once more I began to doubt my earlier deductions about her and Lindsay. No hurt seemed to lie behind her calm, faint blue eyes; a refined and courteous confidence marked her long straight face. Human aberration seemed a complete stranger in this self-sufficient, sensible, attractive old lady.

She took a blackthorn walking-stick from the porch and put on another of the straw hats that I’d remembered her in, and together we walked away from the house, a small breeze running up from the Tay valley beneath us, just sharpening the hot afternoon, stirring the huge chestnuts, leaving minute sighs in their branches, the only other sound a full murmur of bees and inseets devouring all the blossom of high summer. We went down the back drive, exchanging news and Smalltalk, until we came to a box-hedged path that led to the old parish church, a cracked steeple and yew trees looming up ahead of us, the dogs worrying at imaginary rabbits in the thick undergrowth, but starting nothing in the drowsy heat of this enclosed space where the breeze had died.

‘Lindsay’s dog, Ratty,’ I said casually. ‘He’s an extraordinary creature. Almost speaks to you.’

She took no notice of this casual introduction to Lindsay, replying without any change of tone: ‘Terriers do, some of them. Uncanny.’

I opened an old wicket gate and the dark granite church came clearly into view ahead of us now and she called to the dogs, who had disappeared. We looked at the dilapidated building. Slates had fallen from the steep roof and a crack in the stone was about to bisect the square belfry.

‘I wanted it repaired,’ she said, waving her stick at it. ‘But the estimates were preposterous. And the Commissioners weren’t interested. I didn’t want it to fall down.’

The dogs joined us now and we walked towards the vestry door. Then she said quite casually, so that I thought she had sensed all along the real reasons behind my visit: ‘Lindsay and Eleanor were married here, you know. Christmas 1935. I always thought it such bad luck, having a wedding and Christmas almost together. Well, that was one reason for keeping it up. The dead will have to look after themselves, don’t you think?’ She waved her stick at the old tombstones falling about in the long summer grass, poppies rearing up here and there and huge white daisies, the whole place gone to seed in waves of bright colour.

‘But there’s something living about a marriage — that you shared in — that makes you want to keep the building where it happened.’ She spoke in so sensible a tone that sentimentality could be no part of her thought. ‘So much sadness about churches,’ she went on. ‘Except for people marrying in them. Worth preserving for that, for Lindsay and Eleanor’s sake.’ I remembered Rachel telling me how Susan had made a shrine at the Rectory out of Eleanor’s things. It seemed true, and yet a surprising thing for such an apparently sensible old woman to do.

She went on ahead of me now, picking her way confidently through the overgrown tombs towards the vestry door which she opened with a key, and we walked out of the heat into a musty damp, the smell of many winters’ ruin, where the water had stained the Victorian fleur-de-lis wallpaper, running the red pattern together into what looked like streaks of blood now. There was a pile of hymn-books and psalters on a bench and a lot of mouse droppings in all the corners. She picked up one of the hymnals, attempting to clean the mould off it with a cuff.

‘It’s what you came to talk about, I imagine: Lindsay. And us,’ she said without looking up.

‘Well —’

‘Why not? The others won’t. Apart from a few words from Madeleine I’ve heard nothing.’ She opened a cupboard now and took out a large, leather-bound book, putting it up on a small vestry lectern before thumbing through the pages. It was the church’s marriage register.

‘There,’ she said, as I came to her shoulder. She pointed to the signatures. Lindsay’s I recognised at once; clear and precise. Eleanor’s was quite different: a sprawling, unformed signature, flowery almost. The date: ‘December 18th, 1935.’

The vestry door was open and I could feel the wafts of heat coming in from the shimmering afternoon outside. One of the terriers was flat out, panting on the threshold, while the other, the younger white one, looked outside, whimpering minutely, still anxious to play. The world stopped just then. Again, as in that moment on the porch at Glenalyth while I was talking to the old Brigadier and Ratty had come behind us, I had the clear impression that Lindsay was in the room with us; that, through looking at these faded signatures, I had gained access to the exact moment in time when he and Eleanor had made them; a feeling that wasn’t eerie at all, since it was so clear: that I was in the presence of Lindsay and his first wife — who were there about us, in all but a material sense, in that small musty room.

‘It snowed all day. Like a fairy tale.’ Susan broke the silence. ‘Half the guests never got here. And most that did had to stay the night — strewn all over the hall and drawing-room.’ She smiled at the memory. But again it was simply an amused, rather than any sentimental reflection on the past.

‘There was snow, was there?’

A bumble bee flew into the room and droned about for a moment, before swinging away out into the warm air again.

‘They should have put it off till spring, when weddings are.’ Susan closed the register and put it away. ‘But Lindsay was going to have been abroad then. So it was all held in a snowstorm. Just cleared a bit during the reception, I remember. The sun came out then and the champagne was too cold.’

She pulled the tattered vestry curtain aside and we went into the chancel of the church.

‘I know you don’t think I can tell you where Lindsay is,’ she said, walking up to the old mahogany altar rails and looking at the east window above them: a picture of Christ in the pre-Raphaelite style with the Lamb of God in his arms, and a lot of very woolly sheep beneath on a green hill. ‘So you must want something else.’ She gazed vacantly up at the bleeding crown of thorns which seemed so inappropriate an addition to this otherwise placid Victorian agricultural scene.

‘You didn’t like Lindsay, did you? I wondered why.’ I thought the time had come to be honest with her.

‘I liked Eleanor.’

She turned and came down the chancel steps, walking past me rather slowly and regally, her face set now with a purpose that it had lacked before, a kind of brave disappointment in her features. She was like a bride, stood up at the very last moment, returning from the alter alone, but determined to go forth and make the best of things.

She walked down the nave now and stopped in front of another stained-glass window half-way along the south wall. Here, I could see, was a more recent design in the leads, a portrait in the literal, chocolate-box style of the thirties of a dark-haired woman set against a background of rhododendrons in full flower whom I took at first to be Mary Magdalen depicted in some Scottish grove. But on looking more closely I was surprised by the legend beneath: ‘In Memoriam: Eleanor Phillips. 1912–1937. “When the day breaks — and the shadows flee away.”’ There was no other comfort added, just the plain statement of memory, of birth and mortality, embedded in the lemon-yellow and green glass. And now I was aware of a great emptiness in the church, of present life alone in the musty building: no longer the extraordinarily vibrant sense of Lindsay and his first wife that had so clearly been about me in the vestry, but the feeling that, without knowing anything of their life in between, I had experienced both their marriage and their death to each other in the space of a few minutes.

She said, ‘Rachel has been talking to you. I was so sorry you two didn’t marry. That was when you last came up here — in ’56. I thought you should have. But Lindsay said you had no prospects, that you were too young. Yet he was only twenty-five when he married.’

‘It was hardly his fault. Though with a bit of encouragement from him, Rachel might have changed her mind at that point.’

‘Exactly. But that was the problem, wasn’t it? He wanted her for himself. He was such a possessive man, without knowing it. And, of course, no one else suspected it. He wouldn’t let her go. It was as simple as that. And I told him so.’

‘Yes, I’ve said the same thing to Rachel. But it never did any good. People set on a course —’

‘Oh yes, I know — just like Eleanor.’ Susan chuckled almost, waving her stick at the glass, at the dark-haired, idealised woman with almond-shaped eyes and thin cheeks who gazed out of the rhododendron bush with the formal serenity of an old court photograph, a beautifully starved debutante lost in a wood. ‘Eleanor would never see the same thing — that polite ruthlessness of Lindsay’s. But I did. Which was probably why we never married in the end.’

‘I’d no idea …’

The church suddenly started to fill again: another door had opened into the past — into other times and people and the fevers then, who filed into the building now like a late congregation.

‘Oh, I wanted to,’ Susan went on much more brightly now. ‘In many other ways — for other things.’ She paused and came closer to the picture of her sister, inspecting it minutely as if searching out some invisible mark or sign known only to her.

‘I never knew that.’

