The Flowers of the Forest

1

We met in my London club once more. But this time privately in the gilt-blue library upstairs, Marcus pretending an interest in some recent literary donations from members on a table by the window, though it was mid-morning and the gracious, sunlit room was empty.

Marcus had seen the Yugoslav letter and spoken to Madeleine too, which was why I had craved an appointment with the clever little man, for he had been unable to offer her any real help.

‘Oh, it’s quite genuine, I think,’ he said, thumbing through a new large quarto edition of The Water Babies — vilely illustrated by one of our younger members. ‘Rackham would have done it so much better,’ Marcus added.

‘He has, Marcus. He has. The letter —’

‘Yes, genuine I’d say.’ He looked up brightly, the pearl tie-pin in place, the confident jeweller’s smile swelling out gently from the fatty jowls. ‘They always put their logo on the top. It’s King Tomislav’s sword — did you know that? Tenth century. First King of an independent Croatia. And that’s what they want again, of course; to get out of Tito’s mob —’

‘I gathered that —’

‘“Hrvatska Slobodna”, Marlow.’ Marcus pronounced the phrase with relish and in probably the right accents. He had obviously been well briefed by experts in the last few days. ‘“Free Croatia”,’ he continued. ‘That’s the name of the game from now on.’ He said this with pleasure, as though he had at last learnt that Lindsay had simply been picked up by some old friends who were half-way through an elaborate practical joke with him. Something had happened to Lindsay which Marcus, at least, viewed with relief.

‘The letter: what did your people —’

‘Oh, yes, our handwriting fellow says it’s almost certainly Lindsay’s signature. But not fluent. So he may have damaged his arm somewhere along the way. That, and the personal contents, of course: I see no reason to doubt it. The trouble is, as I told Mrs Phillips, we can’t release this Croat terrorist. The PM is adamant. Hi-jacked one of our planes last year. But more than that, it would queer our pitch with the Marshal entirely. So that’s out, I’m afraid.’

Marcus closed The Water Babies and opened a heavy volume entitled Psychology in Industrial Relationships by a clever, psychiatrist member.

‘Look at this!’ he exclaimed, finding a passage in the preface. ‘“Management and Work Force in dispute may be regarded essentially as one would a mental breakdown in an individual: as a form of schizophrenia —”’

‘Marcus, now you know who has him, where Lindsay is, you’re going to have to make every effort to get him back in any case, aren’t you — whatever Tito thinks.’

‘Money for old rope, isn’t it? What will these shrinks get up to next?’ Marcus closed the book and paid me attention. ‘Yes, Marlow. But I don’t think you know very much about these exiled Croat extremists, do you? That’s the whole point, you see: we don’t know where Lindsay is. Could be anywhere in Europe. These fellows live all over the place. Particularly in Munich and Brussels. But also in Paris, Zurich, Vienna. And there are at least two separate front-line terrorist groups involved: the “Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood” as well as “Free Croatia”, with several splinter groups such as “Matika” thrown in. Needle in the haystack department, I’m afraid.’

‘Yes, but this group: it’s the one we know.’ Marcus was trying to blind me with science. ‘Where do they operate?’

‘Anywhere. They’ve worked out of both Brussels and Munich before. But that doesn’t mean they have in Lindsay’s case.’

‘Even with a Munich postmark?’

‘Almost certainly a blind.’

‘You could try Brussels then.’

‘We could. We will. Through Interpol, though, and the local chaps. So it’ll take time. What will you do, Marlow?’

‘We could start with Brussels too, I think. And maybe it won’t take us so long.’

Marcus clasped his hands together, lowering his head and frowning meekly like a penitent come to his vengeful god at last. ‘You really don’t know these Croat nationalists, do you Marlow?” He leant forward, the sunlight touching his silken-smooth, grey-flecked hair.

‘How should I?’

‘They put the IRA provos in the shade.’ Marcus warmed to his bad news. ‘They’ve had forty years experience — starting with the assassination of King Alexander in Marseilles in ’34 — and successfully gun-thugging their way round Europe ever since. And nasty with it: even the resident SS men in Yugoslavia couldn’t stomach their methods during the war, ran home to Adolph. I don’t think you want to get involved.’

‘I’m not going to start gunning for them — just dealing with them. Once they know you aren’t going to release their man, we can probably deal. The Phillipses aren’t poor. I’ve talked it over with Mrs Phillips. And these terrorists could probably use forty or fifty thousand. Well, you can’t put an offer like that to them, can you? Tito would be upset.’

‘True. It’s a possibility.’ But Marcus couldn’t keep a touch of doubt out of his voice.

‘You still don’t really want Lindsay back, do you?’ I said. ‘That’s why you took George.’

‘Who?’

‘Willoughby-Hughes. You remember.’ Marcus looked annoyed now, returning to unpleasant memory. ‘George and Basil and the Russians, Marcus,’ I went on. ‘There’s still all that. You seem to have forgotten about it.’

‘This Mr Wallaby-Hughes is simply helping us with our enquiries. A lot of what he said about himself and Fielding didn’t add up.’

‘You’ve got it wrong: Willoughby-Hughes — and George is simply a romantic old fool. Nothing to do with Moscow. He went to see Basil to try and help the family — just as I’m doing. And you don’t want that, so you took him to cause trouble. But it won’t work. When you told Mrs Phillips the position over this Croat over here, she agreed with me: that we should tactfully look out these “Free Croatia” people and offer them a deal. Are you going to try and stop us?’

Marcus shook his head slowly, incredulously, the expression of a diamond merchant being offered paste.

‘Marlow, you’re a free agent. Our hands are tied, as I say. You must do as you think fit. But I’ve told you about these Croats. They bite — to say the least.’

‘What about Basil Fielding and the PM?’

‘An unfortunate case of misplaced trust — to say the least. The PM is being suitably advised now. So you have no authority whatsoever — from him or us — to concern yourself in this business any more.’ Marcus stood up, looking at me dismissively. Our meeting was over. It was clear that he was relieved at the course events had taken. These dangerous Croats would absolve him from much further work in the matter. His hands were comfortably tied. As far as he was concerned, Lindsay Phillips was out of harm’s way.

Madeleine and Rachel, on the other hand, were filled with hope and anxious for all sorts of careful activity. The letter had transformed their lives. These words out of the blue had brought the man before them again, in a hundred familiar images: he existed somewhere; he slept and he woke and he thought of them so they could believe in him once more. And these reciprocal thoughts ran like a magic lifeline in the air between them, a line which they could now follow up materially across the continent, which must lead them to him eventually. Lindsay, in effect, had been dead for nearly three months. But now they shared in his miraculous resurrection. There but remained the journey to the hidden tomb where he waited for them.

I spent the afternoon at Thomas Cook’s in Berkeley Street making the travel arrangements, while Madeleine telephoned Lindsay’s old friend in Brussels, Willis Parker, a senior diplomat now with the British EEC delegation there, who expected us on the morrow and had made arrangements for us to stay at the Amigo Hotel in the centre of the city.

Early next morning I took the big black Volvo Estate southwards out of London, making for the Dover-Ostend car ferry: the beginning of things, I thought, surrounded by an air of happy confidence in the powerfully singing car, the windows open to the dazzling weather, the luggage well packed and all arrangements made. The journey started like a holiday, coming back from school to Scotland years before. Though now it was I, and not Henty in the old green Wolseley, who was going to meet Lindsay. A sense of family had come strongly among us once more. And in the bright clear light that morning all that we had lost seemed already very nearly made good.

Madeleine sat in the front seat next to me as we edged our way out of Ostend early that afternoon, the clamour of the quayside, the bustle of the holiday corniche dying behind us as the big green and yellow motorway signs loomed up ahead. She had, quite simply, become young again in the past few days, as if someone had just fallen in love with her. The nightmare had died in her eyes and she no longer had to be brave, so that for the first time since we’d met again her expression became as I remembered it from years before: a quite different face now, with different shapes and colours in it; a portrait not just restored but one where a whole new line and texture is revealed beneath, the original conception again brilliantly displayed. She was the bright crusader once more, struck by some visionary cause, moving towards it now with that huge happiness found in the renewal of a lost faith.

Rachel, in the back, had collapsed with the heat — her legs up along the whole width of the seat, one arm stretched out on top of it. I could just see the side of her face in the rear mirror, curls bobbing in the warm breeze from my window, a long wrist coming out of a flapping sheath of fine cotton, fingers drumming lightly on the leather.

‘Look!’ she said as we passed by a market garden on the outskirts. ‘Just look at those beautiful flowers in all those awful rows and rows.’

‘The Belgians grow them for money. Not for fun. We’re in Europe now,’ I said — and she put her other hand on my shoulder just then and squeezed it and said, ‘I’d prefer to be poor.’

‘Something of a rhetorical statement,’ I told her. But still she kept her hand where it was. We could tease each other once more, I realised; the little shafts of pleasurable enmity had grown up between us again in the last few days, that wordless connection we had possessed before, in her father’s time, when he was always there, a sure and certain presence at the edge of her vision, just beyond that part of her life which she gave me — and which, should I fail her, she could return to. And so it was again now, I recognised: mentally she could give herself to me again because he was once more there, somewhere just over the horizon, a placatory, advising, all-embracing spirit which supported our love — on which it depended, indeed. And though in the past I had hated this tie, this continual proviso to the success of our relationship, I accepted it now, not simply as the lesser of two evils but as one of the effective compromises which, if we’re lucky, time brings to love.

Later, twenty feet up on the motorway, we glided across those flat lowlands of Flanders, laid out like a perfect exercise in agrarian geometry, with lines of polder dykes and ruled canals and arrow-sharp poplar trees dipping into a huge sky fluffed with cotton-wool clouds far away on the horizon: a vision that I had seen before only in dull geography books and smudgy lantern slides or on weary school trips through provincial art galleries as a child, so that this reality, seen for the first time, struck me now with the sudden, intense pleasure of great art.

Madeleine gazed down a long perspective of trees and water away to our left, her profile like part of the picture as I glanced at her for an instant.

‘I’d better tell you about Willis,’ she said without turning.

‘Yes. I was going to ask you,’ I said. ‘Presumably he’ll have contacts — or know someone — who can get us onto these Croats?’

‘Yes, I’m sure he will. But apart from that — well, he’s always rather had a thing about me, in the nicest possible way. But I thought I’d tell you in case you wondered —’

‘In case you thought Maurice Chevalier had risen from the tomb,’ Rachel put in. ‘Willis is the Don Juan of the Diplomatic Corps. The biggest old roué you ever saw,’ she added lightly. ‘Sort of permanent Edwardian bachelor — chasing skirts all his life. That’s all Mummy wanted to tell you.’

‘Well, that’s a little harsh —’

‘But it’s true.’

‘He did want to marry me, though. I met Lindsay through him.’ Madeleine turned to me. ‘So don’t be surprised —’

‘No, indeed! He never gives up hope. He’s marvellous. But I suppose he’s sad.’

He didn’t sound too sad to me and I said so.

‘It’s only sad because I think he really did want to marry me,’ Madeleine added thoughtfully. And we left it at that — determined to keep the sadness out of our lives from then on.

The Amigo, a discreet luxury hotel, lay hidden on a quiet side street behind the rebuilt neo-Gothic excrescences of the Town Hall — which gave onto the Grand Place, a huge medieval market space, filled with spiritless tourists and great slabs of shadow from the high gilded buildings as we circled it late that afternoon, trying vainly to get out of an endless one-way system.

At last, when we found the hotel, there on the steps, like the beginning of some happy children’s story, was Willis Parker — waving at us excitedly, a hungry-looking little Santa Claus of a man with a ring of white hair like a halo round a bald pate, dressed in immaculate linen tropicals and some kind of old boy’s tie. Even from the car window before we stopped I noticed his eyes — merry, dark blackberries in a cherubic face — and yes, dancing bedroom eyes, I thought, yet of someone unlikely ever to truly make it in that direction: a flawed Lothario. But it was his energetic joy that came across at once: an air of tremendous excitement and expectancy, as if he found the world really too much of a good thing altogether and could not restrain the kind of continual orgasm he made towards it.

He must have been in his sixties but he waved his arms and danced about just then like a young clown in a bad circus, giving directions to a porter over the luggage — and to another man who then quite unexpectedly took over the wheel of the car, so that I thought we were about to lose it.

‘No! No! He’s only taking it downstairs for you. There’s an underground park. Leads directly up into the hotel. Very convenient, what?’ He glanced at me with a touch of roguishness I didn’t understand. ‘Now, come along in, all of you. I’ve arranged everything with the manager — an old friend. I perched here myself — it seemed like years — when we were trying to get into the Market. Now come on in.’

The day’s heat still danced up from the concrete and my pockets were so sticky after the drive I couldn’t reach for any small change to tip the men. We’d been travelling for ten hours and I was glad of Willis Parker.

‘You look all in,’ he said, holding the door open for me, while I was still reaching for coins, my passport and a damp hanky in the other hand. ‘Now don’t you worry about any of that — it’s all seen to. Come straight in — a shower, change of togs, you’ll be a new man. And I’ve one or two things fixed up for this evening I think you’ll enjoy.’ Again the slightly risqué look, some mild conspiracy among the men, before the big glass doors closed behind me.

We were in a large, cool, flagstoned hall, sparsely but richly furnished in the Empire style — high-backed, flock-covered armchairs grouped in twos and threes for subtle conversation around the dressed stone walls, which were hung with expensively imitated Gobelin tapestries, and what might have been a genuine Aubusson that led like an exotic Royal train to the lift banks. The rooms, I noted, were close on £50 a night. But it was not this which really worried me; I had a chunk of Basil’s money with me (or rather, as it now seemed, the KGB’s) and was using that, though Madeleine had tried to insist that she pay all the expenses. No, it had suddenly struck me that this wasn’t my world at all — which already lay years back, it seemed, in a cloudy, country past: a world of sparse dry sherries and a small cottage lost in the wolds. I had taken on a cause not beyond my competence, perhaps, but certainly far from my ease now, in this frigid, air-conditioned hotel, sealed from the real world. So far I had moved among familiar places in my search for Lindsay, places where he had lived himself. But now I felt the enormity — the stupidity even — of the task I had proposed: Lindsay, in one way, had been everywhere at Glenalyth, in the country hats and coats and the damp smell of old mackintoshes in the back hall, in his books and bees. But here, I felt: how could he be anywhere here? In this antiseptic room or in any anonymous continuation of it throughout the continent? His fingerprints — all the previous clues to his whereabouts — had been erased once he’d crossed the channel. I had lost faith in Lindsay somehow.

And then, after I’d turned the shower off, I heard through the bathroom wall Rachel playing the flute in the room next to mine — faintly heard, a flurry of high notes followed by a repeated diminuendo, something from Gluck’s Orpheus I thought — but certainly a tune remembered from our days together twenty years before in Notting Hill. And I saw then that I had some sort of a past — however failed and tenuous — yet which I could remember, which I could return to, which was nearby — right there, in fact, in the next room to mine. What of a man like Lindsay, so richly endowed with wife and family, friends and memories, who could not return to this wealth because he was dead? Suddenly that seemed the worse loss: the cessation not of life but of memory. And I felt for Lindsay once more then, in that arid room, and hoped he was alive somewhere, still attached to his reminiscences.

When I got some clothes on I went in to see Rachel. She was playing near the open window, half-dressed, a huge bowl of late June roses on a table in front of her.

‘I didn’t know you’d brought the flute. That was nice,’ I said when she’d finished.

‘Yes.’ She stood up before putting it away. ‘It’s work. Apart from all the other things. All you really need: “Work and love.”’ She snapped the flute case shut. ‘As Freud said.’

She touched the crimson roses now, re-arranging them in the glass, so that their disturbed scent came to me across the warm room where she’d turned the air-conditioning off and opened the windows. Already she had unpacked everything and strewn all her things about the place — hankies and tennis shoes, fine summer cottons, a bikini and all the other balms of travel: she had made the place her own as though she’d lived in it a week.

Seeing my glance over the confusion she said, ‘Yes, I couldn’t bear it otherwise, the emptiness, without me in it. Oh, I don’t mean me the body — or the suitcases or skirts or these flowers Willis sent up. I mean something really mine, made by me, so I played a tune. And then I belong here — suddenly.’ She smiled, yawned hugely and then lifted both her arms straight up in the air, as though stretching from a trapeze, the muscles in her stomach curving inwards, hips rising free of the rim of her thin pants for a moment. ‘The work you can depend on,’ she said at last. ‘The other — rarely. It’s usually “either/or”, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. You told me: all your real feelings go into your work. You’ll be back to your concerts soon.’

‘No. I’m just going to play for myself, if all this comes right.’

‘If Lindsay turns up?’

‘Yes.’ She looked calmly at me, yet with a kind of tired intensity. ‘You’ve put too many feelings into your life,’ she said. ‘I’ve put too few. I’ve seen most things in terms of being alone on a platform. Just the music — with my father as the only really needed emotion.’ She stood up, started to undress, moving towards the bathroom. ‘You were right, I suppose,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘About Lindsay. I always said you weren’t. But only because I resented your resenting my dependency on him.’

‘A lot of what we think is love is just weakness,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t free of that either.’

She turned, holding her pants in her hand. ‘I could be a great concert flautist, I think — but then the music would simply go on saying all the things I didn’t dare tell my father — as it used to be. I was really loving him through my music. Maybe that’s why he disappeared — he couldn’t take the emotion. And that’s what I mean: feelings like that, expressed in that way, are all too charged, too manic. If we find him then I’ll love him in an ordinary way. And if I do that my music won’t be so extraordinary any more, just a pleasant thing, a hobby. I’d have a life then and not just a career. Don’t you think I’m right?’

It all seemed so reasonable I had to say yes, especially since she came over and kissed me just then. But I realised that her change of heart had been dictated by her father’s letter, her renewed faith in his life somewhere. What if, in the end, he failed her with his presence? Her arms would slip away from me then, just as they held me now, only through her belief in his existence.

Several bells started to chime outside the window, somewhere in the Grand Place — thin, melodious bells, the sort accompanied by archaic figures emerging from a hole before circling a clock face. I looked over Rachel’s ear, out into the yellow evening, a great streak of sun, like a spotlight, dying dramatically on some pink gargoyles at the back of the Town Hall. The day had a softness to it now, a calm before the trumpets of the evening, for there was an invitation in the air, some hint of drama there as well.

It seemed like the moment before curtain-up, so that I said suddenly, ‘You can’t give up your music like that — twenty-five years work.’

‘We have to be able to change. To take on other lives.’

She held me lightly in her arms, then stepped away from me, holding my shoulders instead, rocking them gently for emphasis.

‘If — we — didn’t — fight,’ she said. Then she paused.

‘We could take on each other again?’ I asked.

‘I love you, if that’s what you mean,’ she said.

‘Me, too, if that’s what you want.’

We smiled. It all seemed too easy just then. But it was simply the great difficulties between us that had gone before, I felt, that made me uneasy. We were gingerly trying the ice again, that was all; a few first footsteps, and it hadn’t broken.

‘You can’t spend the rest of your life — just us, without your music,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to face the public again.’

‘An audience of one is more important.’

She turned away and started to run the shower in the bathroom, the water hissing briskly. Then she came out for a moment to look for some shampoo, dabbling among her crowded things on the bed — that familiar bronzed body of hers, stretching easily as she searched: the crinkles changing in her skin, small breasts wavering, the bell of dark curls ringing round her face. This was all her, her essential being — a nakedness that had survived through many years, from a room in Notting Hill and hotel beds in Paris in those days: we had come through an age apart and found something vital in each other again, in another foreign bedroom, full of the impermanent knick-knacks of travel. But now the lotions and travel-sickness pills had a future; the sun cream and paper handkerchiefs were things held in common once more. This was what love was like.

Willis was so full of babbling pleasure when he met us again that evening, and drove us out to a restaurant on the outskirts of the city bordering the great Forêt de Soignes, that it was hard to think of all the grim work ahead of us with Lindsay, and not give ourselves over completely to the sense of happiness together, of being four people well met on holiday, suddenly more than fond of each other.

We sat at the Chalet de la Forêt over a crisp pink tablecloth, the colour warmed to gold by candles down the middle of the table, each one sunk in a cluster of fern leaves. We sat, raised up, on an open terrace — as if in some tree house, looking out over the dark woods on the other side of the forest road. Endless ranks of huge straight beech trees disappeared in front of us like an army into the night, their long alleys pierced by headlights now and then as cars rounded a corner somewhere in the distance, the beams creating great pillared cathedrals, arched by leaves, in the spaces down the rows between the trunks.

‘It’s not actually the best restaurant in Brussels,’ Willis said with pedantic care. ‘But I think it’s by far the nicest.’ He smiled now, shades of the young Lochinvar creeping over his tubby face, looking at Madeleine, seated exactly opposite him, with some ancient tenderness.

Rachel finished a last spoonful of cold Vichyssoise — before she moved her face out of my vision and into the halo of candle flame which separated us. ‘It’s the nicest restaurant I’ve ever been to,’ she said decisively, leaning across to Willis. ‘Thank you,’ she added gently. Then she moved the little candelabra of ferns to one side, the more readily to see me, the slightest question in her glance, seeking some wordless confirmation of her mood in me. We stared at each other for a second — a time when all is well lost beyond two people — and then I raised my glass to Willis. ‘Thank you,’ I said again, drinking the wine. I wasn’t really thinking of him, though, but of how you could come to need someone, perhaps for a lifetime, while doing no more than look at them for an instant over a restaurant table. There is a moment in every affair when there is no turning back; it must have occurred once before between Rachel and me at some time, somewhere, in London or Glenalyth. Would I forget this moment too?

It was Willis’s turn to offer a toast then. ‘To Lindsay — and to you, Madeleine,’ he said — generously enough, perhaps, in the circumstances. For Lindsay, I realised, was not just a silent fifth at our feast that night but a more constant shadow over all of us, wherever we went, whatever we thought, each hour of the day. And I hated this absent proviso he cast over our lives just then. I wanted our future settled — wanted him definitely dead or alive suddenly, so that I broke the gentle mood, taking advantage of Willis’s toast, and said, ‘What do you think, Willis? Where is he? Who should we talk to?’

Willis was taken aback. He gulped at his wine, too eagerly, ‘I’m sure he’ll turn up,’ he said at last, a little unwillingly, I thought, as though Lindsay was a difficult dog we were well rid of, did we but know it.

‘Yes. But where should we begin? Do you have any ideas?’

‘Of course — I’m sorry.’ Willis paid attention now. Though I could see that he, like the others, had hoped to enjoy their dinner first, before broaching the topic. But it was too late now. I was tired of waiting endless attendance on this dictatorial wraith.

‘Yes — I’ve been talking to a friend in the Belgian Home Office here.’ Willis embarked on his progress report without enthusiasm, the evening’s pleasurable excitement draining from his face as he spoke. ‘The man you may need lives quite near here. Just the other side of the road, in fact — over there, in the suburb of Ucckle.’ Willis gestured behind him, towards the city. ‘Fellow called Radovič, an old Croat nationalist, been living here for years. But he was a Colonel in Pavelič’s puppet army during the war, friend of all the top Nazis in Yugoslavia at the time — which is why he was sentenced to death in absentia by the Partisan courts afterwards. And that’s the trouble. Tito’s police have been out to get him ever since, especially recently with this upsurge of Croat terrorism, so that he’s impossible to see. Lives in a barbed-wire villa surrounded by bodyguards: he sees no one, speaks to nobody, doesn’t reply to any letters — at least not about anything to do with Yugoslavia. He says, with some truth, that he’s a naturalised Belgian businessman now with absolutely no connections with his old country. In fact, he is certainly the money man and most likely the brains behind at least one of these exiled Croat extremist groups: “The Croat Revolutionary Brotherhood” — as well as perhaps the “Free Croatia” group, which is the one you want. I’m told the only way of meeting him is to be a member of the Cercle Sportif here. He rides with them. He and his cronies go out most mornings with their horses. Out there.’ Willis pointed into the deep woods.

‘On the other hand, even if you did get to meet him, I’m not certain it would do the least good. He’s never going to admit he has anything whatsoever to do with any of these exiled groups. And he’s certainly not going to be interested in money. He’s a very wealthy man in any case.’

The waiter came then with our second course and we all looked at Willis, saying nothing. We had ordered a saddle of lamb, among four, and it smelt delicious, the big dish circled with mushrooms and covered in fresh herbs. But none of us felt like starting it now. Willis picked up the wine bottle and recharged our glasses — ever the attentive courtier. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘It’s not encouraging.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘You see the difficulty,’ Willis went on. ‘You really need to get in touch with someone much further down the line in this organisation. The field commanders, the activists. And we don’t have their names — and the top dogs certainly won’t give them to you. Surely you’ll have to leave it to Interpol and the local police?’

‘We have,’ I interrupted. ‘But they’ll take a year. We can move far quicker.’

‘I don’t see how, without some initial contact.’

‘I wonder if your friend in the Home Office here has heard of a Yugoslav called Ivo Kovačič,’ I asked. ‘He was a friend of Lindsay’s before the war in Zagreb — something of a Croat nationalist. He taught at the University there and kept bees.’

‘He certainly didn’t mention him. But there are thousands of Croats in and about the city. Quite a few of them live down by the railway near here in St Job — rather a pinched little suburb.’

‘Why? Why do you ask about this man?’ Madeleine asked.

‘The Brigadier told me about him — an unpleasant business between him and Lindsay, at the end of the war in Austria: Kovačič tried to kill himself — just as Lindsay was packing him onto a transport back into the hands of Tito’s partisans. Well, I thought he might have survived and ended up here.’

‘Yes. Lindsay did once tell me something about that. I’d forgotten. You think this man may have had to do with kidnapping him?’

‘I wondered. It’s just possible.’

‘If he’s here,’ Willis said, ‘I could find out. He’d be on the alien’s registration files.’

‘You never came across any Croats with Lindsay when you worked with him?’

‘No. Don’t remember any. But I only really worked with Lindsay at the start of his career — in Vienna,’ Willis said. ‘And once, of course, when we crossed embassies in Paris for a few months. That was 1938, wasn’t it?’ He looked at Madeleine, who smiled at him, readily.

‘Yes, Willis — the summer of ’38, when you had your wallet pinched at the Brasserie Lipp and they refused to let us wash up. You were so furious over both setbacks.’ Madeleine turned to me, explaining: ‘That’s how I met Lindsay. The Parkers …’ She paused then, as if uncertain over something in that meeting. ‘The Parkers — they were great London friends of my family,’ she went on. But she didn’t add any more to the history — simply, I thought, because the story was so far from our present concerns.

‘How are things in Hyde Park Square?’ Willis asked her lightly, apropos of nothing it seemed. Yet I had the sudden sensation of eavesdropping just then — on the distant, muted chatterings of family skeletons, rattling at their cupboard doors, seeking release. There was a minute tension in the air.

‘How can you afford to keep the place on?’

‘We can’t. We’re going to sell it. As soon as Lindsay retires.’

Lindsay, I noticed, was again firmly inhabiting a present tense.

‘Selling it, are you?’ Willis had found some of his natural gusto once more. ‘I’m finishing this year, too. Thought of a place back in London. Might you consider selling it to me?’

‘Oh, Willis, it’d be miles too big for you.’ Madeleine was dismissive. ‘It’s a ridiculous idea. What would you do there?’ She laughed.

Willis’s face fell then, became meek and unhappy just for an instant, as though he had been some pet animal unjustly reprimanded. But he recovered at once. ‘I’d put it into flats. Give me an income. Besides, I’ve always been very fond of the place. You remember those children’s parties your parents gave — the lemon water ices? That Italian they had every year, complete with his little ice cream cart and straw boater, serving them out in the hall?’

‘Yes! I do remember.’ Madeleine was radiant now. The moment’s unease I’d felt between them had gone. ‘Giovanni something — with a droopy moustache, just like my Crimean grandfather. That portrait —’

‘Yes, the one in the billiard-room — with the others: that row of marvellous Victorian gallants on each side of the room.’

The two of them shared their happy reminiscences with vigour. Their early relationship appeared uncannily like my own with Rachel, I thought — twenty-five years later in the same house. And the result, too, seemed to have been identical: Willis and I had both lost out to the same man — Lindsay again. Wherever either of us had turned, in these two generations of the same family, Lindsay was always there, waiting to pre-empt our happy destiny. And I was annoyed once more at Lindsay then, so that when a lull came in their memories I took the opportunity of mentioning something possibly embarrassing or even discreditable about him.

‘I found a book stuffed down the back of a shelf in Glenalyth the other day,’ I said innocently. ‘A diary — about Dollfuss and the civil war in Vienna in 1934 — written by some Austrian woman called Maria von Karlinberg. A “comrade’s” diary. I wondered if you’d ever heard of her, Willis, when you were out there with Lindsay?’

Willis paused, his fork half-way to his mouth. He put it down and drank some wine instead. Then, having given himself time to think, he said, ‘Yes — I do remember her. At Legation receptions in the Metternichstrasse. We had to ask her. She was a very rich and well-connected woman, turned socialist, worked as a reporter on one of the Red papers they had out there before Dollfuss put an end to them all. Her father had been something like Minister of Posts and Telegraphs under old Franz-Josef — and, yes, he had a grand Schloss somewhere in Hungary, or was it Slovakia? In any event, I remember there was a lot of complaint about how they’d lost all their property after the Versailles Conference, with the daughter saying it was all a “very good thing”. Quite a little to-do one night at the Legation, sort of family row. I remember that …’

Willis embarked on a witty social history of the family and their times in Vienna — but without mentioning the daughter again, so that I had to bring her back into the conversation.