‘Why should you? No one did. Not even Eleanor.’ She spoke to the picture now. ‘But now that he’s gone, why not? One gets so tired of living with omissions all one’s life.’ She leant forward and rubbed at what I saw now was a speck of bird dropping on the glass. ‘My father had this window put up as a reminder, since she was buried so far away. It isn’t very good.’

‘In … Zagreb, was it?’

‘Yes. Huge, heavy, Viennese sort of cemetery: you know — angels playing granite violins. I went to see her tomb once.’

‘I never really heard what happened out there,’ I said gently, still thinking that Susan might suddenly decide to dry up on all this uncomfortable past and start talking about the weather and the crops. But she didn’t.

‘She ran out the front door of the Palace Hotel one morning — straight under a tram,’ she said shortly.

‘Yes. I knew that —’

‘Do you think what happened between them then has something to do with Lindsay’s disappearance now?’ Susan turned from the glass and looked at me rather carefully.

‘It — yes, it may have.’

‘Very well then. I’ll tell you, because I think you may be right.’

We left the church then, and walked back by the box hedge, and then towards the formal pleasure gardens at the far side of the rectory, the dogs recovered now after their shady siesta, off after imaginary rabbits once more. The afternoon was warm and sweet-smelling as we came in among the rose beds.

‘I was a little older than Lindsay after all,’ she said, picking up a trug and secateurs from a wooden wheelbarrow before moving into the bushes. ‘And Eleanor was several years younger. Makes a difference when one is young. He and I were in our late teens. Eleanor was still almost a child. My father had been padre in one of the General’s regiments during the Great War, so we were accepted neighbours of the Phillipses. Spent whole days over at Glenalyth, as Lindsay did over here.’

‘With just you two girls?’

‘Yes, but he fished, you see: fly fishing, trout and salmon on the Tay here. There was none of that on the loch at Glenalyth. So we got to see quite a lot of him during the holidays. It wasn’t difficult —’ She stopped, bending down over a recalcitrant thorny bloom, trying to cut it firmly, and yet at an angle, at its base.

‘Yes?’ I said.

‘Well, things were excessively formal in those days, you know. Especially among families like ours. Nonetheless, suitable marriages were pondered on, well ahead of time, then. He and I were not discouraged, shall I say. And Lindsay was “suitable” to put it mildly. Besides, I liked him a lot.’

Susan moved on to another rose bush, a delicate crimson-leafed flower whose perfume, even in the heat, was clear as a bell. ‘He was rather a diffident, withdrawn person — an only child who never got on well with his father, the rough old General. And I liked that side of him. But Lindsay knew what he wanted, too. There was a kind of … frustrated confidence about him. In short, why elaborate —’ She bent over the heart of the rose bush. ‘We took to each other. That was the end of his first year at Oxford, the summer of 1929 or ’30.’

Having taken a dozen sweet roses in the trug, we moved back now to a long wooden greenhouse at the top of the garden, where Susan inspected a small nectarine tree, trying feebly to climb up one wall, with fruit the size of a marble. ‘Looks like leaf curl, I’m afraid,’ she said and I thought once more she was going to die on me.

‘You suggested — he had a ruthless streak,’ I reminded her.

‘Yes.’ She turned from the little tree, rubbing one of the diseased leaves to dust in her fingers. ‘I first noticed it in silly things — in games. Tennis or croquet, that sort of thing.’ She smiled now at the memory. ‘Lindsay was really a very bad loser. Terrible. Though he hid this very well, too. Especially if things went badly against him. Very hard to spot. But I saw it several times: calling a ball out on the line more than once, you know?’ She turned to me, suddenly gesturing with her hands, and saying briskly, ‘You see, he desperately wanted to win. A sort of insecurity in the shadow of his war-like Papa, I suppose. And I quite understood that. But then, well, one day — it was up there by that sundial.’ She waved her stick through the door at a broken marble column in the middle of the pleasure garden. ‘We were standing there and I asked him why he did this, why he cheated in small things. He denied it point-blank. And we never talked about it again.’

We left the baking greenhouse now and went down through the pleasure garden to a little summerhouse looking out on the longish grass of the old tennis court, where we took wicker chairs, and the two dogs lapped thirstily at bowls of water which Susan poured for them out of a watering can before filling an old vase on the table and starting to arrange the roses in it.

‘The next summer he asked me to marry him. We were alone, he and I, most of that summer. Eleanor had gone to a crammers in Edinburgh. She had a chance of a place in Lady Margaret Hall that September. Well, I was very cool-headed about his offer. All the same, I said yes, though we didn’t tell either of our parents — which must show some sort of doubt either he or I had about it all. That was 1932. Well, he went back to Oxford then and we wrote to each other — rather careful letters. But the style of the times, I suppose. I was in Edinburgh by then — trying to be a secretary — had rooms just next the Lyceum Theatre with an old cousin. We saw each other over Christmas and all seemed well. And then in his New Year letters he started talking about Socialism — about Marx and about completely changing society and all that — and about Eleanor. He was seeing quite a lot of her in Oxford by then. And that’s when it all started going downhill between us.’

I had picked up an old croquet mallet from an open box beside me and was letting it swing gently between my knees. One of the terriers got up anxiously, thinking I was about to start a game. I put the mallet down.

‘He had obviously persuaded Eleanor of his ideas.’ Susan finished her flower arrangement. ‘But I’m afraid he never persuaded me.’

‘But surely,’ I said tactfully, ‘that wasn’t at all uncommon then. Young people, especially undergraduates: so many of them went left in the thirties. It was a bad time —’

‘Oh yes, I know all that.’ Susan looked at me as if I were being intentionally obtuse. ‘I was something of a reformer myself by then. Not socialist, but liberal, if you like.’

‘So — why did it go wrong between you?’

‘Because I became convinced that Lindsay’s socialism — his communism even, for that’s what it was — was a complete fraud. He didn’t mean it — which is what came to infuriate me about him and Eleanor: that he made her believe in it all, hook, line and sinker — without believing in it himself. It was a lie.’

I was amazed by this ready confirmation of my own thoughts about Lindsay. ‘But how did you become convinced — that he was lying about his beliefs?’

‘It was my interest in crosswords and puzzle games and clues generally. I should have been a ’tec writer.’ She smiled, putting down the roses now and straightening her fingers as if they’d been too long at a typewriter. ‘I used to be very sharp — too sharp — about what people said, the way they contradicted themselves.’ She paused now, as if considering a new and risky thought and wondering whether to voice it. ‘You see, the one thing Lindsay was never very interested in was verse. Well, I was in a quiet way. It was when he came up here — that would be the summer of ’33 — and started quoting all the moderns then, Auden and Day Lewis and the others. That’s when I first had my suspicions. I remember particularly walking over the moors at Glenalyth one afternoon — Eleanor was with us — and Lindsay started to quote one of those apocalyptic socialist millenia poems, something from Auden about “giving away all the farms”, I remember. And he said that this would mean giving up all the tenanted farms on the Glenalyth estate which he was going to own. Well, I knew this was ridiculous, that he was saying something he didn’t really believe at all. Lindsay was very land-conscious, you know. And I told him so afterwards — that he was cheating again, or playing games. And we didn’t talk about getting married after that. There was a coldness …’

Susan looked out onto the sun-filled lawn, living that coldness again, her face absolutely immobile.

‘The funny thing was,’ she went on, ‘was that by next year, when he’d left Oxford and was cramming for the FO exams before he was posted to Vienna, he’d completely given up all his left-wing business and taken just the opposite course: became very reactionary, never stopped running the socialists down and black-guarding Ramsay MacDonald — which was a sore temptation then, I’ll admit.’

‘But surely that was a fairly common process at the time? Simply a flirtation with Marx, and then over to the other side. Why should the whole thing have been fraudulent? Lindsay was growing up after all — in Oxford, full of extreme views: but temporary ones. I don’t find it unusual, his trying things out like that.’

‘Yes, I’ve thought of that, of course. But the fact is Lindsay had no extreme views in politics. The pro-Hitler line he took in the mid-thirties was as false as his earlier socialist enthusiasms. I’m sure of that.’