‘But Lindsay knew this woman Maria, did he?’ Willis didn’t reply. ‘I suppose he must have,’ I went on, ‘if she sent him her book.’

‘Yes. Lindsay did know her,’ Willis said at last. ‘But only vaguely, I think. As I did. Lindsay handled what passed for “Information” at the Embassy then, so she came to see him about that: what Ramsay MacDonald was up to with the miners and so on.’

Willis steered the topic to an end in some good humour, as did Madeleine: ‘Before my time,’ she said. ‘I never heard of this Maria. One of Lindsay’s old flames was she, Willis?’

Willis chuckled deprecatingly. ‘Hardly, Madeleine. Hardly. Why, Lindsay was engaged to Eleanor at the time. She came out and joined him that spring, as I remember. Yes, just after the February battles: spring of ’34.’

I was pretty certain now that Willis was lying; a white lie of some sort, a tactful evasion in order to save Madeleine’s face: Maria von Karlinberg had been something more to Lindsay than just an importunate socialist newspaper reporter, I felt. And I was almost certain, too, that her diary had been dedicated to Lindsay: ‘To the Fat Man in the Blue Bar at Sacher’s.’ What was new was the information that Eleanor had been out in Vienna at the same time. It seemed more and more as if Lindsay, not Willis, had been the inveterate philanderer all his life. Yet Willis — for Madeleine’s sake, I supposed — was protecting him, forty years on from the events. It was an act of love or charity towards her which brought him no comfort, however, for he looked awkwardly across the table at us both just then, his expression strained, red-faced almost, like a schoolboy who had got away with a whopping lie right in front of matron but who knows he will not succeed in the same with the headmaster. Willis was suddenly an unhappy man.

Yet the evening recovered among other purely happy topics, and the splendid food and more good wine passed round the golden tablecloth. I felt ashamed by the end of it that I had raised my awkward queries. And yet, I thought, why else were we all here, if not to discover Lindsay? Was it my fault that, in aiding the search, his devious soul was coming to light rather than his body? I suppose it was. I was the wrong person to help look for him: I bore him a grudge. Though perhaps a grudge, like love, is among the few things that ever truly lead us to anyone in the end. It keeps them in our mind, at least.

The maid had turned Rachel’s bed down and closed the windows and tidied up the chaos when we got back to her room that night, the shadowed lamplight falling tactfully over the renewed order.

‘I’m sorry for Willis,’ I said. ‘I don’t think now he’s a happy man at all.’

Rachel opened the window. The muggy summer air warmed the slightly chill room at once; a car hooted daringly somewhere out in the silent streets. Rachel kicked her shoes off, sitting by the window table — and then started to fiddle with the red roses once more, counting them aimlessly.

‘The maid’s pinched one!’ she said suddenly. ‘There were a dozen here before, I’m sure.’ She took all the roses out of the bowl now, to count them properly, and as she did so a small card fell from between the stalks onto the table. She picked it up.

‘Oh God! I know why Willis wasn’t very happy this evening. Look — the flowers — they weren’t for me at all. And in the rush I forgot to thank him. They were for Mummy. They put them in the wrong room, so she never mentioned them to him either.’

I looked at the damp little visiting card, the message almost indecipherable now, the ink run away almost to nothing in the water. But it was such a simple message it was clear enough: ‘Madeleine, with love, Willis’.

‘God, how he must have felt snubbed by her. Poor Willis. How awful.’

‘It wasn’t your fault. Or Madeleine’s. You can explain it tomorrow. Or I can — when I see him first thing at his office.’

‘Shall I call him now. At home?’

‘It’s midnight. I wouldn’t bother. Get Madeleine to call him first thing.’

‘I don’t have his home number anyway. How dreadful of us.’

Rachel stood up and started to undress. ‘Poor Willis,’ she said again, grieved.

‘Don’t,’ I said, touching her shoulder. ‘There’s nothing to be done.’

She stood back, looking at me. ‘A bowl of roses,’ she said at last. ‘“I sent a letter to my love, and on the way I dropped it: and one of you has picked it up, and put it in your pocket …”’

As she spoke she took her clothes off, piece by pice, and flung them all around her — wilfully pitching everything away as she recited the nursery game.

‘“It wasn’t you, it wasn’t you, it wasn’t you: but it was YOU!”’

Finally she said, ‘I’m not tired. It’s funny.’

‘You slept in the car.’

‘Sleep with me, won’t you?’

I did. But before we slept, pulling her face away from mine on the pillow, she said, ‘You need never be like Willis now, with me — you know that. Never ever.’

2

Poor Willis — poorer than any of us thought. At first I wondered if, in awful revenge, he’d hoped Madeleine alone might find him, when she got to his apartment for her lunch date which she had arranged the previous evening with him. Or had he counted on my getting there, as I did, before the police, and learning something crucial from the chaos on the floor? — the letters, the photographs, all the memorabilia, as it seemed, of his hopeless love for Madeleine, strewn about the front room of the rather grand bachelor apartment he had on the rue Washington just off the avenue Louise.

There had been no reply when Madeleine had rung him first thing with her apologies that morning. The two women had then gone shopping while I had taken a taxi to the British EEC delegation’s offices in the Place Schumann, where Willis was to have let me know the results of his enquiries about Ivo Kovačič. But he never turned up. His secretary wasn’t really worried: until she’d called him twice and had no reply. I said I’d go and see what might have happened to him myself then — told her it was personal business in any case.

I was happy that morning coming out into the sunlight of the great ugly Place — happy in a way I’d thought never to recover: that manner of delight through another that quite blots out pain or error — and so I believed in my unlikely excuses for Willis. I had a future in love — which made the sight of Willis himself when I got to him, curled up on his sofa like a baby, all the more unhappy. Here was no Lothario, but a far too single-minded heart it seemed, whose constancy had never brought him anything. Willis, as he lay there next the remnants of pills and an empty whisky bottle, was like a corpse in a government poster, warning against fidelity. And I feared for my own future with Rachel, which seemed founded on just the same drug.

At first, when I’d discovered the porter and we had opened his door, I thought Willis had simply been burgled after he’d left for work, for he was nowhere to be seen in the dark apartment. It was a minute or two before we came on him — his small body wreathed voluptuously in cushions, embedded in a long white sofa by the picture window. The porter opened the curtains. They swished across on their silken pulleys and the sun filled the room, illuminating Willis like a corpse found in the library at the start of some Agatha Christie drama. Who Killed Cock Robin? But beyond the initial shock there was no more life to the play — and the mystery lay all before curtain-up, I thought, a long way in the past.

The body was surrounded by old letters and photographs. The photographs of Madeleine weren’t particularly special. Again — as in the attics at Glenalyth, where Lindsay, Eleanor and Susan had figured — here were pre-war holiday snaps featuring another variation in Lindsay’s stable: he and Madeleine and Willis this time, in Paris, and two of them leap-frogging on the cabined beach of what might have been Le Touquet. But Willis’s letters to Madeleine were another matter. I had to revise my view of him as the love-lorn swain entirely. There must have been about twenty of them, carbon copies, some in pencil but mostly type-written, going back many years — addressed from various foreign capitals, and a few on military stationery, written to her during the war — and other quite recent letters judging from the freshness of the paper. I glanced through several while the porter phoned and we waited for the police. One I found was addressed from Stockholm, dated June 1938.

‘Dear Madeleine,

It was so nice having your letter. You hardly have to thank me — much more the other way round: thank you for sharing your holiday with me. It was a wonderful gesture — you all coming over here in the first place. I won’t forget it — and of course I wish you both much happiness, it couldn’t be otherwise. I’m glad you like Lindsay’s bracelet. Their silver work over here is so simple, without any of that vulgar ornamentation on modern jewellery found everywhere else in Europe now … Dearest Madeleine — it’s a fine feeling now to know that you are happy — entirely positive — and you must never think of me in the future as leaning over your shoulder regretfully or any other nonsense of that sort …’

As far as I could see none of the letters echoed the dashing philanderer in Willis. On the contrary, they suggested a completely adult relationship between him and Madeleine, with nothing clandestine to it. The words were quite innocent in their friendly love, without apparent stress, reflecting familial concerns. Here was a perfectly natural intimacy. Why, then, had Willis apparently killed himself over it?

But where were the replies, I suddenly thought? — Madeleine’s letters back? I looked through the mess of paper. There was nothing from her. A vital piece of the puzzle was missing. Had she never written to him? It seemed inconceivable. Had he destroyed her letters? And, if so, why? I no longer saw Willis then as a pathetic figure, the victim of some naive passion, but as a perfectly sensible man who for some obscure reason had become involved in what seemed an entirely one-sided relationship. Willis appeared to have entered some kind of fraud in his dealings with Madeleine — and perhaps with Lindsay, too — which had finally, in the snubs of the previous evening, become too much for him so that he had terminated the agreement. And here only Madeleine herself could help me.

I was sorry in a way that she didn’t have to see Willis; I thought perhaps that, confronted with the actual body, as in a medieval judgment, her guilt or innocence in the matter might automatically emerge. As it was, the Embassy took everything off our hands while the police did no more than take my name and address before I left the sad apartment with its expensive bachelor chic on the rue Washington.

The others were back at the hotel when I returned there at midday — Madeleine in a breezy summer hat about to set off for her déjeuner intime. It was a bad few minutes in the lobby when I told her the news. But she fought it well before Rachel took her up to her room. I thought they’d be gone for some time. But they appeared again ten minutes later and Madeleine said she’d like a drink in the shadowy cocktail bar at the back of the lobby.

It was quiet and nearly empty — apart from two Germans munching peanuts loudly up at the bar. We sat in a corner, nursing brandies. As I’d always known, Madeleine, in the grip of a particular enthusiasm or when faced with a special difficulty, took on the sudden force of a crusader. And Willis’s demise, I supposed, might bring the best out in her. It did, to begin with. She listened to me, as I elaborated on the morning’s events, with a sharp, business-like attention — as though death were essentially a matter of balancing figures in a ledger. My talk of Willis’s letters to her, however, she took less confidently, as though unsure now of her earlier addition.

‘Of course,’ I said, ‘a snub by itself surely isn’t enough for someone to kill himself.’ I didn’t look at her directly but I had her in the corner of my eye none the less. ‘And I can’t understand why he had all his letters around him, but none of yours —’ I went on.

Madeleine interrupted me with her answer, as though the better to underline its truth. ‘He must have destroyed them. Of course I wrote to him. We were great friends.’

‘Of course. But why destroy your letters — and so religiously keep copies of all his own?’

She must have been expecting this question and she accepted its implications now with sudden resignation, as an athlete in a hard-fought race accepts defeat only in the last few yards and simply walks across the line.

‘Willis was protecting me, I suppose,’ she said. ‘I can’t think of anything else.’

Rachel and I said nothing but Madeleine must have read our thoughts. ‘Oh, no — it wasn’t any indiscretion of that sort. Willis and I were very fond of each other but it was never anything more. No, it was about Lindsay. I sometimes wrote to him — oh, about things I didn’t understand. He never replied to me directly about this, just sent ordinary letters back. We talked when we met, in London mostly. That’s what we were going to do today at lunch.’ She paused and sighed before gathering herself. ‘I’m sure he destroyed the letters: I told him to. He was very loyal about Lindsay. He helped me a lot.’

‘But why? What was it about Daddy?’ Rachel leant forward eagerly.

‘At times … I felt I didn’t know him. No, that’s too simple. I felt I was looking through him, through the person I knew so well — and into someone I didn’t know at all.’ She gestured impatiently. ‘Of course, it’s such a cliché — I know we all have to have our privacies. But with Lindsay sometimes …’ She stopped, looking at us both searchingly, as if we possessed the knowledge that would complete her sentence.

I said, ‘With Lindsay sometimes the person you didn’t know at all took over?’

‘No. Just once or twice I thought that second person was all there really was of him — and the man I knew was a front.’

‘You never mentioned any of this,’ I said tactfully. ‘It might have helped.’ I thought: at last this woman admits a crack in the armour of her love — and I felt for her suddenly, as for someone who might, in the end, become entirely bankrupt in her affections. But she replied now without any sign of such a doom.

‘It was all a long time ago. And Willis reassured me in any case — said it was the sort of tricky work Lindsay did. It came not to matter. Anyway, that was all I wrote to Willis about.’

‘Hardly enough for him to kill himself, Mummy.’

She turned to Rachel briskly. ‘You don’t have to tell me. I can’t say why he did it. I really can’t.’

‘Surely he wanted to marry you — and the news of Daddy’s existence again, together with the snubs …?’

‘Perhaps,’ Madeleine said. But she was being optimistic, I thought. Willis seemed basically sensible — not really suicide material at all. And I said as much. And then it struck me: ‘I wonder if someone killed him?’ I asked. ‘And the letters were strewn round everywhere to make it look like a romantic suicide?’

They both looked astonished. ‘But why? Who?’

‘I don’t know.’ I saw Willis’s death now as one with a real future in it — for I believed in Madeleine’s innocence then.

As happens, the door that closed to us, with Willis’s death, seemed to release the locks on another with barely any effort on our part whatsoever. I’d picked up the Brussels phone book by my bed before lunch. Radovič wasn’t there. He must have been ex-directory. I turned back to the letter K, idly looking for Kovačič — and there he was, suddenly jumping out of the page at me: Kovačič, Dr Ivo — the only one listed, at an address in the suburb of St Job on the outskirts of the city. The phone was no use: he could have put me off, denied ever knowing Lindsay. I had to confront him and take the chance that he was the right man, the University lecturer, Lindsay’s old bee-keeping friend from Zagreb. I bought a map and had a cab drop me near the area late that afternoon.

The Rue de Ham wasn’t a slum but it hovered on the brink of poverty. A row of small terraced houses in the English manner, with white-washed doorsteps and cheap curtains facing outwards, led up a hill from the dusty square of St Job. Evening commuter trains rattled through a cutting behind the terrace while trams ground slowly up the incline in front. The area had a pinched gentility, a forgotten nineteenth-century suburb condemned now to be always on the roads to somewhere better.

I walked past Kovačič’s doorway on the other side of the road, crossed over higher up and then came down the hill back to it. The place looked innocent enough and I was certain no one had followed me.

A thin-faced man, dressed in a too-smart shirt and Henry V hairstyle, opened the door. I heard a typewriter clattering away in the background. The youth smiled slightly, as though I were expected. ‘Oui?’

‘Monsieur Kovačič? Je voudrais parler avec lui. Si c’était possible …’

The typewriter stopped and an older voice, with a permanent cold in the throat, shouted, ‘Qui est là?’

‘Sais pas. Quelqu’un pour vous.’ The wiry, sad-faced man spoke French perfectly, yet he didn’t look French. He looked queer, if anything. But he looked tough as well.

‘I’m Peter Marlow —’

‘C’est un anglais,’ he called back and then a man like a great tired bear ambled out in slippers from a room to the side of the hall — bushy eyebrows beneath a tangle of greying hair, as broad as he was big, in a fine blue silk shirt buttoned meticulously at each wrist — the face not yet collapsed with age but close to it, the rather sensuous flesh around the nose and lips about to fall away for ever.

‘Mr Kovačič? …’

‘Yes? You came about private lessons?’ He spoke slowly but in almost perfectly accented English, as if he’d been listening to the BBC World Service for many years.

‘No, I —’

‘You should have made an appointment.’ There was something of the pedant in his attitude, all right.

‘No, I came to see you — about something else. Can I come in?’

Kovačič gestured to his friend, who closed the door with a thump behind me.

‘Yes. About what?’

‘About Lindsay Phillips.’ I was trapped now between the two men.

‘Who?’ Kovačič straightened his cuffs impatiently.

‘Lindsay Phillips — an old friend of yours.’ It sounded an unlikely description of their relationship, given its latter development. But I had to start somewhere.

‘Lindsay? Lindsay Phillips?’ Kovačič spoke now in angry astonishment, the skin tightening all over his old face. ‘Didi — see if he’s alone.’

The man by the door opened it again a fraction and looked carefully up and down the street. They spoke rapidly in Serbo-Croat now.

‘I’m alone. This is entirely private,’ I said to Kovačič, before his friend came up behind me and frisked me from top to bottom. There was nothing. I’d left the little.22 revolver at the hotel.

‘Come in, then,’ Kovačič said at last. ‘This is Didi.’ We didn’t shake hands.

The little front room might have been that of some poor scholars in a provincial town forty years before. Apart from a frozen winter landscape in the naïve Croatian style above a tiny fireplace, books filled all the available spaces between floor and ceiling. There were two battered easy chairs with a primus stove in between, and what seemed like a church lectern at one end with a typewriter sloped down across it. Kovačič went up and leant on this now, looking at me accusingly, like some hell-fire priest. The room had a dusty, remote quality. It was not part of the city; it smelt of exile — of chalk and old textbooks, and methylated spirits.

‘A friend of Lindsay’s?’ Kovačič asked. ‘I can’t say you are very welcome.’

‘No. I’m sorry. I realise that —’

‘Did Lindsay send you? Or British Intelligence?’

‘No. Lindsay has disappeared. Three months ago. I came on behalf of the family — entirely a personal matter. I found your name in the directory.’

Kovačič grunted. A train suddenly clattered past, loudly, almost in the next room it seemed. The house must have looked directly over the railway cutting at the back. And I’d had enough of trains just then. Didi was standing aggressively by the doorway. I realised I was thumping with fear.

‘I understand your feelings,’ I said brazenly. ‘You had some trouble with Lindsay. Just after the war — I know. But I thought you might be able to help. Apparently he’s been kidnapped by some exiled Croats —’

‘Has he, indeed? I’m not surprised.’ Kovačič came out from behind the lectern now. He was pleased with what I’d just said. The atmosphere relaxed a fraction.

‘Yes. His family have had a letter from him. The “Free Croatia” group.’

‘I wonder they’ve not executed him already. Some “trouble” you say I had with him: you know why I can’t sit down — why I have to use this stupid desk all the time? That’s because of him — what the Partisans did to me when he sent us all back over the border in May ’45. My wife didn’t survive at all — nor several hundred thousand others like us. Didi and me — we were among the few lucky ones. Trouble? Lindsay Phillips and his friends created a holocaust for us all.’

‘Yes. I heard that. I know what happened at Bleiburg. I’m very sorry.’

Kovačič threw his hands abruptly in the air. ‘Well, you’re too young to have been involved. But if you know about it all, I’m the last person to want to help. Don’t you think?’

‘I suppose he was acting under orders then —’

‘Of course. But you don’t know the whole story. Some British officers actually helped many of us Croats escape — let us run away into Austria or Italy. But not Lindsay, who could have done that so easily in our case. After all —’

‘You were friends. I know.’

Kovačič nodded. ‘Yes. We were. He rented my house in Zagreb before the war, you know. Oh, dear me!’ Kovačič put a hand to his brow, covering his eyes, so that I thought he was crying for a moment. But when he looked up I saw he was simply trying to hide some ghastly rictus of laughter. ‘Yes, we were friends: in Zagreb before the war — he and his wife, Eleanor. And her sister, Susan. I remember them all. Many good times at the Gradski Kavana … And the bees we kept together behind my house up in Tuškanac park.’ Kovačič wandered round the small room now as if he were trying to find an escape from it, back into some reasonable emotion, an understandable life.

‘But why,’ I asked, ‘why didn’t he help you?’

He stopped his perambulations now and went over to a shelf, picking out a drum-shaped bottle from among the books — plum brandy, I saw. He poured himself a stiff glass, downed it and then shook his head at me. ‘What naïveté! I told his commanding officer in Bleiburg at the time —’

‘A man called MacAulay?’

‘Yes, the Brigadier there. You see, Lindsay wanted me out of the way. I knew by then he wasn’t the man he said he was — a British diplomat. He was an agent for the Soviets, the Comintern or the NKVD. That’s why he made sure I was sent back over the border, knowing I was very unlikely to survive.’

‘But how could you have possibly found that out?’

‘From his wife. From Eleanor.’

‘Who killed herself —’

‘I never believed the suicide story. Lindsay killed her.’ Kovačič started to walk again. ‘I was away from Zagreb just then. But I knew the hall porter at the Palace Hotel. He said there was something funny about it all. He saw it happen.’

‘I was told she ran out under a tram, just in front of the hotel.’

‘Yes — she did. But Lindsay was right next to her. The porter thought he pushed her.’ Kovačič drank again, considering the past as though turning over the pages of an old diary in his mind. ‘She didn’t die at once, apparently. Just lay there with her eyes open on the tram-lines.’

‘Died in hospital, I suppose.’

‘I wasn’t there. But yes, that evening or the next morning. There was an inquest — of sorts.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It wasn’t very thorough. Something was being covered up. The porter was never called as a witness, for example. I’m sure Lindsay killed her.’

‘But how did you learn he was with the Russians?’

‘Eleanor told me. That’s why he got rid of her — she’d found out about him. They were having terrible fights in those days: the woman was very unhappy — but not suicidal. She just wanted to leave him, get away from everything.’ Kovačič walked back behind the lectern. ‘That was the other problem: Lindsay had been unfaithful to her,’ he said sharply, the archaic term exactly reflecting the period he was describing. ‘You knew that, I suppose? With Susan, her sister. The year before. The child was born in Zagreb that spring, I remember: 1937 — a few months before Eleanor died. But it wasn’t her child. It was Susan’s. They arranged to pretend otherwise — that British taste for decorum in everything.’

‘Yes, I know. Susan told me. But wasn’t Eleanor pretty left-wing herself? Why should she complain if she’d found out Lindsay was with the Russians then? Many people were. It was a very common allegiance in the thirties.’

‘I asked her that myself — we’d had arguments before, she and I, about left and right.’ Kovačič rubbed his chin and picked at his ear, crinkling up his eyes as though the better to see into the past, into a time which, in his long exile, had obviously never ceased to concern or perhaps obsess him. ‘I was up at my house one morning — when they were renting it; Lindsay was at the Consulate. I had some books I wanted to pick up.’ He moved out from behind the lectern now, and suddenly he was gesturing vehemently, like a frustrated hot-gospeller. ‘She said he was cheating! That he’d lied to her, first about Susan and now about his politics. You see, Lindsay always made such a point of being very right-wing in those days. But she found him out. I remember — it was that same spring of ’37: Eleanor was out on the terrace at the back of our house, just in a thin dressing gown. She was sitting at the little bamboo table we had — doodling, you know?’ Kovačič looked at me; but really he was looking through me — the exact details of that morning forty years ago forming a drama in his eyes. ‘She was making circles on a newspaper, staring at the cherry trees at the end of the garden. She was — numb. But she insisted on staying outside and we had some coffee, sitting there in the wind, the blossom falling everywhere — it was like a pink snowstorm up on the hill that day — and she told me: “Lindsay is a Soviet agent” — just like that.’

‘How did she know?’

‘She’d had suspicions for some time. And then she’d caught him, she said, with his Soviet contact: walked straight into the two of them quite by chance in Strossmayer Square the previous afternoon. A Russian, she told me, pretending to be a friend of Lindsay’s, a Viennese businessman. But Eleanor wasn’t a fool. She spoke German perfectly, some Russian too — said his accent was all wrong for a Viennese businessman. But she’d come to realise Lindsay was a liar in any case — over Susan. I was very sorry for her. I’d liked them both, you see.’

‘But she may have been wrong about the man — just suspicious about everything then, since she’d found out about Susan.’

‘Exactly what I told her. But she insisted she was right — that it was something she’d felt about him for some time — that he was living a big lie, in his work as well as with her. He wasn’t “coming clean” — that was the phrase she used.’

‘Even so, you’d no real proof —’

‘No. No code books or anything like that. But aren’t people’s feelings some kind of proof? Strong feelings. And Eleanor was a very honest person. Very uncompromising. Besides Zlatko, who knew her far better than me — he told me the same thing.’

‘Zlatko?’

‘Rabernak — a friend of theirs. An antique dealer in Zagreb then.’

‘Of course. Susan mentioned him. He sort of took over Eleanor?’

‘Why not? Lindsay had left her in every way. Well, when I heard she’d died — I was up in Ljubljana lecturing that summer — and when I came back and spoke to the porter at the Palace Hotel, then I believed what she’d said about Lindsay. And I told him so. He denied it all of course. I didn’t see him again until I got over the border at Bleiburg eight years later. So — you can see now why he didn’t help me.’

‘And Zlatko — what happened to him?’

‘He went back to Vienna immediately after she died. He had his main family shop there. I never saw him again. I should think he died in the war.’

‘Did you ever tell anyone about Lindsay — after the war?’

Kovačič shook his head ironically. ‘Who would have believed me? I was a displaced person — discredited too, since they believed, wrongly, that all Croats had been pro-Nazi. I had difficulties enough getting myself established in this small teaching job here. You don’t get involved with the authorities in such a position. I did nothing. But —’ Kovačič spread his hands out wide, signifying not mercy but an appropriate fate, ‘I’m not surprised he’s been picked up by my Croatian compatriots. Slow justice. But justice all the same. I know you think we are all just violent extremists — and at best why should you worry about us in any case? A lot of Croats who fought on the wrong side because they believed in their country? Well, we worry. We still do. And though I’m not one myself I understand those extremists very well. Our nation was put to the sword in May 1945 — and Lindsay, my friend Lindsay, was one of the instruments of that massacre.’

‘Yes. I see that.’ There was silence. There was little more I felt I could say. I was saddened by this awful account of someone I had admired, who had been a friend of mine, too — and more than that, who had long been for me an emblem of the good life, a man of honour as I and many others had thought — of great loyalty, sanity and familial affection. Kovačič’s story utterly contradicted all these known qualities. Yet it had a ring of truth in it; indeed much of what he’d told me was simply a confirmation of what I’d heard from Susan in Dunkeld a week before.

As if sensing my thoughts Kovačič said ‘You’re not a relation of Lindsay’s?’

‘No. Just a friend of the family.’

‘I’m sorry. I should have offered you a slivovitz.’

‘I said I’d try and help them — his second wife and daughter.’

Kovačič laughed, pouring me a small glass from the drum-shaped bottle. ‘He married again — of course.’ He turned away, still smiling. ‘Stanka, my wife — she was pushed into a lime quarry near Maribor. So was my son. Didi here — he’s not my real son. His father was killed too, killed at Maribor,’ he said as if describing a great battle and not a massacre. ‘We look after each other now.’

Kovačič left it at that. The evening sun had slanted and the room was cut in half by a deep shadow. The warm air smelt of plum brandy — something like the perfume Rachel used. Another tram started its long grind up the hill outside, laden with homecomers, returning to these drab, forgotten suburbs. How many other lives, besides Kovačič’s, were lived out in quiet desperation here? Yet perhaps his was the worst, I thought. A fine house, in a park on a hill, with cherry trees surrounded by beehives, the spring singing with insects, infested with blossom, full of sweet purpose, good friends and merry evenings at the Gradski Kavana: and it had all come to this — a primus stove, an orphan, memories in a bottle of plum brandy. This was what the war had led to — as it never had for Lindsay; this was what Europe in the previous generation was all about: immeasurable losses which we knew little of — in our grand hotel down in the city or in those offices in Whitehall where Marcus still plotted, covering up some deeper plot of Lindsay’s. It all ended here, in an impoverished room on a dingy suburban street — in my disgust.

‘Will they kill him?’ I said at last.

‘I wouldn’t blame them — if they do.’

‘No.’ I paused. ‘We thought we might make a deal with them. With a man here called Radovič …?’ I added half-heartedly, and indeed I had no more appetite at all now for the search.

Kovačič shook his head. ‘He’ll never see you. I should just — go home.’ He slumped once more over the lectern. His back must have been hurting him. ‘You understand?’ he asked.

‘Yes. I understand.’ I stood up, finishing the warm slivovitz. But I realised when I got outside and walked away into the summer evening that I didn’t really understand at all: not yet.

A first secretary from the Embassy, a Mr Huxley, was with the two women in the lobby when I got back to the hotel. He was a careful man, like some insect discovered beneath a stone — pale-faced, nervously alert — with a very soft voice that made him appear all the more guarded. He spoke as if he was in a small room with a sick child. He said, ‘We’ve had confirmation — from your farm manager in Scotland. There’s been another letter this morning from your husband, postmarked Munich again. They have the text on the Embassy telex — if you’d like to come with me …?’

The letter was shorter this time — and, according to the preamble, Lindsay’s signature was in a much firmer hand.

‘Am still well. But hoping very much that H.M. Government will proceed with arrangements as outlined in previous letter. Please have them indicate willingness to co-operate by placing notice to “Janko” in personal column of Times — with phone number.

Again, the last part of the message was briefly but tellingly personal:

Do hope I may be released in time for honey crop.

All love, Lindsay.’