‘But how can you be sure?’

She stood up, taking the trug impatiently from the table, while the dogs came to a canine alert behind her.

‘If you’ve spent a great part of your childhood with someone, growing up together — and if you’ve been fond and close to them — you know. And I know: Lindsay was never more than a simple patriot at heart.’

‘But does one ever really know what happens inside someone else? I grew up with Rachel — just like you and Lindsay. Yet now I feel I never got to grips with the real person.’

Susan shrugged her shoulders. ‘Simply because Lindsay kept her in thrall. I was luckier. He didn’t fool me. It was Eleanor who suffered. Of course, what I’d like to know is why in the first place he pretended to all these things he didn’t believe in. Come, let’s have some tea.’

The dogs were allowed a saucer of cooled milky tea each, dispensed from an elegant Georgian silver teapot, while Susan and I ate some finely cut tomato sandwiches and crumbly oat-cakes prepared for us by the woman in the gate lodge. The drawing-room was bright and cheerful, at the corner of the house, with two large sash windows at each angle looking southwards down the tree-lined valley. There was a steady table in the middle, comfy chintz armchairs by the cold grate, some good Scottish watercolours about the well-papered walls, and what looked like an engraving of Byron to one side of the fine red marble mantelpiece, on which I saw a number of delicately carved wooden and enamelled music boxes — half a dozen perhaps; more, certainly, than the remainder of this collection which I had seen in the drawing-room in Hyde Park Square. Yet there was no sense of any shrine here — unless it were a most tactful one to the bad Lord B. himself. The room was as gracious and carefully composed as the woman who occupied it. Both the windows were partly open in the heat, letting in the summer, with a curtain on one of them half-drawn against the sun, leaving our heads in shade but falling on the silver tea-set and warming it with a great light.

‘You see, what I can’t understand,’ Susan said, ‘was why, not believing in all this socialist business himself, why he then encouraged Eleanor in it. That was the dishonest thing — and the cruellest. For it was she who suffered as a result, long before he did. Wherever he is.’ She looked out of the window dismissively, as though Lindsay had gone down the valley into some well-merited exile in a distant country.

‘You think her suicide came as a result of her believing in him — in their shared socialism, which he then denied?’

‘More than possible — that that was part of it.’

‘There were other parts?’

‘I … don’t know.’ She spoke more carefully now, I thought. ‘I wasn’t there at the time. Though I’d been in Zagreb that summer before she died. The four of us. We’d just come back from a motor trip through Slovenia.’

‘Four of you?’

‘Of course. Zlatko was with us.’

‘Who?’

‘Zlatko Rabernak, Lindsay’s Yugoslav friend.’

‘Not a university teacher?’

‘No. Zlatko was a musicologist and collector in Zagreb.’ She pointed to the row of music boxes on the mantelpiece. ‘All those. He was a great collector of them. Some they bought from him. But most he gave her.’

‘Of course, the music boxes. There are some in London. But I’d not heard of him.’

‘He was a dear friend.’ Susan refilled my cup. The tea was some delicious mix of Indian and China. ‘We’d taken holdiays together several times before,’ she continued lightly.

‘Down the Rhine?’

‘Yes. How did you know?’

I produced the old photograph from my pocket. ‘I found it in one of the attics at Glenalyth.’

Susan became animated now. ‘I have some rather better ones than that’ She stood up and went over to a bureau near the fireplace where she took out an album, bringing it back for me to look at.

‘There,’ she said, finding a page in the middle of the book. And now I saw a much fuller and more exact representation of that forty-year old holiday in Germany: some dozens of photographs of the three of them and the man Zlatko — a small-faced, bright-eyed, impish fellow with shiny dark hair going straight over his head: sitting on benches at a river-bank inn, picnicking by a car on a roadside or moving along narrow mountain paths in the sunny Rhineland of 1936. And I noticed how Susan’s expression here, unlike her gloomy mood in my own photograph, was almost invariably happy — especially in the snaps where she and Zlatko featured together.

Suddenly the question in the back of my mind occurred to me, clearly, but I couldn’t voice it somehow. It seemed impertinent to broach so private a thing. And it might not have been true in any case. But here, surely, was one possible answer. Of course, as I had said to Rachel, there had been four of them on that pre-war summer holiday in Germany — floating down the great river and cruising Hitler’s new autobahns in a Sunbeam Talbot. And since Lindsay and Eleanor were clearly spoken for at that time, Zlatko must have been Susan’s particular friend and companion. And if this were so, had there — as I sensed — been some trouble between the two of them then?

Susan had just described him as a ‘dear friend’: hers, presumably, as well as of the other two. Had Zlatko thrown Susan over in some way? And I remembered the music boxes then and Susan’s slightly tart comment: ‘Some they bought — but most he gave her.’ And I thought, too, how Rachel had told me that Susan had insisted on taking all these little boxes back after Eleanor’s death. Had she done this not to create any kind of shrine to Eleanor (and indeed there was no evidence of such in the house) but in order to take subsequently gifts which she had hoped to receive from Zlatko then? Failing with Lindsay, had she fallen in love with one of his friends — only to find that he, too, was engaged elsewhere. Had Zlatko taken — just as Lindsay had — first to her but then to her younger sister? Yet still I couldn’t put these questions in any direct way to Susan. They seemed too dense and complex, with the implication of appalling emotion, to survive an entry or clarification in this calm drawing-room. Yet I had to broach the topic in some way.

‘Is Zlatko still alive?’ I asked easily, without looking up from the album.

‘No idea, really.’

‘You don’t hear from him ever?’

‘No. Why?’

‘You mentioned — he was a dear friend,’ I said uneasily.

‘I see what you mean.’ And now Susan became Aunt Susan for the first time that afternoon, as she had been to Rachel and me in our childhood: a rather formidable, bossy lady in a long brown cardigan, someone difficult to appease whom one therefore tried to avoid. ‘I was very fond of Zlatko, that’s all — if that’s what you mean,’ she said shortly, closing the album.

I knew then that I had passed over the line between polite adult enquiry and childish impertinence with Susan; that I had prised open a wound in her and come into that brutal estate in memory which we keep most private, where we have been most hurt in some ancient battle.

‘I didn’t want to pry —’

‘How could you?’ she said angrily. ‘You weren’t even born then. Did you find something else in the attic?’

‘No.’

She became calm again after this outburst. ‘It’s so ridiculous … that one should be upset, so long afterwards. I’m sorry.’ She bent down and picked up the two saucers which the dogs had emptied.

‘No, it’s not ridiculous. We spend so much of our lives avoiding the truth. You said so yourself — in the church: “living so long with omissions”.’

Susan said nothing, both hands quietly on the table now in front of her, as if about to start something on a piano.

‘I’ve only ever prided myself on being sensible,’ she said at last. ‘Even the most difficult clue had an answer — a meaning was there somewhere. But I never, ever understood their lives, no matter how I’ve tried. Sense — and sentiment as well — I had both, I think. But the others, Zlatko and Eleanor — and Lindsay too, who was sucked into it — gave up any sensible answers then — in everything. Or perhaps Lindsay was simply mesmerised,’ Susan said, more to herself than to me. ‘Standing there, doing nothing, while Zlatko took over his wife.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘That’s what happened.’

‘Yes — he simply let her go.’

‘Did she want to go?’

‘I don’t know. I could never make the least sense out of it. It defied all reason.’

‘These sort of things usually do.’

The older dog moved over to the cold fireplace now and lay down, while the Highland terrier started to whine, anxious to be let out. ‘Oh, do be quiet Tomkins!’ But I got up and went to the door.

‘Of course, Lindsay may have wanted her away because he no longer shared her politics. She. may have become an embarrassment to him — and his FO career.’ I opened the door. But the dog wouldn’t go out now; it just sat there on the threshold looking up at me expectantly.