Huxley was distantly kind but quite unhelpful. ‘Of course, we’re working on it all the time,’ he said, his voice dropping almost to a whisper. ‘Problem is, as you know, we can’t release this man they want in the UK. But at least we can make contact with them now. We’ll put a notice in the personal column, of course — and perhaps come to some other arrangement with them. Who knows …?’ Huxley was expert in leaving things in the air. And he left himself soon afterwards. I wished he’d stayed — which would have postponed, at least, the difficult task ahead of explaining to Rachel and Madeleine what Ivo Kovačič had told me an hour before in the unhappy little room in the Rue de Ham. It was not information, as in Susan’s case, which I felt I could entirely hold back from them any more.

We ate in the formal hotel dining-room, on high-backed chairs, with too much napery and cutlery. I should have liked a simpler meal but the women felt disinclined to go out. And after all, it was a meal from their kind of world, I thought — rather unfairly, realising how far my loyalties had become divided. It wasn’t their fault that they were rich; and neither of them had sent men to their doom in cattle-waggons or pushed someone under a tram.

I told them about Bleiburg and the massacre outside Maribor first. And Madeleine’s reply was expected: ‘But he was only carrying out orders. He told me. How could Lindsay have saved them in any case — and let the others go?’

‘Some of the other British officers there at the time did just that apparently,’ I said. ‘Saved as many as they could. And after all, this man Kovačič was a close friend.’

‘That’s ridiculous. None of us were there. How do we know what the circumstances were exactly? It may have been quite impossible for Lindsay to have done anything about it.’ Madeleine spoke easily, without any rancour at my Devil’s advocacy.

‘I’m only telling you what Kovačič said.’

‘Go on then.’ I felt I was a witness in some nightmare trial, now, forced to speak with intimate knowledge of events in a country and in a time I had never experienced. Rachel and Madeleine stared across the table at me with a cold interest. As I had suspected we had come to a showdown at last between their intuitive love for the man and my knowledge of the dirty world he worked in, that business of endless deceit which could not but infect the men who proposed and manipulated the deceptions. For the sake of whatever he’d believed in, Lindsay had betrayed those nearest to him really from the very start of his career — without realising it perhaps — by the very act of joining a world he could not share with them. The two women had believed in the promotion of a definable truth, through love — where love unbolts the dark; whereas Lindsay all his life had been intent on keeping that door firmly shut. Lindsay’s way — and my way too — of looking at things was simply not possible for them, since, apart from the calculated dishonesty, they could never have seen the usefulness of it. And indeed there was none; which was why they looked at me now with so little enthusiasm once more. They sensed in me what Lindsay had always managed to hide from them: a dissembling nature, that of some animal from a dark wood, apparently domesticated but basically unreliable and potentially very dangerous.

So I decided not to tell them anything — of any importance at least. Why should I tar them with the same brush of dissension and betrayal, the horrors which Lindsay and I had either perpetuated or suffered in the world of Intelligence? If Kovačič’s little dingy room was the fag-end evidence of a European holocaust that Lindsay had had a hand in, did that mean they had to share it? Why shouldn’t some people remain untainted? And God knows, I thought, Kovačič, who bore such a grudge against Lindsay, could well have been a very unreliable witness — and the hall porter at the Palace Hotel even worse. And Susan? Well, she could have been in the same boat with them: possessed by some ancient jealousy that had worked its way into her heart so that she had come to believe what was not true: that Lindsay had been her lover and Patrick her son. Why did I so readily believe the possible fantasies of these distant people and not the factual experience of the two women — my friends — in front of me? Because, like others in my world, I had formed over the years a kind of loyalty towards betrayal. It was so much the expected thing. So I said, ‘Kovačič didn’t say much more — other than that they’d obviously taken Lindsay because of what happened at Bleiburg — a kind of revenge. That follows. But he has no connection with any of these terrorist groups.’

‘What did he say we should do then?’ Madeleine asked.

‘He said we should just go home.’

Madeleine’s eyes flashed with annoyance. ‘That’s nonsense. There’s lots we can do. I’ll go and see him myself. I should have come with you. We could go now —’

‘I don’t think —’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’ve just seen him,’ I stalled.

‘You were gone long enough. Was that all he told you? — just to go home?’ Rachel asked indignantly. I’d moved from the witness box into the dock.

‘No. We talked about Zagreb, when Lindsay lived there in the old days.’

‘So you talked about Eleanor then?’ Rachel put in with the enthusiasm of a prosecutor.

‘Yes.’ And then I went on, avoiding the topic of Eleanor. ‘And about the bees he and Lindsay kept together at the back of his house there, somewhere in a park above the city.’

Madeleine looked at me intently — as though seeing in me something of her husband, some fascinating aspect of the man before she’d ever met him — as if I had experienced him before she had. And indeed in a way I had, for I’d come to see that moment when Kovačič had found Eleanor out on the terrace very clearly — the wind blowing the cherry blossom about, the little bamboo table and the dark-haired woman, like the girl I’d seen in the stained glass at Dunkeld, doodling on a newspaper and staring out numbly into the pink trees saying ‘Lindsay is a Russian agent.’

And it was as if Madeleine saw some faint image of these same pictures in my mind as she watched me, so that she said intently, without any sarcasm, ‘Why don’t you tell us what really happened — between you and this man?’

I put down my fork; the food was going cold in any case. ‘Kovačič thought Lindsay was working for the Russians. He met Eleanor one morning. She told him.’ I explained the background to this discovery. They laughed.

‘Is that all?’ Rachel asked defiantly. ‘That old chestnut?’

‘No.’ I was annoyed then. ‘He said something else: he thought there was something funny about Eleanor’s death.’

‘I looked at the two women. They were almost relaxed now, a touch of sympathy for me in their eyes.

‘Funny peculiar or funny ha-ha?’ Rachel asked.

‘Peculiar,’ I said slowly, seriously.

‘How would this man know?’

‘He was there — or at least he talked to the hall porter at the hotel afterwards. The man thought she’d been pushed under the tram —’

‘By Daddy, of course,’ Rachel put in, in her lightest mood. But she was angry beneath it.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, that’s nonsense, isn’t it?’ Madeleine said easily, relieved now to hear that the worst was so mild a thing.

‘I don’t know. It’s what he said.’

‘Poor man. He bears a grudge, doesn’t he,’ Madeleine spoke quietly.

‘Yes. His wife and son were both killed after they were sent back into Yugoslavia.’

‘Well, that explains it,’ Rachel said brightly. ‘Doesn’t it?’ She looked at me tartly.

‘I don’t —’

‘Whose side are you on anyway?’

‘I’m not on sides. I’m simply trying —’

‘You know Daddy. Do you really think he could have pushed his wife under a bus?’

‘A tram —’

‘Or do you still secretly resent him?’ Rachel ran on in a kind of sudden panic. ‘Because of my affection for him. Are you really like this man Kovačič too? Bearing him a grudge?’

‘No —’

‘I’ve told you, so often: it wasn’t Daddy that took me away from you in Notting Hill — it was that bloody dirty bath and broken windows. I don’t understand you — you always seem to want to see the bad in him.’

The two women looked at me now, both with this same question in their eyes, though Madeleine had left it unsaid.

‘No — that’s not true. I’ve only wanted to find him. And as I explained to you both, to do that meant looking into his past.’

‘Where you enjoy coming up with a lot of mud,’ Rachel said vindictively. ‘You — horror!’

‘Don’t try and browbeat me. It’s not true.’

Madeleine entered now as referee. ‘For goodness sake, don’t squabble like children.’

And, indeed, it was an apt image, for Rachel, having been angry, now took on the expression of a hurt schoolgirl, of a child betrayed in some wretched boarding-school, who had expected a parent to come and take her out for the day — a guardian angel who would not now arrive. And I was that person, I suddenly realised — not Lindsay, who had never failed her. I was the man, once more, who had let her down, who had been unable to shield her from uncomfortable reality — from a broken window, scum on the bath, or a woman under a tram. Loving her was not enough; I had to lie to her as well — which I could not do. I couldn’t do what Lindsay had obviously done so well for her — give her that blind peace and security, without which she couldn’t love, so that she had loved only him. Instead of replacing him as her icon I had once more questioned his divinity. She would return to him now, I felt, as a prodigal daughter, a penitent searching for him all the more passionately, blindly — as one must look for a god who is not there.

How tiresome her petulant and immature nature could be. Yet I loved her for it, for her flaws — and I was well able to understand what I had lost as her face crinkled in tears and she got up from the table without a word and walked away. She had been what love was like, I thought.

3

I had slept badly, and alone. Yet my fatigue was more than physical next morning as I stood in the hotel lobby after breakfast, the bright morning sun streaming in from the summer streets outside. Rachel wasn’t up yet; she’d gone to ground, as she so often had in the old days after some setback with me or her father. Madeleine apologised for her and I had tried to be bright about things in return. ‘We must be very bright,’ Rachel had said a week before in Glenalyth. But she had failed. The past had crept up on her again — uncertain images which were not bright and darker feelings even less resolved. And I had no more heart for it all now. I wanted a rest — I wanted something else. You could go on looking for something or someone too long — like a child crying for a ball lost beyond the garden fence, something dearly loved, which finally, like a death, he has to admit he will not see again.

I was tired of Lindsay’s loss, of the pain and anger he could still bring about, the deceptions which surrounded his disappearance. And I didn’t care now who had deceived whom — or when or why. I wanted to go out alone into the summer, have a coffee somewhere or a beer, and think about something else. A trip to the national gallery perhaps — or better, up into those woods on the edge of the city, near that restaurant where we’d been happy.

I said to Madeleine, ‘There’s only one other possible contact here. This man Radovič. I’ll try and see him,’ I lied.

‘How?’

‘He goes riding every morning in the forest — you remember, Willis told us.’

‘And you’re going to get on a horse too?’

‘No. I’ll take a bike. Why not?’

‘You’re mad. How will you recognise him in any case? It’s a huge forest.’

‘All right — I just want to go out by myself, into the air — and think.’

The porter told me of a shop in the city where I could hire a bicycle. But just as I was leaving he came up and said he thought one of the kitchen staff had a bike he might lend me. We went round to the back — and he did: rather a flashy racing machine with dropped handlebars, which he seemed unwilling to part with, until I left him a thousand francs deposit on it. I hadn’t realised how desperate I was to be away from everyone that morning.

But still I was held up. Just as I was pushing my socks into my trousers outside the hotel Rachel rushed up to us, bright again, happy, so that I thought she’d forgiven me.

‘I’ve suddenly had an idea,’ she said. ‘We could all go to Munich — where the letters came from. Klaus would help.’ She stood there, in the slight breeze, her curls dancing round her eyes, smiling with hope.

‘Klaus?’ I said dully.

‘My old husband.’

‘Of course.’ I’d forgotten Rachel’s marriage, let alone remembering the name of her husband. Lindsay had absorbed too much of me, damn him, and here was his daughter, happy once more, in pursuit of him. I had made no real difference to her; it was Lindsay she wanted. Yet what was the point? I foresaw nothing but more lies and evasions ahead of us in our search for him; Lindsay was unobtainable. But I didn’t argue.

‘Why not?’ I said. ‘Who knows, he might well come up with something.’

We were fooling ourselves, I thought, as I rode off into the sunlight. And then at the corner, as I waited for the traffic to pass, I looked back and saw the two women standing outside the hotel. Madeleine waved, a little abrupt gesture. She had probably read my thoughts. But then, since she was no fool, she had surely had the same thoughts herself already, I decided. She and I were pretending there were still useful pursuits ahead of us. In fact we were as lost now as Lindsay was. Only Rachel believed otherwise — caught once more in those ecstasies of anticipation, that blind optimism which was her father’s ever-available gift to her in the old days, when I had failed her.

My journey was slightly uphill — all along the length of the Avenue Louise and then through into the Bois de la Cambre before I finally came to the beginnings of the forest — so that it was nearly twelve o’clock before I got there, too late in the day under the huge sun for anyone to be out riding, I thought. I was wrong.

The heat died suddenly under the immense copper beech trees, their darkly bronzed leaves, very high up, blotting out the sun and leaving great cool spaces beneath where hoof-pitted rides and walks and a few asphalt paths criss-crossed each other, running away for miles into the distance, down slopes, over little willow-pattern bridges and round dank ponds. A few minutes after I’d left the roar of traffic on the main road that ran along one side of the forest, I found myself, as if I’d dived under water, in the midst of an extreme silence — a world lit by faint colours, mist-like blues and golds shimmering in the long vertical distances between the trees, the sunken valleys shot through with light here and there, myriads of pencil-thin beams falling on the rust-brown carpet of leaves — and flocks of late bluebells, stirring slightly in a breeze like strange seaweed, thrusting up from the floor of what seemed a cavernous ocean then.

Yet I wasn’t alone. After ten minutes ride deeper into the woods I suddenly seemed surrounded by people. First another cyclist, in shorts and a yellow sprint jersey, his head well down over a racing machine like mine, sped past me — going on down a slope towards a small lake to my right; while coming towards me — just about to cross a little willow-pattern bridge — I saw three other men in the distance on huge horses, the one in the middle seemingly hedged in by his two companions, as though protecting him.

The cyclist ran on fast down the hill. I thought: he’s going to crash, there wasn’t enough room to pass the riders on the small bridge. But he slid to a halt twenty yards or so away from them and I saw him lift out one of the metal water bottles from a cage on his handlebars, as if to drink from it. But then, in a flash, he threw the thing expertly, like a grenade, the canister soaring up over the horsemen before landing in the middle of them.

It exploded on impact in a fan of light and a great smudge of dirty smoke. Then he threw the second water bottle and an immense cracking sound spread up from the little valley beneath me. When the air cleared I saw that half the bridge had disintegrated. One of the horses was floundering about in the shallow water while the other two, both riderless now, lay across the remaining planks like carcasses in a butcher’s shop. Of the three men only one seemed to have survived the explosion — and I saw him, fighting for his life then, taking cover by the water’s edge from spurts of automatic fire, coming from both sides of the lake. Looking across the valley I saw what had happened: a second cyclist had come down the hill from the far side, joining his companion in the mayhem. The big man in the water, though armed himself I saw now, didn’t have a chance. Caught in a fearful pincer of fire, fore and aft, he heeled over like some aquatic animal, his head tipping back neatly in a reverse dive before he fell into the muddy shallows, just his stomach and part of his face peeking out of the water.

In the end only one of the horses remained alive — wounded and neighing atrociously beneath the bridge. The first cyclist crossed it, carrying his bike — putting the beast out of its misery on the way over — before the two men in their coloured jerseys pedalled away at surprising speed, disappearing up the hill on the other side of the lake.