‘Yes,’ Susan said. ‘I’ve thought of that. And if it’s true — it’s quite appalling. Let him stay if he wants,’ she added. I closed the door and the dog followed me back to my seat. ‘Give him a bit of oatcake,’ Susan said. ‘That’s exactly what I meant,’ she went on, ‘when I told you how it was Eleanor who suffered for her beliefs, not Lindsay — who never held them.’

‘It’s a terrible tale. If it’s true —’

‘It is true. I saw it happen. And Zlatko told me himself — how he’d become involved with Eleanor, which is why I left that summer before she died.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Totally vague about it — they all were: said it was just something that “happened” — and that Eleanor was unhappy with Lindsay in any case. Well, I knew that. But I told him he shouldn’t let it happen —’

She paused now, as though aware of the element of personal bias she had allowed into her description.

‘And Lindsay,’ I said, covering the silence, ‘how did he explain it all afterwards to you?’

‘He never did — other than once ascribing Eleanor’s behaviour to a kind of madness.’

‘Well, there may have been that in it, too. There often is. How did you know Eleanor was unhappy with Lindsay?’

‘She talked to me. For the same reasons as I’d been, I think, though she wouldn’t admit it: she felt something basically false in him.’

‘Living a lie?’

‘Yes.’

‘You know that Lindsay was really working for British Intelligence for most of his career?’

‘Yes. At least, I learnt that only after the war.’

‘And that perhaps wives in such cases don’t always know what their husbands are really up to. It may, in any case, have been necessary for Lindsay to lead a double life — but especially if Eleanor had all these socialist sympathies. You could see the whole thing that way, couldn’t you? That Lindsay married Eleanor in good faith but subsequently his work required him — to withhold things from her, even to lie to her.’

Susan didn’t answer at once.

‘If you looked at the whole business quite without bias,’ I went on, ‘entirely objectively; it could make sense that way, couldn’t it?’

‘Yes, it could,’ Susan admitted at last.

‘And Zlatko was right. These things — I mean he and Eleanor — they do just “happen”.’

The little white dog started to whine again, looking towards the door, and this time I got up and put him firmly outside.

‘What you say makes objective sense, maybe,’ Susan said when I’d got back. ‘But you didn’t know the people involved, weren’t actually there. Subjectively the whole thing was a fearful mess.’

‘As it would be — because you were closely involved. I was simply trying to be fair to Lindsay.’

‘I see that,’ she said reasonably. ‘And perhaps you’re right. But it still doesn’t explain my feeling —’ She stopped, as though she’d quite lost the feeling. ‘My certainty almost, that all these political involvements of Lindsay’s were a charade. Simply wasn’t him.’

‘No, indeed — because British Intelligence could well have required him, from the start, to take up these fronts.’

‘Simply carrying out orders, you mean? Well, doesn’t that make it worse?’ Susan was firmly dismissive now. ‘If that’s so — and let’s say we agree that his socialism was all a pose — why did he encourage Eleanor in it initially? Share it with her, and then — forced into the opposite, reactionary extreme by his bosses — why did he deceive Eleanor about this new course? Why did he carry her along with him, marry her? He should have dropped her, long before, if he felt he couldn’t share anything in his professional life with her. Instead, he held onto her, he lied — he manipulated her.’

It was my turn for silence now. ‘Well?’ she asked.

‘Yes, I agree. It does seem … strange.’

‘Cruelty, surely; cheating of the worst sort.’

‘It’s putting country above people, of course. You said he was really a simple patriot at heart.’

‘Yes, a patriot. But not a fool. He knew right from wrong in personal affairs. You’re suggesting he was a simpleton — morally. That wasn’t so. He was a perfectly knowing person at heart, as well.’

Susan finished her little biography with some vehemence. It had a precision and feeling that smacked of the truth, of her direct experience of it and of her sad disgust with the man himself.

‘But,’ I said, ‘you told me you thought all this business with Eleanor had to do with his disappearance. How?’

‘I simply meant that anyone who behaved as he did then — so illogically and unfeelingly — well, one day it was bound to catch up with him.’

‘Isn’t that just the revenge of myth? In reality, don’t the worst rogues always go unhung?’

‘You admit it, then?’

‘No. Well, I don’t know. I’ve often wondered: does cause and effect really operate like that, so far apart in time?’

‘Yes. If you go on living your lies long enough.’

Susan looked at me critically.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘But I thought you might have meant something more precise —’

‘That Zlatko bumped him off, you mean? Forty years later? No.’ She smiled minutely and I was reminded again of the other Yugoslav in Zagreb — Ivo Kovačič, the bee-keeper and University professor whose letter to Lindsay I had found in the attic. I asked Susan if she’d known him.

‘Yes — a big man, very forthcoming, very nationalistic about Croatia, talked endlessly. We used to meet at that café in Zagreb on the main square, the Gradska something. And you’re right — he kept bees. We had some of his honey, I remember. And Lindsay rented his house — when he first came to the Consulate in Zagreb, yes — up in a nice park above the town. Why?’

‘They were quite close friends, then?’

‘Yes, I’m sure they were. Lindsay had a lot of friends out there at the time. They were very kind …’ She let the sentence die away, seeming to remember that time indecisively, warily almost.

I had one further and, in the circumstances now, most difficult point to try and raise with Susan: Rachel’s vision of her and Lindsay in the boat that afternoon, ten years after the tragedy in Zagreb. In the light of what Susan had just told me, it seemed more than ever an unlikely view.

‘Rachel,’ I said, ‘I wanted to ask you — she’s told me of feeling some sort of terrible unease as a child in Glenalyth, during and just after the war. Well, you were often there then, you remember — you came over to look after us sometimes. I wondered why. Why you did this, feeling about Lindsay as you did?’

‘I helped out because I was — still part of the family,’ she said firmly, shades of Aunt Susan beginning to move over her face again.

‘Even after all you’d been through — with Eleanor and Lindsay?’

‘With Lindsay? No. It was the family. As I say. Not Lindsay.’ She spoke abruptly now, her words reflecting some uncontrolled staccato in her thoughts. ‘It was you. And Patrick. And Rachel.’

‘Yes, it was Rachel who felt this unease. She told me yesterday. She suddenly thought she knew why: a sense of antagonism between you and Lindsay —’

‘Well, there was that.’

‘But then she says — and it may be nonsense — she says she saw you in the boat one afternoon together — she was hiding on the shore somewhere. And — there didn’t seem to be any antagonism at all.’

Susan stood up and went over to the mantelpiece where she took a pair of spectacles out of a case and put them on, before turning back to me. And now she seemed the image of her former self, the rather bitter schoolmarm that I remembered. But when she spoke her voice was quite calm.

‘Poor Rachel. She was so insecure then.’

‘Yes, but why?’

‘Because of Patrick. Have you found out — something in the attics? I can’t think —’

‘No, what?’

‘Patrick was our son. Lindsay’s and mine, not Eleanor’s,’ she said quite simply. ‘That’s why I was at Glenalyth, looking after you all quite a lot.’ She moved over to the open window where the bees were loudly sampling a cotoneaster bush just outside. ‘No one knew. Except Eleanor — and then she died. And no one knows now. And he’s dead, too.’

‘I’m … sorry.’

Susan turned from the window. ‘It wasn’t the done thing, you see, in those days. And now it’s all so irrelevant, with none of them left.’

‘All the same — I’m terribly …’ But there was nothing more I could say. The chasm was too deep, had no bottom to it.

‘It doesn’t square at all, does it, with what I’ve told you — about being sensible. Well, it never has to me either.’ She walked over to the mantelpiece again and now I recognised one of the water-colours above it as the loch at Glenalyth. Susan glanced at it. ‘Oh, yes, Rachel probably did see us in the boat that afternoon.’ She stopped, before continuing forcefully. ‘I hate the expression “love — hate”. It seems so pat and unreal. But it wasn’t.’

She turned and said, ‘Where is Lindsay, do you think?’ — a minute hope, I thought, in her voice. A few hours before she had been so calm, a woman untouched by human aberration. But now her expression was that of someone who has suffered every horror in the book.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to find out.’

The indecisive dog started to scratch outside at the door now, and I got up once more to let him in.