By the time I got down to the water’s edge nothing moved. There was silence again. The light still fell in magic beams through the high canopy of leaves above and there were calm blue visions in the long distance once more. But the carnage in front of me spoiled the view: some terrible fault had occurred in nature, as if a volcano had erupted from the earth a minute before. Horses and bodies lay half-in, half-out of the water. One man’s head lolled in the mud like a piece of broken statuary, the eyes gazing up appalled; the bleeding hindquarters of an animal dripped over the parapet. And there was a sickly warmth now in the little valley and an acrid smell — of flesh crushed, bleeding in the heat, singed by fire. I couldn’t stomach it. I turned and bicycled furiously up the hill — making for the centre of the forest where the trees soon hid me and the flocks of bluebells waved me on, ever deeper into the bronzed woods.

I thought how quick the police had been when I got back to the hotel — downhill all the way — half an hour later. Two plain-clothes men were in the lobby with Madeleine waiting for me. I was about to mention the battle in the forest but the smaller man, as if in a great hurry, got in first — a neat, precise little detective whose English was good enough, in an old-fashioned way, to suggest a senior position in the service.

‘Inspector Payenne,’ he said. ‘Welcome. But I must tell you that we have discovered suspicious circumstances in the death of your compatriot, Mr Parker.’

‘They think it wasn’t suicide at all,’ Madeleine put in wearily. ‘As you thought —’

‘Oh,’ Payenne interrupted, like a man trained in the old school. ‘You thought before it was not suicide, did you, Mr Marlow?’

‘I thought he wasn’t the kind to kill himself, that’s all,’ I said sharply. ‘What have you found?’

‘The post mortem shows few traces of alcohol in the system — and none at all of any barbiturates.’

‘The pills and whisky may have been a plant then?’

‘We think so.’

‘So what does the post mortem show?’

‘Heart failure. Perhaps.’

‘Is that enough to constitute “suspicious circumstances”?’

‘It may be. Your Embassy records show that Mr Parker had no history of any cardiac trouble.’

‘You’ve been in touch with them?’

‘Yes, with a Mr Huxley.’

Of course, I thought, Huxley would have helped them, the soft-tongued conspirator finding a role at last — and it was then that I first suspected we were about to be framed. ‘Well, heart failure,’ I said. ‘What can one do? A tragedy.’

‘He may still have been poisoned or killed in some other way,’ Payenne said, holding up a neat, stubby finger like a cricket umpire. ‘Our laboratory is still considering that. And also one of your own Home Office pathologists who has come over. I must ask you all to remain here until we have completed the results.’

‘He thinks one of us killed him,’ Madeleine said, mockingly.

‘I did not say that, Madame Phillips —’

‘You think it, though.’

‘You were the last people to see him alive. Naturally … We must await our conclusions,’ Payenne added in his archaic English. Perhaps Kovačič had once taught him, I thought, after hours, in his language college down town. Certainly Inspector Payenne was pursuing a traditional line, straight out of Agatha Christie — with its talk of poisons, pathologists, post mortems and three equally suspect murderers. It was quite unreal. Yet it was just as I’d forecast: Willis’s death had a future in it now, a future in which, with Huxley’s connivance (and therefore also with Marcus’s) we were to be framed. Once more, I thought, Marcus had leant out over the channel to forestall our journey towards Lindsay.

‘For the moment I would like you all to keep yourselves in the hotel. I would be most obliged,’ Payenne said. And when he left I saw that at least one of his colleagues had remained behind, lurking now outside the big glass doors in the sunshine. What more severe incarceration would ensue, I wondered, when Payenne discovered the news in the forest — and learnt that I had been up there myself, on a racing bike, at the same time? He didn’t know this now, but the hall porter or the kitchen hand would be pleased to tell him. It was a good moment to leave — but how? And why should the two women agree?

Rachel, who had been on the phone in her room, came downstairs just then in high good spirits. ‘I got through to Klaus — at last! He’s with the Bavarian State Orchestra on tour. They’re in Heidelberg now. Not far from here. But listen! He’s been trying to get in touch with us: someone approached him, in Munich yesterday, saying they know about Daddy — where he is, and would the family care to make a deal. Isn’t it extraordinary?’ She smiled hugely. I wished I could have made her so abundantly happy.

‘Who?’ I asked. ‘Who called him?’

‘Someone from the Free Croatia people, of course. Who else? The man said so. Klaus said for us to come on down to Heidelberg at once. They’re giving a concert tonight in the Castle. But he’ll be free afterwards and we can stay with him. He’s borrowed a house there.’

‘It won’t be so easy,’ Madeleine said. We explained the news about Willis. But Rachel laughed it off at once. ‘Well, we didn’t kill him. We were all in bed here.’ She looked at me briefly. ‘It’s ridiculous. Of course we can leave. We must!’

‘There’s someone outside the hotel door right now,’ I said. ‘And others inside probably. And anyway, if we did get out, they’d stop us at the border very easily. Remember, Heidelberg is in Germany.’

‘Excuse me butting in,’ a pleasant American voice said suddenly from nowhere. And then a man in a candy-striped summer suit stood up from behind a group of high-back chairs next to us. He came over to us, smiling, apologetic — a nice, old-fashioned American, I thought, not recognising him at once. ‘I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation. But I’m going down to that concert in Heidelberg myself this afternoon — I could take you with me. I don’t know if you remember me, Mr Marlow?’ He smiled across to me, his hand on the chair above Rachel. Of course, it was Pottinger. Art Pottinger — Professor Allcock’s American academic friend who had disappeared in front of my eyes so successfully a few weeks before opposite the British Museum. I introduced him. ‘Ah — Rachel Phillips,’ he said in a slow admiring way. ‘We spoke about you — Mr Marlow and I — when we last met. Are you playing over here, on tour? I’d love to hear —’

‘No. We’re looking for my father,’ she said abruptly.

‘Sit down, do,’ Madeleine said, by way of apology.

The candy-striped linen suit had been pressed recently and Pottinger had become a well-groomed academic now — if that’s what he was at all. But I didn’t question his bona fides just then.

‘You seem to be in some trouble,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t help overhearing … you must forgive me. I’ve been over on the continent a few weeks — in Amsterdam with the Professor, and now I’m staying here. Sort of sabbatical tour — of the music festivals, among other things. I was going to take in this concert tonight in any case, then on to Salzburg. So if I can help …?’

‘What’s happened to Brian?’ Madeleine asked.

‘Oh, the Professor went on back to London, as far as I know. And I came on down here. I don’t want to interfere, but I have a car in the underground garage —’

‘So have we,’ Rachel said. ‘But we can’t use it.’

‘Of course not,’ Madeleine said. ‘We wouldn’t want to get you involved.’

‘Why not, Mummy?’

‘Rachel —’

‘No, no, that’s quite all right. I’d be very pleased to be of help. Your father, you say — he’s disappeared? The Professor didn’t mention it — but then I’m not that close a friend. And now they say you’ve murdered someone!’ Pottinger smiled slowly. ‘You don’t any of you look the type.’

We explained the position to Pottinger then and I must say I saw no real reason not to trust him. He’d hardly have presented himself to us if he had been with the CIA or the KGB — and his whole attitude seemed so much more straightforward than anyone else’s I’d come across in the past few days. ‘What do you suggest?’ I said.

‘I suggest you come out with me — in my car. They won’t have their eye on that. And if they do spot us, well, I’ll just say you asked me for a lift uptown.’

‘And the border crossing?’ I asked. ‘They’ll check our passports there. They’ll be looking for us by then.’

Pottinger smiled once more, with a lazy, archaic American confidence. ‘Oh, I know this part of the world pretty well. I did some research at the University of Louvain over here a few years back. There are half a dozen small roads — beyond to the east — where we can get over. No checkpoints. I did it quite often when I was here.’

‘But the whole thing — it’s entirely illegal,’ Madeleine said, perturbed.

‘Do they have a warrant to keep you under house arrest?’ Pottinger asked, leaning forward incisively, like a small-town attorney. He was a big, chumpy man, I noticed again now, something of the wrestler in him — apart from the face, which might have belonged to someone else altogether with its sharp-featured intelligence and mobility.

‘No. There was no warrant or anything.’

‘So it’s not illegal then. And if they catch us at the border — well, we’ll just say we strayed over. Lots of people do. It’s not an indictable offence, Mrs Phillips, leaving your hotel.’

‘But why take the risk on our behalf? No, we couldn’t.’

It was a point that had crossed my mind too. But Pottinger smiled once more, a smile of genuine concern. ‘Mrs Phillips, any friend of the Professor’s — well, I needn’t say. Besides I was going to Heidelberg anyways, so why not help out? Listen, put a few things into some overnight bags after lunch, then take the lift down to the basement garage. I’ll be waiting for you. It couldn’t be simpler.’

He stood up, beaming. He was an easy man to like.

‘What about the hotel bills?’ I asked. ‘They’ll have warned them about us.’

Pottinger shrugged. ‘You’ll be coming back here. So just phone up and ask them to keep your rooms — after you get over the border: say you decided to take in this Heidelberg concert on the spur of the moment.’

‘Oh, Mummy, we really ought to get down there. Any way we can.’ Rachel was eager again, the spur of action gleaming in her face.

Half an hour later we left our rooms. I shared a small holdall with Rachel, emptying the contents of my briefcase into it — a change of pants and socks, my Baedekers and Maria Von Karlinberg’s diary which I hadn’t yet read properly — and we took the lift down, one by one, to the underground garage without anyone noticing us. Pottinger was waiting for us like a chauffeur, in a hired Peugeot. By two o’clock we were out in the lovely afternoon, on the motorway, going eastwards towards Louvain.

Pottinger drove easily, only one hand on the wheel, and we were free once more, gliding across the flat green countryside with its geometric fields and small white farms and distant church spires, spread out around us as neatly as a picture in a child’s book: free of Huxley and Payenne — and the little holocaust in the forest, which I hadn’t mentioned. But, of course, I should have remembered it. There was a queue of cars at a road block some miles outside the city and we were trapped in it before we could turn back.

‘Stay calm. They can’t have gotten all this show together, in so short a time, just for you people. It has to be for something else.’ Pottinger was admirable, taking off his linen jacket casually as we waited in the burning heat.

We showed our passports, they checked the boot. ‘Just tourists, going to see Louvain,’ Pottinger said in response to the enquiry. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Rien. Rien de tout,’ the patrolman said, waving us through. But there was a radio in the car and Pottinger turned it on. ‘That’s a full-scale alert,’ he said. ‘Something big has happened.’ Then I told them what had happened — that morning, in the forest. I could hardly do otherwise. And ten minutes afterwards a news bulletin confirmed it. What I didn’t know was that it was Radovič, the exiled Croatian army officer, the man I’d gone to see, who had been the principal victim in the killings.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I should have told you.’

Pottinger turned to me, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘And you were on a racing bike too?’ he asked.

‘Yes. But I didn’t kill him. I borrowed it from one of the hotel staff.’

‘No. I shouldn’t think you did kill him. I know something of the background to this Croat business. That man Radovič. The SB — Tito’s secret police — they’ve been gunning for him for years. He’s the top man of one of those exiled Croat groups.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s why I was trying to see him —’

‘We didn’t tell you,’ Madeleine interrupted from the back. ‘It’s one of these Croatian terrorist groups who’ve taken Lindsay. We’ve had letters from him, one from Munich, in fact. The “Free” something or other.’

‘Free Croatia — “Hrvatska Slobodna”?’ Pottinger asked, turning off the motorway now, against an exit sign for Louvain.

‘Yes — those are the people.’

‘I see.’ Pottinger nodded his head carefully. ‘I see how it is,’ he said, as if he’d found the answer to a lifetime’s search. ‘Well, that does make it all a little more difficult. But tell me, your husband, Mrs Phillips, you say he was in the British Foreign Office, and that you’ve had these letters from him for some time: well, are you looking for him entirely on your own? Surely your own people — at the Embassy or your intelligence services — aren’t they helping you?’

Pottinger looked straight ahead, concentrating on the road.

‘I’m afraid … we’ve not had a lot of help from them,’ Madeleine said.

‘None at all. They’re trying to stop us, if anything,’ Rachel added. ‘I’m pretty sure they’re trying to frame us — with our friend’s death. It’s all crazy. They don’t want to be involved.’

‘But why? Your father had an important position —’

‘They say they can’t deal with these Croat terrorists; it would upset Tito,’ Madeleine said shortly. ‘That’s more important than all my husband’s work.’

‘I see. It’s a bad business —’

Madeleine leant forward. ‘Why don’t we go back? We can go back,’ she said apologetically. ‘Just see Louvain and go back. Wouldn’t that be best?’

‘If someone saw you — or knows you were on that racing machine, Mr Marlow — going back would be out of the frying pan, into the fire. On, on I’d say: never apologise, never explain.’

Pottinger enjoyed his idioms, I noticed, like someone who’d just learned a language, and I was tempted once more to try and confirm his bona fides. ‘It’s a pity we haven’t got time to see Louvain,’ I said. ‘Were you there long?’

‘Just a semester. There,’ he said, pointing to a spire on the horizon, sticking up beyond some dull suburbs. We were taking a ring road round the town. ‘That spire, that’s the Louvain University Library, the one the Germans burnt down in World War One. But the town hall is more interesting — finest example of late Gothic in Belgium. If you like that sort of thing. Personally I found the whole place rather … provincial.’

‘What were you researching? I thought you specialised in Soviet studies. I saw that typescript of yours in the Professor’s rooms.’

‘A paper on the history of the reformed church in the east — in Prussia. That’s East Germany now: Louvain has the best collection of books on that topic in Europe.’

‘The reformed church? Surely Louvain is a Catholic foundation?’

‘Indeed. But they keep all the texts on their enemies, Mr Marlow. Complete files, you might say.’ He smiled easily. ‘And what do you do?’ he asked, neatly turning the tables.

‘Oh, I write histories too,’ I said. ‘About Egypt. I was a teacher there years ago.’

Pottinger nodded politely. ‘Were you? That must have been quite something. Do I know your books — under your own name?’

‘No. I’m afraid they’ve not been published yet.’

After Louvain we took a secondary road for Hasselt and then Maastricht, a small town near the German border. From the map it seemed we were going too far north conveniently to hit the Cologne-Heidelberg autobahn. But Pottinger obviously knew his way.

‘What sort of road are you going across on?’ I asked. ‘A track? I thought the Germans were very efficient — checkpoints everywhere.’

‘There are tracks. But even better, there’s a few miles of old turnpike — a motorway they never completed. It’s not used. Leads right up to the German border, between Visé and Eisden. Stops at a farm this side. There’s a track across from there on. It’ll be as hard as rock in this heat. I’ve used it before.’

‘You make a habit of illegal entry and exit?’ I smiled. Again, as outside the British Museum, I sensed a too clever will-o’-the-wisp in Pottinger, a man who could appear and disappear with a skill that was more than academic.