4

June and Marianne arrived the following day from London — in clothes as unsuited to the country as their husbands’ had been. And their mood was awkward too — as strangers in an already well-developed house party who had perhaps missed more than half the fun. Marianne drank too much whisky the first evening while Julia kept to her room until lunchtime on the Saturday. The house was uneasy that weekend.

With Madeleine and Rachel at breakfast, I’d described my visit to Susan in no more than social terms, avoiding any depths and denying that she’d helped in any real way over Lindsay — a deception which wasn’t difficult, since neither showed any great interest in my meeting the previous day. I was surprised by this. It was as if, for some reason, the matter of Lindsay and all his doings had ceased to interest the household that day. Or perhaps, I thought, it had simply come to obsess me.

Marianne alone, perhaps due to that careless euphoria and impertinence that comes with a hangover, appeared interested in the problem which had brought me to Glenalyth. Before she burst in on me, I was in the study at the back of the house where most of the books were kept, looking for some detailed map of the home counties which might have the old Oxford-Cambridge railway lines on it, when something else caught my eye — a German book that had fallen behind a bottom shelf where the pre-war Ordnance Survey maps were, with a vaguely familiar name on the spine: ‘Maria von Karlinberg’. Maria? And then I remembered her — could it have been the same person? Maria had been a name in Lindsay’s youthful address book which I’d brought down from the attic — an aristocratic old Viennese lady, as I had imagined her, living on a pittance in some decrepit Hapsburg palazzo. But she must have been someone rather younger, I thought now, a contemporary of Lindsay’s almost, for the book — so far as I could judge from my rusty German — issued without a printer’s or publisher’s name and therefore perhaps clandestinely, was an account, in the form of a ‘Comrade’s Diary’, of all the bloody events which had led up to the demise of Austrian democracy, beginning with Dollfuss’s massacre of the workers in their model estates in February, 1934 — the same violent events which Lindsay had witnessed when he had first been posted to Vienna and which he had written home about in such a two-faced manner.

There was a printed dedication in German: ‘To the Fat Man in the Blue Bar at Sacher’s’, I thought it said, a message which intrigued me, since this rich Viennese hotel seemed an unlikely place for any ‘comrade’ to drink, then or now. The book, apart from the dust and cobwebs, was in mint condition, seemingly unopened. I put it aside for later reading, as a possible pointer to something — I’d no idea what.

‘Oh, sorry,’ Marianne said, when she came in on me, looking haggard but purposeful, in a pair of sky-blue nylon ski pants and fashionable knee-length Cossack boots, unlikely accessories given the weather outside — the sun beating down as usual on a tinder-dry world. I’d just found what I wanted, an old ordnance survey map with a host of others on a bottom shelf — and I didn’t stop what I was doing, trying to identify and trace the branch line between Oxford and Cambridge. She came up to my shoulder.

‘Going on a journey?’

It was impossible to be even vaguely rude to Marianne. Her brashness was so assumed and she herself so essentially vulnerable. ‘Yes. I mean, no. I was looking for an old railway line.’ And then I spotted it, quite clearly: a little, laddered course that wound east to west between the two universities, across Buckinghamshire, through Bedford and Bletchley, with the station at Bow Brickhill just about midway between the two academies.

‘There, there it is,’ I said involuntarily.

‘Just what is going on — will you tell me?’ Marianne was abruptly rude. ‘George tells me nothing. What games are you all playing?’

‘I — we, we were looking for Lindsay —’

‘Down that old railway line?’

‘Maybe.’

‘I’m not quite such a fool, you know.’ I looked up. Her rather unruly thick fair hair had been crimped back against the sides of her skull with tortoiseshell combs; her cheeks were flushed and the whites of her eyes tainted with crimson lines. I could see the neat malt the previous night had taken her badly.

‘Of course you’re not.’ And she wasn’t a fool, I realised again, except in one way: in allowing herself to be so consistently hurt in her long and hopeless loving with George. ‘I didn’t know — you wanted to know: about Lindsay.’

She sighed, rather dramatically. ‘I want to know about George — what the hell he’s up to. He never says.’

‘Oh?’

‘I don’t see why he should get mixed up in all this cloak-and-dagger nonsense?’

‘Is he?’

‘Yes. Phoning and seeing people all last week — before he came up here. He’s a musician, not a private eye,’ she added abruptly.

‘Who —’

‘I went to see the man, I was so annoyed.’ She was almost stamping round the study now — or would have been, in anything harder than her suede boots. ‘His bloody friend Fielding,’ she went on. ‘Well, I know Basil from the old days at College: just a soak — a dangerous soak. And George shouldn’t be involved.’

I didn’t look up too quickly from my map. Indeed something had just struck me about it that seemed of possibly even more interest than what Marianne had just said. But I forgot it in this new and unexpected intelligence.

‘You went to see him?’

‘Yes.’

‘What for?’

‘Marianne stopped walking about and made a petulantly dramatic pose, both hands on her hips, legs apart, like a stable girl about to lose patience with a nag.

‘Did you know Fielding was with the Russians?’ She spoke with the slurred confidence of an exceptional hangover.

‘The Russians? How do you know?’

‘Well, someone he shouldn’t be with. I didn’t phone him, you see. Just went round, rang the bell. He wasn’t in. But someone else opened the door.’

‘When was this?’

‘Friday — yesterday. Anyway, it was the police you see, or the special branch or whoever they are. They were in the flat — the whole place was upside down and they more or less pounced on me: who was I? What was I doing — and I didn’t have many good answers as I’d not made an appointment and hadn’t seen Basil for years. They thought I was a contact of his. Anyway, they realised I wasn’t — eventually — and let me go. But it was quite obvious they were on to Basil in a bad way. So he must have done something pretty wrong. Defected or something,’ she added professionally.

‘Yes? What?’

‘Well, I don’t know. But I don’t want George involved. It’s none of his business — looking for Lindsay Phillips,’ she added very tartly.

‘Did you tell George?’

‘Of course. He said it wasn’t important.’

What was George up to? Why was none of all this suddenly important to anyone any more?

‘So Basil has decamped,’ Marianne went on with authority. ‘And you only do that if you’re working for the other side, don’t you?’

‘I suppose so.’ I was fairly stunned.

‘Well, can’t we do something?’

‘What?’

‘Because they’re coming up here, they said so: to talk to George about his phone calls and about seeing Basil just before he disappeared. You see, I had to tell them about why I was there — because George was up to something with him. And I suppose they’d been watching his flat and tapping the phone as well.’

‘Coming here? No one’s said anything.’

‘Well, they said they were. And I don’t like it. Basil is probably another Philby all over again — and now George is going to be involved in it all.’

It was her mentioning Philby that brought me back to the map and the old railway line. Philby, Burgess and MacLean — of course: all Cambridge men, the same college then, same generation. And hadn’t we always wondered who had recruited them, how they’d managed their initial involvement with the Russians then in England? Someone already at Cambridge, some don there, it had often been thought. But why only at Cambridge? The undergraduates at Oxford must have offered the Soviets almost as rich a potential in recruits. Had the KGB tried and succeeded without anyone ever knowing? And how, I thought, as a Soviet intelligence recruiter, might you best minister to both the universities in this matter, at the same time giving the recruits from each equal cover in their early clandestine activities? Might you not situate yourself midway between the two Universities, on some easy access to each — an hour’s train ride either way to view prospective traitors? And might not those clients — apprentices now in the NKVD — put the process into reverse and under the guise of attending meetings of a model railway club, make their reports to this first link in the Soviet intelligence chain — either to the man who ran the ‘Oxford and Cambridge Model Railway Society’, or to someone from London, a member of it himself, who came up to engage his new recruits under the cover of this innocuous hobby — talking to them afterwards in the village pub or as they walked back to the real railway station? Was this how Lindsay had first become a part of Soviet Intelligence — through his model railway trains?

It was a theory, at least, with only one obvious flaw: the clients of such a Soviet controller or contact could never have all visited Bow Brickhill at the same time — or actually used the place as a club together — since their identity as Soviet recruits would then have become known among themselves. On the other hand the place might have been used only individually by its members, one at a time, with instructions never to divulge their involvement with the club. Or again, it might simply have been used as a message-drop or as a contact only in emergencies. Finally, of course, my theories could have been pure fantasy — and the club had been entirely bona fide. Had been? Perhaps it still existed.

‘Well?’ Marianne said.

‘Wait and see. What else?’

We didn’t have long. The phone went at midday for George, and the whole business emerged over lunch. I must say George handled it very well. ‘A matter of no importance,’ he’d said. ‘Pas de problème,’ he added — one of his favourite phrases. George was in a confident, garrulous mood: the impresario about to make a killing. And apparently his music with Rachel had gone well that morning — Dottie Parker was being shoved along at a gallop. The others seemed to agree with George’s diagnosis of the events in London.

‘Just a fellow I knew years ago,’ He started to round off the topic. ‘Thought he might be able to help over Lindsay. Of course I can’t tell them anything about him. Wonder they’re bothering to come up all this way.’ George was almost witty about it all now. ‘Old Basil — probably done a bunk to Moscow. Sly fellow he always was anyway. Little half-pint man.’ George quaffed at a larger pewter mug of beer — a refreshment he’d provided himself with each lunchtime since the start of the week — and cracked some unsuitable joke about life in a dacha in the Moscow woods.

It didn’t really strike me as very funny at all. Almost everyone I’d come across in my enquiries about Lindsay had gone the same way — or worse: first McKnight in the Wren church and the lout on the train; then Pottinger and his American friend and now Basil. Even Professor Wellcome in Oxford had tried to run a mile from me when I’d taxed him in the matter. Lindsay’s friends appeared a remarkably unstable lot. As for Basil — who could tell? Had Marcus framed him — just as, I suspected, he’d tried to get rid of me? And what of Basil’s friend the Prime Minister? Perhaps he’d be the next to go.

‘When are they coming to see you?’ I asked George.

George looked up from his tankard mischievously — a schoolboy, so like Basil I thought: the fat and the thin on opposite sides of the same coin. ‘This afternoon,’ he said. ‘On their way now. Flying up to Perth.’

A rush job, I thought. But I was more surprised still when David Marcus got out of the car, with Inspector Carse and another man, after lunch.

Marcus barely introduced himself and it was obvious that Carse had no idea who he really was. His colleague from London, a DI5 man by the heavy-footed look of him, took George to the morning-room, while Marcus led me off tactfully into the study.

‘Yes,’ I said at once, ‘I wanted to see you …’

‘I warned you, Marlow —’

‘Yes — that lout on the train was warning enough. But I’ve not taken it. Even him.’

‘He was nothing to do with me, that man.’

‘Of course not. “I got a job to do,” he told me. And certainly he wasn’t looking for my wrist-watch.’

‘You’re in the firing line, Marlow. But they’re not my guns.’

‘You’re lying. Or do you suppose the Russkis are after me? That they don’t want Lindsay found?’

Marcus made a gesture of impatience. ‘Believe what you will. It’s no matter —’

‘Dead bodies never were to you. All right. You don’t want Lindsay found. But you won’t tell me why, will you? Not really why. Just a lot of cock about his being a right-winger on the make in your service, which is a pretty poor excuse for the mayhem you’re setting up —’

‘Believe what you will — I told you. You want to find Lindsay — well, go ahead. But don’t say you weren’t warned —’

‘Oh yes, I’m being warned all the time. Everyone’s doing it.’

‘You’re not progressing, then?’

‘Why should I tell you? Was that all you came all this way for — just a progress report?’

‘It interests me, naturally.’

‘Naturally. But you could have sent a junior up to talk to me. Whatever’s going on, you want to keep it entirely to yourself. So it’s bigger than some right-wing conspiracy, isn’t it, Marcus?’

‘I came to talk to you about Basil Fielding,’ Marcus said wearily.

‘What is there to say? Fielding — and the PM — wanted Lindsay found: you don’t. So I suppose you did for Basil, and the PM is next on your list. But you can’t do away with everyone, surely, who wants to see Lindsay again. Or can you?’

‘Do stop this fantasising, Marlow. Matters have changed. Fielding, it now seems clear, was with Moscow.’

‘Shouldn’t have been too difficult for you to fake things that way for him —’

‘Listen, for once, will you?’ Marcus said fiercely. ‘I faked nothing for him. A routine security check put us onto him. He was being followed, and he met a man who was nothing to do with us. We don’t know who he was —’

‘Where was this?’

‘Hampstead, by the pond there, last Sunday, pretending to look at the model boats.’

‘You followed the other man too, of course.’

‘Yes. But we lost him. We think he must have been with the Soviets, though — up the road from the Highgate compound.’

‘Well, all it simply means is that you don’t want Lindsay found — but the KGB do. Ergo: he’s one of theirs, probably has been all along. And that would embarrass you, Marcus — which is why you’re shutting the shop up tight on Lindsay Phillips and pretending he never existed, or better still — praying he’s at the bottom of the loch down there and won’t turn up in a month or so in the Moscow Press Club, telling how he pulled the wool over all your eyes for forty years. That’s what all this amounts to. After Philby and the others you’d do anything to stop another really big scandal. And this would be one, no doubt. They’d really have your head on a plate then, Marcus.’

‘They would; if it were true. But it isn’t.’ Marcus fingered his pearly tie. ‘It’s more complicated than that.’

‘It always is.’

‘You’re no longer a member of the service. I can’t give you all the details. I warned you, simply —’

‘Good God, Marcus, I told you in London: these people are my friends. That’s why I’m looking for Lindsay. I don’t give a tinker’s curse for the rest of it — whether he was left, right or centre. So tell me, what have you really come to see me about?’

‘About Fielding, as I said. Did he say anything else ever to you, when he briefed you about Lindsay, that might have made you think he was with Moscow, for instance?’

‘That won’t wash, Marcus. You don’t really want to know that. Your men in London could get all that sort of information for you. You’ve come all the way up here for something else. And I can’t for the life of me think what it is.’

There was silence then, a neat impasse. Marcus looked across at me with a kind of amused confidence — a quiz-master who’d come in with a stunner on the last vital round. ‘No?’ he said. ‘Well don’t worry. You go on looking for him, if you must.’

Marcus and I parted amicably enough in the hall. Madeleine had offered him tea but he’d declined, pleading urgent affairs elsewhere.

‘What’s up with George?’ I asked. He was still closeted in the morning-room. Marcus shifted about uneasily by the dead fireplace before going to see what had happened to them all.

Marianne was with us, shades of unhappy worry everywhere about her face. ‘What can they be up to? George knows nothing about that fool.’

The morning-room door opened at last and we heard the heavy tramp of feet like a small army coming towards us, and George’s voice protesting about something, the rather high-pitched undergraduate tones arguing the toss in the college debating society, but now with a really serious edge to it: ‘It’s ridiculous,’ we heard him say as the group came along the back corridor. ‘There’s no question! You can’t possibly …’

They all came into the hall. George stopped by the door, surrounded now by the three men, like a huge forward in a rugby line-out waiting to be pounced upon by some minuscule but crafty opponents.

‘They’re arresting me,’ he said, loudly, incredulously — addressing all of us, his great face shining, expanding with anger and amazement.

‘Not arresting, sir,’ the special branch man put in. ‘Further questioning, that’s all.’

George took no notice of him. ‘They’re taking me down to London!’ he declaimed, like some great nationalist orator betrayed. Then he looked at me, walking towards me. ‘You. You must know what’s going on!’

‘Yes! He does!’ Marianne almost shrieked, rushing over to George, taking him by the arm, then turning so that they both confronted me. But George took no notice of her. ‘You set this up,’ he said to me vehemently. I thought he was going to hit me as he took another step nearer. I retreated.

‘What —’

And he would have hit me if Carse and the others hadn’t held on to him just then like a tug-of-war team. ‘You — you set it up: all of it. To get me out of the way,’ he added, slithering over the floor towards me.