‘No,’ he said deprecatingly. ‘I just used it once, to see what would happen. Hell, it’s all one Europe now anyway. Same as state lines. What’s the odds?’ He spoke like a cowboy from the new world, about to rustle a few cattle.

The land rose gradually as we neared the border — turning south now through Tongres — and afterwards a few hills began to appear, at last a break in the long flat land. But by the time we got to Visé the countryside had sloped again; it was rougher now, marshy in places.

‘Here’s the river Meuse,’ Pottinger said, as we crossed over the wide expanse of water before passing through the small market town of Visé. ‘The old motorway is next. It’s as swampy as hell round here — floods in the winter. That’s why they never completed it.’

Beyond Visé we turned north again and now there were rows of pine trees on either side of us, small plantations running up the side of the valley. The sun was behind us, slanting a little and shadowed here and there by the greenery. But it was still hot and we’d been travelling for more than two hours.

‘I could do with a break,’ Rachel said.

‘So could I. But I don’t know if it’s the right moment.’ Pottinger was looking up into the rear mirror now. There was a car following us, a good way behind. But it was there: on this isolated, empty road. We turned a corner and the trees hid us. Pottinger increased speed and by the time we saw the car again it was a long way behind.

‘Nothing. Just some farmer.’ Pottinger shrugged.

‘If they were following us — they don’t have to go fast,’ I said. ‘There doesn’t seem to be any turn off this road till we get to Bereneau.’

‘There isn’t — except the motorway.’

Another corner hid us and again we picked up speed, imperceptibly almost, as thought Pottinger were anxious not to alarm us. But we were alarmed.

Then, to our left, in a clearing in the plantation, we saw the entrance to the old motorway. It was neatly walled up. Yet we made for it, fast.

I hadn’t seen the gap at one side of the wall — a break between the last two rows of trees — an old contractor’s path that sloped down through the woods. Pottinger swerved onto it expertly, the car suddenly thudding on the hard, sun-beaten earth. He swung the wheel round, following the curve in the trees like a rally driver late for a checkpoint. Half a minute later we were out in the sunlight again, bumping over stony ground, along one side of a V which merged with the shoulder of the motorway rising ahead of us. We hit it at fifty miles an hour and suddenly it was wonderfully smooth as the thumping stopped and the wheels bit sharply into the asphalt. ‘Jesus!’ Pottinger said. He was excited, like a small boy.

The motorway was divided down the middle by a rusty central barrier and we were travelling up it now on the wrong side, which made our speed all the more unnerving. The surface was broken here and there with great frost-scars, so that Pottinger swerved quite often, though he hit some of them since he was keeping an eye on the rear mirror too. All in all, it was a fairly hair-raising journey. Then we saw the other car again. There it was suddenly, a black speck in the rear mirror, gaining on us steadily. But it wasn’t exactly behind us, we soon saw. It was travelling on the right-hand carriageway, separated from us by the steel barrier. And then I saw that it was a British car, a Rover or an Austin Princess, with its lines raked up towards the back.

Pottinger remarked on this too. ‘It’s not the police. Stupid fools. They’ve got themselves on the wrong track.’

‘Surely we’re on the wrong side,’ I said.

‘Yes — intentionally. That side doesn’t lead anywhere — except space. We come off the motorway down another builder’s track, on our side about a mile ahead. But he can’t get off it. There’s no hard shoulder. The road just ends, a hundred feet above the ground.’

The other car was racing us now, coming level almost — and I saw a man waving from our near window, pointing at someone or something in our car, then gesturing us to stop. I didn’t recognise him for a moment, he was so low down in the seat. Then I saw who it was; of course, it was Huxley, the minute little conspirator from the Embassy in Brussels.

I opened my own window and waved back furiously, pointing ahead of their car, trying to warn them. ‘Slow down,’ I turned, shouting at Pottinger. But it was just then that we pulled sharply to the left onto the hard shoulder before dipping away very quickly on a steep track running down the embankment, so that we were hidden from the other car.

The supporting pillars of the motorway ran along to our right now for about a hundred yards before they stopped abruptly at the edge of a small valley. And it was into this valley that we saw the bottom of the Rover, high above our heads now, curving gracefully, in a gentle arc at first before the car lost momentum in the air and plummeted nose-first into the ground. And for the second time that day I was faced with a world of fire as the car crumpled, turned on its side and the petrol tank exploded in a great sheath of flame.

‘Jesus!’ Pottinger said again, but no longer in the tones of some happy schoolboy. We stopped and got out and walked towards the flames. But there was nothing we could do. Madeleine was appalled. ‘We must get the police,’ she shouted.

Pottinger wiped his face. He was sweating badly. But his nerve was far from gone. ‘The police? It’s too late for them. Come on. They’ll be here soon enough anyway.’ He looked up at the pall of dirty smoke rising into the clear summer sky. Then he shepherded us all back into the car hurriedly and we hit the track through the edge of the farm then and within five minutes we were out on some minor road — in Germany.

Huxley: what the hell had he been up to, I wondered? — a thought which Rachel, identifying him, echoed then in the back.

‘One of your Embassy men, was he?’ Pottinger asked.

‘Yes.’

‘I wonder what he wanted to say to you.’

‘I wonder how he managed to follow us.’

‘He must have been hanging around outside the Amigo all the time.’

‘Yes — he must.’

Pottinger said, ‘I don’t understand. You tell me your official friends aren’t being any use to you. They’re being unhelpful. Yet here they are keeping tabs on you all the time.’

‘They don’t want Lindsay found,’ Rachel said. ‘We told you.’

‘It doesn’t follow, though — does it? Risking their lives like that just to stop you finding your father.’

‘It does follow,’ I said. ‘If the game is big enough.’

Pottinger looked at me in surprise. ‘What game?’ he asked.

‘I wish I knew,’ I said. But I was lying. For I thought for a second that I did know what was going on just then. The puzzle became clear for an instant — and was then entirely lost to me. I had somehow touched the answer and then it had slipped from my grasp, like a fish, back into the cloudy streams of consciousness: an answer that had to do with two groups of people looking for the same thing — but for different reasons. Looking for Lindsay …? But the thought was gone, lost in the furore somewhere of that bright summer afternoon — burnt in the blazing heat of a dead car.

We got to the Cologne-Frankfurt autobahn an hour later, and by six o’clock we were half-way to Heidelberg.

4

The castle at Heidelberg reared up high above us on the other bank of the river as we drove through the narrow streets of the old town — a rose dream of gothic towers and broken battlements, floodlit already, streaked in golden light against a velvet evening sky, for we were late. It was after eight o’clock and Klaus’s concert must have started already. It was impossible to park near the castle itself and so we’d walked up the steeply winding road in the shadowy twilight, past little baroque town houses perched on the slopes with vine tendrils streaming down from iron terraces which were set sheer above the city in places, the old medieval bridge 500 feet below us now, lights winking on the stream and pale stars coming down over the wooded valley which ran away out of the town into the darkening night.

The air was still and warm with trails of faint perfume from the crowds of expensive people who had walked this way ten or fifteen minutes before. Then the music emerged in the distance — hundreds of strings trembling faintly somewhere up ahead of us, with a sudden introduction of brass bursting on the night, a sweet fanfare, which died and then came again, more loudly this time.

‘Strauss,’ Rachel said, her face excited now, alive in the shadows — a different woman who was about to forget the recent past and go back into her own, her real life.

‘Johann?’

‘No. Richard.’ She strode away from us, like an addict sniffing opium on the wind. ‘I hope he’s left the tickets for us,’ she called over her shoulder.

Pottinger had his ticket in his hand — that at least was real, I thought; he’d booked it in Brussels. And he was once more the academic now, not the cattle-rustler, his face set with pleasure, full of intelligent purpose. We were all of us free then, as if the violent events of the day had happened in some afternoon movie we’d seen before leaving Brussels. Our journey down had passed entirely without incident. We were ordinary people once more — because we so much wanted to be that. We’d pressed our luck and won and now it was time to retreat into anonymity.

The music drifted towards us now from beyond a moat bridge, a kind of spectacular ruined causeway which led out from the side of the valley onto a buttressed hill where the remains of the great castle stood. But the concert was still hidden from us, somewhere down in the centre of the ruins, the audience and musicians as yet invisible. Only the music was clear, almost fully formed now — the sweeping arpeggios of piano, woodwind and sounding brass rising in clusters which exploded high up in the night sky, the sound falling outwards, cascading into the sweet air like a firework display.

Our tickets had been left for us and we found our seats half way down the courtyard, with Pottinger somewhere behind us by himself. There was nothing to do then but sit back and enjoy Richard Strauss. But he wasn’t a composer I liked and my attention soon drifted away from the music. Though Rachel was so close, sitting next to me on the small chairs, I had lost her again. She had been polite, almost formally distant towards me since the evening before and she had gone back now entirely into her music, into that world where for so long she had lived alone, like a child, and which she could return to now and happily spend a second lifetime growing up in. And the sounds that I heard then, despite all their artistry, were once more like the music in Notting Hill, when Rachel had played the flute behind the bathroom door — a prelude to loss and departure, when she’d run back to her father from the scum and the dirty bathwater. Perhaps Klaus might take her on again, I thought — the big man with his back to us now. He was extremely broad-shouldered with long strands of flourishing jet-black hair flying about his ears as he took the orchestra through the complex score: big-boned yet with delicate movements; Italianate, almost gypsy features when he turned: a face like a solid, handsome watch that would never go wrong. Surely that was what Rachel needed, not my kind of truth, my time-telling, which would always be at variance with hers? And yet I didn’t want to lose her.

I thought of Huxley instead, the music beginning to crash distantly in my ears, visions of the ruined motorway that afternoon taking its place — and the bottom of a car which had circled over our heads, soundlessly, like a great silver bullet in a surreal dream, before it touched the earth and rose again in flames. What had he been trying to signal to us — so vehemently, so desperately — as he raced along beside us? He’d been pointing, jabbing his finger at us repeatedly. But pointing at who? It had been at Pottinger and me in the front seat, not the women behind us. And since he knew, presumably, all about me at that point — from Marcus in London — he could only have been trying to tell me something about Pottinger.

Then it dawned on me — or rather, dawned again: I’d been avoiding the evidence for the sake of a convenient escape from Brussels. Of course, as I’d felt ever since that morning in Bloomsbury, Pottinger wasn’t just an academic — if he was that at all. He was with the Intelligence, with the Americans, or possibly with Moscow. One of Huxley’s minions, keeping tabs on us, had spotted him with us in the hotel perhaps, and identified him, and Huxley had then followed us, assuming we’d been taken in some kidnap. Of course, I thought, we’d gone eastwards: they must have thought we were headed for East Germany and Moscow. That was it. Pottinger was in that camp. But why on earth had he run the risk of openly attaching himself to us if he was with the KGB? Why, because of course he wanted to know as badly as we did what had become of Lindsay — Lindsay, one of his men, who hadn’t come back home to Mummy. And we’d told him now what had happened to him — that the Croatians had taken him. Thus, if my theories were right, he would have no more use for us now.

I turned round. I could see Pottinger’s seat ten rows back on the aisle. It was empty. And then way behind, at the entrance where we’d come in, I saw a figure in a candy-striped jacket pushing quickly past the little tent which housed the box office.

I was just next to the aisle myself and was up after him in a second, running back down the courtyard and out past the attendants onto the floodlit causeway. But there was no one there, down its whole long length. It was deserted, the broken battlements casting a huge jagged shadow all down one side. I went over to the wall. There was a drop, a good hundred feet: no one could have made it — and no one could have run so fast as to have disappeared at the far end of the causeway in the few seconds which had elapsed. Pottinger had found himself some great hand once more to scoop him out of thin air. But this time I was determined to find him.

Turning round towards the little box-office tent again I saw there were only two ways he could have gone — to the right or left of this entrance tent, crawling along part of the broken battlements before dropping back into the castle forecourt a little further on along either side. I chose the right path, leaping up onto the battlement and making my way along it for a few yards without looking down into the moat far beneath me. I was soon able to drop down onto the far side — behind another tent this time, which hid me from the audience. There was a flap and pulling it aside I found myself facing an old woman, knitting by a small card table. I was in one of the women’s cloakrooms.

‘Keinen Herren!’ she shouted at me. She pointed further along in the direction I’d been taking. I backed out and moved on round the edge of the courtyard, the music getting louder as I circled slowly towards the podium. There was another tent now and again I was behind it, wedged between it and the castle wall. I could hear someone peeing almost straight in front of me, a foot or so beyond the canvas. It must have been the gents. But there was no flap I could open this time to get inside.

‘Pottinger?’ I said, shouting into the canvas without much hope. The peeing stopped abruptly and a German voice, greatly shocked, said suddenly, ‘Ja? Mein Gott — Was ist das?’

I was trapped behind the latrine now. Pottinger, I supposed, must have taken the other direction round the castle battlements. He was gone anyway. The music came to a rowdy climax beyond me and there was a great cannonade of applause — applause for Pottinger, it seemed, as I fought my way out from behind the guy ropes and folds of canvas back into the forecourt.

After the concert we walked all the way down the hill again, to where we’d parked the car, half-way along an old street by the river. The space was empty. But there, placed neatly together on the pavement, stood Rachel’s hold-all and Madeleine’s overnight bag. Pottinger, considerate to the end, I thought. But then I realised that he’d want to help us; he was anxious for Lindsay as we were, I saw now. I looked around the dark street, into the shadowy archways. Pottinger had disappeared. But he, or his colleagues from Moscow, would be with us from now on, I felt, eavesdropping on us, following us, as Marcus I was sure had done, and would do, in ways we would never know. We were three Pied Pipers now, leading all the others on a dark dance. I opened Rachel’s hold-all. My things were still there — Maria von Karlinberg’s diary and the little silver revolver and matchbox of ammunition. I put the gun and matchbox in my pocket this time. I’d keep them with me from now on.

Klaus had borrowed an appallingly contemporary studio from some friend — a bijou apartment decorated in the most clinical modern style, set near the top of the hill with one long room full of mirror table-tops and chrome armchairs, which gave out over the whole valley, twinkling in the night beneath us.

He had taken his tail-coat off and was in a starched shirt and false waistcoat now, busying himself first with a tray of drinks and then with the curtains at one end of the long picture window. He started to close them. Then he stopped half-way.

‘No,’ he said decisively, as though reconsidering a vital piece of stage management. ‘Let us look at the night — as well.’ He left the curtains as they were, then stood back, admiring his work briefly. He turned, rubbing his hands. ‘Quelle histoire,’ he said to himself. I presumed he was commenting on our story which we had all of us fed to him by degrees since the concert had finished. ‘No,’ he went on, picking up an earlier question. ‘They obviously got in touch with me because I was married to you.’ He went over to Rachel and put his arm round her for a second. ‘There is a syphon of soda in the kitchen,’ he told her, towering above her from a great height. ‘They might like it.’ She left willingly. They might have been still married, I thought, Rachel operating so meekly in his shadow, the compliant Hausfrau almost, who had never left him ten years before.