I couldn’t think what he was getting at. And then I saw him looking at Rachel bitterly and I knew. It was pure farce and I couldn’t prevent a smile — which, of course, infuriated George still more. He made another lunge at me, struggling like a great bear caught in a frail trap.

‘I’ve no idea,’ I said retreating once more. ‘Marcus! What is going on?’

But none of them replied. George was told to pack a case, and Marianne went upstairs with him. Fifteen minutes later the two of them were bundled into the car and they all disappeared down the drive. We stood on the porch watching them go. Max and Julia had arrived from somewhere during the fracas.

‘Well, there goes Dottie Parker,’ Max said before turning and looking at me with distaste. ‘“Gangway, girls — I’ll show you trouble”,’ he added. I scowled back at him in return. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said. ‘It was nothing to do with me.’ Then I noticed both Rachel and Madeleine looking at me questioningly. I shook my head in disbelief.

‘You don’t really want him found, do you?’

‘Well …’ Madeleine paused. ‘If it leads to all this trouble.’

And then I thought — yes, that’s exactly why they’ve taken George: to cause that trouble, so that I would be forced, or at least asked to stop looking for Lindsay. And what would happen when I told them, as I felt I must now, that Lindsay had probably been a traitor most of his life? No doubt they would see that as simply another piece of mischief on my part.

We were in the hall after supper. Julia and Max had left the three of us alone. Indeed, they were upstairs packing just then, having decided to return to London the next morning. The house party had rather collapsed.

‘You asked me to help,’ I said. ‘I don’t see how we can possibly stop now.’

Madeleine sat in one corner of the sofa, perfectly still, looking into some middle distance, while Rachel fidgeted on the edge of a chair opposite. Our coffees were getting cold. They said nothing.

‘How can you?’ I asked almost roughly.

‘I begin to feel somehow that he’s not to be found,’ Madeleine said eventually.

‘David Marcus doesn’t want him found, that’s all, because he thinks Lindsay was with the Russians. It would be an embarrassment for him, if he turned up. But we can’t do nothing.’

‘What can we do?’ Rachel asked briskly. ‘If what you say is true, then he must have gone over there. Are you suggesting a trip to Moscow?’

‘Do you think he’s been with them all this time?’ Madeleine asked.

‘I think it’s quite possible, yes, that he was with Moscow.’ I looked at her firmly. Then she laughed, unnaturally, leaning forward suddenly with the spasm before flicking her ash gold hair out of her eyes and rolling back again. ‘It doesn’t sound like him, Peter. It really doesn’t.’

‘In his world it’s perfectly possible.’

‘His world was mine too.’ I remembered Susan’s bitter comments on Lindsay’s earlier betrayals with Eleanor.

‘He wouldn’t have told you,’ was all I could say.

‘But I knew him — for nearly forty years. I knew him. He wouldn’t have done that.’ Madeleine looked at me with an absolute certainty in her eyes: the glowing, clear look of the totally innocent, and thus possibly the most deceived. ‘I knew him,’ she said again, repeating that great confidence in knowledge that comes of a long love. But Susan had ‘known’ him in this way, too, I thought — earlier on in his life; Susan who had grown up with him and loved him as well — and borne his child into the bargain. Yet she had been proved wrong and been deceived in the end. I feared for Madeleine. She ‘knew’ him too — but had never known that Patrick wasn’t Eleanor’s child and had thus been equally ignorant of the real reasons for all that pain in Zagreb forty years before. Madeleine, it seemed, knew quite a different man.

‘If he’s worked for the Russians all his life — I’ll eat my hat,’ Rachel said, using the old slang, a schoolgirl again herself, as full of belief as her mother in a man they had lived with and loved most of their lives. As I had suspected, it was I whom they viewed now as a presumptuous interloper come to disrupt and deny their familial affections, a messenger of darkness here to put out the light. I think at that moment they wished they’d never set eyes on me at the Chelsea Show. Yet the fact remained, which they could not deny, that Lindsay was not there, and that he’d upped and disappeared one fine spring afternoon without leaving a word for them. If not to Moscow, then where? They might deny he was a traitor and be right in that. But if so they were left then with a deeper mystery. For what husband and father, unblemished thus politically, would impose such a cruelty on his family — and for what reason? If not for Moscow, then it could have only been because of some darker flaw that he had so dispensed with them.

As it turned out, to their unbelievable joy, the postman on Monday morning seemed to prove them right, in their initial belief at least.

‘There! You see! He hasn’t gone to Moscow!’ were Madeleine’s first words to me, tears streaking her cheeks, after she had read the letter. It was typewritten, with a heading in capitals ‘HRVATSKA SLOBODNA!’, the words divided by a flaming sword, the envelope post-marked Munich on the Tuesday of the previous week.

‘My darling Tika, dearest Rachel,

I can’t describe the horrors of being out of touch with you these past three months and knowing how desperately you must have been worrying. Of course, as you will understand, it was none of my doing. I was taken and am being held (in considerable comfort, I may add) by the “Free Croatia” organisation who are allowing me this letter to you both — which I am dictating since my arm was injured (not badly — so please don’t worry). I am being held against demands which this group is now rightly making for the release of Croatian nationalists and liberators now imprisoned throughout Europe. I am sure that, in this respect, our government will now liberate Stephen Vlada, the Croat patriot, unjustly held by them in Durham prison. When they have done that, I will be freed.

After this political spiel the letter continued in an entirely personal vein.

‘I don’t know when this will be, but soon I hope, and I long for that. In the meantime you will be brave and happy as you can be, both of you, until I see you again. I know you will be. We have been through worse things, after all, and survived — you and I and Rachel. Patrick I’m thinking of and the war too. Wear the silver bracelet and be well till I see you again. And tell Billy I’m thinking of him and the honey. With this marvellous weather there should be a bumper yield this year. I’m sure I will be able to write again. My dearest love to you both,

Chokis.’

The mysterious signature alone was in ink: not in Lindsay’s usual hand but a close approximation of it, I thought. All the same I played the Devil’s advocate for a moment.

‘Could it be a forgery?’

‘How could it? He hardly ever called me “Tika”. It’s an old nickname — from before the war,’ Madeleine said.

‘And “Chokis”?’ I asked. ‘What’s that —’

‘Another reason it must be genuine,’ Madeleine raced on. ‘I sometimes called him “Chokis” — it means “Fatty” in Swedish. We all went there once: before the war. Lindsay apparently was rather plump when he was young and the name stuck among some of his intimates. But I didn’t like it. So I translated it — “Chokis” — a mixture of chocolate and kisses.’

‘And that silver bracelet,’ Rachel added. ‘You got that in Sweden too, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, it’s very special. I only wear it on special occasions. Who else could know all this and about Patrick and Billy? And it’s his style too. I can feel it. My God, he’s alive,’ she added, turning away, restraining other tears and patting the dog Ratty who jumped for joy at her feet.

‘He’s alive,’ Rachel repeated the words calmly, a fine light in her eyes, not looking at either of us though, but through the open hall door, her gaze fixed somewhere on the huge summer outside.

‘To the Fat Man in the Blue Bar at Sacher’s’ was all I could think of just then — the dedication in the book by Maria von Karlinberg. Who, then, was this author of the Comrade’s Diary?

The small village of Bow Brickhill in Buckinghamshire lay just a few miles off the M1 motorway, so it was an easy detour on our car journey to London two days later. The Rise, given as the address of ‘The Oxford and Cambridge Model Railway Society’, was no more than a narrow track leading steeply up from the single village street, soon to lose itself above us in the thick beech woods of the Woburn estate which covered all the top of the hill. Number 17 was a fairly large, pink-bricked, recently restored cottage halfway up, on a small plateau of land giving onto the woods at the back and looking down over the whole village, with a station and railway just beyond it — a line that was still operational, from Bedford to the new town of Milton Keynes, I presumed — for just as I got out of the Volvo a commuter train clattered along the valley in the bright sunlight towards us.

Number 17 was a natural bastion and vantage point, I thought; clear views all round for miles, except for the thick woods immediately behind it, which instead formed an ideal retreat or bolt-hole. There was no bell so I knocked on the handsome teak door with its inset of bottle-glass panes. A baby squealed bitterly from somewhere in a garden at the back.

I knocked again and a few moments later an elderly ruffle-haired man, half of a cheap cheroot burning in his mouth, in shorts and a floppy coloured shirt, opened the door. It was Professor John Wellcome.

He didn’t recognise me at first. ‘Yes?’ he asked abruptly. ‘I’m sorry, the scenic railway is by appointment only —’ It was Madeleine he saw then, behind me, just getting out of the car. And in the instant he recognised her, he remembered me — and his face became as still and canny as a retriever’s in front of hidden game before turning into a mask of welcome.

‘Goodness gracious, John! I never knew you lived out here,’ Madeleine said when our surprised greetings were over and we were all inside the low-beamed drawing-room. The dreadful baby Bonzo had come in from the garden now, and seeing us all as usurpers of his ground and likely to delay his lunch, he started to scream. The American girl Caroline, in a crochet wool bikini, took him away petulantly for his suck in the kitchen.

‘Oh yes,’ Wellcome clapped his hands in what struck me as an assumed joy, though the other two women were quite at ease. ‘Yes, indeed. This was my father’s old house. We use it as a country cottage now. How splendid to see you both. Let me get you all a sherry — or better: I have some cold wine in the fridge … this weather!’

‘We were just on our way down from Glenalyth. We’ve heard from Lindsay! Can you imagine — a letter yesterday. Some awful Yugoslavs are holding him somewhere …’

‘Good God!’ Wellcome drew the words out in genuine astonishment. ‘I’ll get the wine and then you must tell me all about it.’ But then something struck him — forcibly. ‘But how did you get here, Madeleine? We hardly ever use the place — it’s usually let. How did you know —’

‘Oh, Peter here. He found an old membership card in the attics at Glenalyth — “The Oxford and Cambridge Model Railway Society” or something. And it had Lindsay’s name on the bottom. Peter wanted to check and see if the Society was still here: thought it might have had something to do with his disappearance.’

Wellcome turned and looked at me before drawing heavily on his cheroot and humphing like a stage clubman. ‘Still playing the detective, are you?’ He spoke lightly, but the malice was there, just under the surface, I felt.

‘Well, it is rather surprising, isn’t it, John?’ Madeleine asked. ‘Finding you in this place — and Lindsay apparently involved as well. He must have often been out here in the old days. But he never mentioned it.’

‘Oh, it was nothing. He’s probably forgotten it. Just an undergraduate hobby we had then. My father was a great model railway enthusiast — and you remember Lindsay’s interest in all that. We came out here once or twice in those days: my father had started a whole layout upstairs. Still there, in fact. People come by appointment sometimes — one of the best scenic model railways in England apparently. But let me get you some wine.’

He left us then and Bonzo screamed in the kitchen and Caroline shouted at him and it was very hot in the small room. ‘How strange,’ Madeleine said, leaning back in a rocking chair that for some reason didn’t rock. ‘Lindsay’s never mentioning that John had a place out here.’

‘Or John himself never telling us,’ Rachel added.

The child threw something violently on the floor in the next room.

‘We mustn’t stay long,’ Madeleine said, getting up from her awkward chair. But when the wine was done — an already opened flagon of supermarket Italian plonk — Wellcome insisted that we should all see the model railway before we left.

He led us upstairs and along into an extension of the cottage at the back — a large, dark, windowless room where, when he went to a corner and operated a switchboard, we were confronted with a sensational little miracle, a toy to end all toys.

The whole area, apart from slightly raised viewing duck-boards running down the middle of the room, was given over to the most elaborately realistic multi-track model railway layout, every item of station furnishing, rolling stock and incidental decor exactly in the period of some pre-war golden age of the railways — with half a dozen passenger and goods trains streaking along over viaducts and into tunnels, going in opposite directions, passing each other at small suburban stations with old Virol advertisements, before running off into an idealised English countryside past little halts and through fields with sheep and shepherds and tractors that actually moved.

All the trains eventually ended up at a large city terminus by the switchboard, complete with miniature passengers and a marshalling yard just outside it, where Wellcome would rearrange the travel patterns, setting off the whole magic circus once more. We watched, spellbound. The illusion was so complete and inviting that one wanted to climb over the barrier and enter the dream, certain that we, like the models, would become smaller than the smallest child then.

‘Now watch!’ Wellcome said. ‘The night sequences.’

The lights in the room began to dim slowly and the minute table lamps in the yellow Pullman carriages came on and now the trains sped through a soft darkness growing over all the land. In the towns and villages pub windows lit up and cinema signs came on, and model cars shone weak beams on level-crossing gates; signals fell from red to green as boat-train expresses fled into the furthest corners of the room, while a small rail car came to a halt at a country junction, the platform lit by weak oil light, waiting for the night mail to pass. Wellcome lurked in the shadows, some distance away, hunched over the switchboard now, ministering to his toys with the concentration of the obsessed.

It was then that a wagon he was shunting back, over a set of points in front of Rachel, came off the rails.

‘Can you pick it up?’ he asked her. ‘Just put it back on — it won’t bite.’ Rachel leant over the barrier and set the truck to rights again — and Wellcome brought up the little shunting engine to it once more, pushing it over the points and onto a separate track which led up to where I was standing.

‘Watch this!’ Wellcome said, now altogether the totally absorbed child. ‘There’s a small down gradient here, together with a wagon vice: it’s a way of marshalling goods traffic. There’s a brake on either side of the rails — just there — which holds each truck as it runs off the incoming feed train. Then, when you release the vice blocks, the truck free-wheels down the slope and onto those points where you can turn it off into any one of those three lines, making up a new combination of goods traffic.’

He released the little metal coal truck then and it came gently down the slope towards me. But again, when it met the points which were supposed to divert it, it came off the rails, just in front of me.

‘Damn. Something must be wrong with the wagon wheels. Try it once more. Put it back on again, will you?’ Wellcome called across to me. I put my hand over the barrier and picked up the truck and when I set it back on the rails the dark room was filled with a terrible scream — which after a second I realised came from me.

My height may have saved me — since, unlike Rachel, in leaning over the barrier, I had not needed to take my rubber-soled boots off the floor. Nonetheless I was badly stunned, my whole arm throbbing with pinpricks all along the skin, while inside it felt as if someone had just rammed a huge needle right up my arteries, from wrist to shoulder-blade. I held myself fiercely with my good arm, rubbing my elbow, clamping it to my side in a sort of cold agony. My head seemed to have come off my shoulders and was a separate thing now, floating around above me.

Wellcome fussed abominably, muttering about a short circuit, while Rachel said in amazement, ‘But why didn’t it happen when I picked the damn thing up?’ I knew enough to realise that the layout entailed probably half a dozen quite separate tracks, each with its own electrical circuit — any one of which could have been isolated from the others and charged with a far higher voltage at the drop of a switch. On the other hand, I didn’t know enough to prove there and then that Wellcome had intentionally activated such a charge. In so complex a layout, it might have been a genuine fault. But it was easy to doubt this.

‘I am so fearfully sorry,’ Wellcome said. ‘I really am. Come downstairs. I’ll get you a brandy.’

In the circumstances, I declined the offer. The Italian plonk had been bad enough and this might have been a genuinely poisoned chalice. I looked once more over the suddenly stilled landscape — the little carriages and engines all marooned at inappropriate places, an express stalled at a level crossing, the Night Mail half-way into a tunnel. A sleep had come over all the game; some evil genius had gripped this magic world and made the boyish sport malign. Tears before bedtime, I thought — and all the delicious canary-coloured carriages and boot-black engines struck me as an emblem of childhood betrayed just then. Or was Lindsay himself somewhere here, I wondered? — rising up out of the old trains he had played with so long ago — forbidding me, across all the years, access to some vital secret somewhere there in the layout in front of me, a truth with I had nearly touched, before another hand in the ether had stretched out to protect his innocence — or guilt?