Madeleine was perched on one of the sharp chrome chairs; I was over by the window looking vacantly out at the night. And he came up to me, looking at me generously. It wasn’t that he was patronising, I felt, but rather that he was the famous conductor now, from whom precise directions over every aspect of life were to be expected. I felt extremely unnecessary and didn’t mind a bit. He offered me a large cut glass of expensive whisky.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Very good,’ he added, as I took a first taste of it.

‘Thank you. I think I’d like some soda.’

‘And you shall have some soda. Rachel?’ He turned and smiled as just then she came back into the room with a big coloured syphon. He took it from her and brought it over to me ceremoniously. ‘Say when.’ He squeezed the lever.

‘When.’ Klaus went on round the room, conducting an elaborate ritual with the drinks. I suppose he thought whisky and soda was something which every English person still required after ten o’clock at night.

He sat down at last, taking off his watch first, then his cufflinks and finally rolling up his sleeves.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘First things first: this man who called me.’ He picked up a large engagement book from the mirror-topped table in front of him. ‘Here’s what he said —’

‘Did he speak German? Can we call him now?’ Madeleine interrupted eagerly.

‘Yes, German. But you can’t call him now. He didn’t leave any number — obviously. He’s going to call you, at the Schwarzenberg Palace Hotel in Vienna. Between 9 and 9.15 two nights from now, on Wednesday. I made the arrangements. You can stay at this hotel. I know the owners.’

‘But why Vienna?’ I asked.

‘Obviously they have Lindsay somewhere down there.’ Klaus took off his false waistcoat. He was disrobing gradually. ‘The man didn’t explain. But you must go there, to the hotel, and wait for him to call. See for yourself.’

‘Go there? But how?’ Madeleine was tired. ‘This foolish American … All our things are back in Brussels. Besides, we shouldn’t really be here at all. We left illegally — and they’re bound to be looking for us at the next frontier.’

‘Nonsense, Madeleine.’ Klaus stood up and went over to her, kneeling down rather formally and taking her hand, as though rehearsing a scene from some grand opera. ‘Nonsense — you must go on and find Lindsay. You must go on, not look back. You will lose him that way.’

‘But —’

‘With me, Madeleine. We are all going on to Vienna tomorrow morning. We have a concert there the day after. It couldn’t be simpler. You can come in the musicians’ coach. They rarely check all the orchestra against their passports in any case. But if you stop now — well, you may lose him again.’

Klaus stood up and came over to me again. ‘Peter,’ he said. ‘You tell her. You’ve brought them here so far. You shouldn’t stop now.’ He turned back towards Madeleine as though waiting half-way through a score for a tardy musician.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Why not? A sheep as a lamb,’ I added. I hardly cared any more, I was so tired just then. After Vienna, if nothing happened, we could pack the whole business in and go home. Home? Well, back to a summer of dry sherries at least, lost in the Cotswolds, and the remains of a book about the British in the Nile valley. It wasn’t much — but they were surer things than anything in Lindsay’s life, it seemed.

‘All right — let’s go on.’ Madeleine had revived once more.

‘There. You see, I knew it was the right thing. You can all come with me. And don’t worry now any more. Let me change my things and I’ll come downtown with you — we’ll have some food. And you can all camp with me here on the sofas. No need to sign any hotel registers. All right?’ He turned and smiled at Rachel.

‘You’re marvellous,’ she said. ‘Absolutely marvellous.’

‘Ah,’ he said, putting an arm round her shoulder again. ‘There is nothing really difficult. It’s all in the mind — where we have no limitations!’

Klaus was a godsend for Rachel, I could see: and he knew it.

The huge coach was air conditioned, which was just as well, as the day had started with a cool, thin mist over the Neckar river, swirling on the water by the old bridge, which by nine o’clock had given way to a lead-blue sky, the heat shimmering already on the twisting valley road which led eastwards down the romantic river Neckar.

I had taken Maria von Karlinberg’s diary out of Rachel’s bag — and Lindsay’s old address book which I still had with me, and I turned to the letter M now — and there she was: ‘Maria — Reisnerstrasse 32, Vienna 3.’ The same woman, I wondered? The socialist journalist of forty years before trying to get a boot in the legation door? Lindsay’s friend — or something more? Willis had been just fractionally hesitant or coy about her. Well, we were going to Vienna now. She might be still around. She might help. I could but try. Kovačič after all had clarified many things and he’d turned up out of a telephone directory. Perhaps more elderly people in Europe had survived the war than I had imagined.

Klaus came with us in the coach for the first part of the journey — down the Danube valley, to Passau, where we were to have lunch. He sat ahead of Madeleine and me now, talking with Rachel, introducing her to some of the musicians. I saw her fingering a flute belonging to one of them, examining it with love. She was at home again. What nonsense it had been for her to suggest a future with me, ‘an audience of one’, as she had in Brussels a few days before. That had been a convenient dream of hers, far from her real nature. Rachel had become ‘unworthy’ once more — of me, or of life: she, who bloomed in a crowd, among the attention of many, as she did now ahead of me, her skin glowing in the bright morning light, playing on the long silver instrument a few delicately phrased notes which floated back down the coach like the tentative theme for a life renewed.

After some thermoses of coffee had been passed round I got out the diary and started to look through it. Madeleine glanced at the cover. ‘That’s the book by Lindsay’s friend in Vienna?’

‘Yes. I wish I spoke more German.’

There was little of the text which I understood fully, a passage here and there, and parts of one long account of a train journey the woman had made with an unnamed man to visit socialist prisoners in some provincial town in Austria — with a lot of talk about someone called Koloman Wallisch, a socialist martyr of the times, apparently, whom the authorities had executed in the provinces after the Vienna risings of February 1934.

Later, when Klaus came down to see us, I asked him to take a look at the passage. ‘An old friend of Lindsay’s,’ I told him. ‘What does she say?’

Klaus stood in the gangway a minute, holding the luggage rack, swaying a little. Then he read from the diary, translating it fluently, in almost dramatic tones:

‘We travelled all night in that uncomfortable third-class compartment — the snow falling all the time. Do you remember? — another of our Wedding Snows — and the hills about were all covered with it next morning. But the town was gay and spring-like with fruit and vegetable stalls — and we had that small front room in the Gasthaus where we saw over the street to all those fine baroque houses and the great market cross — and beyond, the mountains, still streaked with snow. But Wallisch had died and was buried here in the cold cemetery down by the river. And there was nothing left but our love then. Our snow love — which was not cold yet.’

Klaus looked up, surprised. ‘Poetic,’ he said. ‘In very simple German — like a child’s story.’ He looked puzzled. ‘But this Wallisch, he was a socialist agitator.’ He glanced on through some more pages. ‘Yet the “diary” here — it’s a love story,’ he said. ‘From what I can make out. A socialist love story.’ He turned back to the beginning of the book, looking at the dedication. ‘“To the Fat One at the Blue Bar of Sacher’s”,’ he read out. ‘What does that mean? Is the woman still alive?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘The “Fat One”?’ Madeleine asked, ‘Could that have been Lindsay? People used to call him “Fatty”.’

‘I wondered just that myself,’ I said.

‘This Maria must have been an old flame then — though Willis denied it, tactfully enough.’

I wondered, though, if Madeleine had really followed all the implications. ‘If it’s dedicated to him,’ I said gently, ‘and it’s a love story — well, Lindsay must have been its subject. The man she’s talking about travelling with in that train all night and in the hotel next morning — that must be Lindsay. Don’t you —’

‘Possibly. Why? Is that strange? He was young enough. I’m sure he had girl-friends out there then.’

‘Yes. But at that time he was supposed to be with Eleanor. You remember? She was out with him in Vienna.’

Madeleine shrugged. ‘Who knows — all the exact dates? And what does it matter anyway, forty-five years ago?’

But I felt it did matter, though I couldn’t say why. And then it struck me. ‘What was that phrase exactly?’ I asked Klaus. ‘Our “snow love”?’

Klaus went back to the passage. ‘“Another of our wedding snows”,’ he read out. ‘Or “wedding of snow” you might translate it.’

And I remembered then: Aunt Susan’s description in the empty church at Dunkeld, of Lindsay’s Christmas wedding with Eleanor, in 1935, when it had snowed all day, ‘like a fairy-tale’, except for the part of the reception ‘when the sun had come out and the champagne was too cold’.

‘And here?’ I asked Klaus again, pointing to the end of the passage. ‘“Our snow love —”?’

‘“Which was not cold yet”,’ Klaus finished the sentence.

I looked at the date on the fly-leaf: 1937 — the year of the break-up between Lindsay and Eleanor, according to Kovačič and Aunt Susan. I turned to Madeleine. ‘Eleanor studied German at Oxford, didn’t she?’

‘I don’t know. I think so. Modern languages. Why?’

‘This diary is written by her. I’m sure of it. She wrote it, some time before she died. It’s the story of her time with Lindsay in Vienna in 1934.’

Madeleine smiled sympathetically. She took the book from me and glanced through it. ‘But Peter, why would she have bothered to do it all in German? And why did Lindsay never tell me about it? He had nothing to hide. I didn’t know him then, after all.’

‘I don’t know. But I’m sure of it,’ I said. ‘Somehow.’

‘Well, that’s as may be.’ Madeleine gave the book back. ‘But how will it help — even if you’re right — finding Lindsay now?’

She turned away and started to doze then, the sunlight touching her ash-gold hair through the big window. Klaus went back to the front of the coach and I sat there remembering clearly the little musty church at Dunkeld, the blinding weather and the long grass and the tall white daisies among the tombs outside the vestry door; and then that pale debutante’s face in the stained-glass window, oval-shaped, dark-haired, serene — like a thirties court photograph: ‘Eleanor Phillips: In Memoriam 1912–1937’ — the woman whose glass face I had looked into, in a midsummer church, who had married there in a snowstorm.

‘Poetic — like a child’s story,’ Klaus had said. ‘A socialist love story.’ But why, indeed — if it be true — had Eleanor gone to all the trouble of telling it in German, and publishing it under an assumed name, the year she died? And I felt the scent of the chase once more, blowing about me, a strange pricking at the back of my neck, just as I had that afternoon at the little ruined church beyond Dunkeld, as though I were once again in the presence of these two people, long ago married and parted and one, if not both of them, dead now. Yet they lived again just then, in the dry air of the coach, as fully as they ever had together in life; real people joined once more, refilling all the shapes of passion and anger which they had created then, released now in a book which I felt certain commemorated them.

And once more I wanted to discover Lindsay, to complete my vision of his life in some way — a life that appeared to me now as something vastly strange and contradictory, like a cathedral full of magnificent vistas and yet with horrors lurking in odd nooks and crannies — a marvellous edifice built on cracked foundations.

Madeleine dozed next to me, oblivious of my thoughts. And I thought what peace she has with Lindsay: alive or dead, guilty or innocent, it didn’t matter to her. I looked at her face, sweet and calm in the light. She had that gift of total belief. Whatever happened she could not be wrong about her husband. And he? What had he done to ensure this faith in him? I thought again — if we lie, and we will, it is to those whom we are closest to that we must lie most completely.

The border with Austria came just after Passau. It was a bad few moments. But there were many other cars and crowds of tourists lining up against the passport counters — and since we were the Bavarian State Symphony Orchestra, as Klaus had forecast, they took all the passports in a bunch, stamped them and returned them without taking a head-count. We three had mingled with the crowds, apart from the musicians, our own passports at the ready, but no one noticed us and we climbed back onto the coach with the others. It was extremely simple in the end. I was surprised, since I assumed that the Belgian police had found Huxley’s car by now and, having checked back through the Embassy, would almost certainly have discovered that he had been following us — we, who had jumped our house arrest at the Amigo Hotel. I could only suppose that either the Belgian or the German frontier police were being inefficient or that the orchestra had given us perfect cover. Or were we, I thought for a moment, because of some other ploy contrived by someone — Marcus perhaps, with the connivance of Interpol — were we being allowed to cross the frontier unhindered, so that we might lead them to Lindsay? Perhaps we were too precious as pathfinders to be stopped, no matter how many corpses littered our way.

I sat by Rachel afterwards. We had drunk some wine with our lunch and she was tired now, the blinding afternoon sun streaking through the big window, touching her bronzed skin with fire. We had chatted about nothing and now she closed her eyes. She seemed to be sleeping.

I said gently, ‘You remember in Glenalyth — you told me in the flower room: that we had to win, to try and win in our life, you and I, and not always settle for less: that we had to be bright?’

‘Yes,’ she said after several seconds, almost inaudibly.

‘Now it’s my turn, to tell you the same thing.’

She opened one eye sleepily, ‘Yes,’ she said again. ‘But I seem to have lost confidence — in us,’ she said at last without looking at me.

‘You make me look back,’ she went on. ‘We’re never really new people to each other. And there’s too much in the past …’

‘That you won’t accept?’

‘No doubt, no doubt.’ She was sarcastic now. She took out a scented hanky and wiped her forehead. There was a vague smell of plums in the desiccated air.

We were fighting again, the one thing we’d always been truly expert in. Our relationship, at heart, was still full of nursery antagonisms, exaggerated feelings. We had no middle way. We had to be either enemies or lovers.

I said, ‘You’re going back into being terrified of the truth. That’s not winning in life.’

‘Do stop talking about terror and winning and things. You said you thought Lindsay had killed Eleanor — that’s the problem, or one of them — And the truth can hurt — too much to be worth it,’ she said severely, as if from the depths of some unquestionable knowledge.

We were coming towards Linz, the old Danube fortress town in the middle of the huge river, straddling it with narrow bridges either side, one of them crossing over to the far bank and onto the Salzburg-Vienna motorway. Rachel turned away from me and looked at the view of spires and baroque cupolas, glittering in the late afternoon light, rising up ahead of us. She had become that haughty, distant cousin to me once more, sarcastic and severe by turns, driven to hurt by the hurt in herself which she would not admit.

I put my hand on hers. It was very warm. It had been lying there in her lap, in the same position, directly in the sun for half an hour, cradling the plum-scented hanky.

‘I love you,’ I said.

She turned on me brightly. ‘And I love my father. Is there anything to be ashamed of in that?’

She spoke loudly, with harshness almost and her eyes were bright with anger and with fear.

‘No,’ I said. But I knew she was adrift again now, tremulous, terrified — and yet excited by the venture, the daring cause she had taken on once more: a cause that lay in some terror or unsatisfied longing in childhood and had formed her real search ever since: the need for reassurance so deep that it was impossible to assuage through the mechanics of real life. It could only be satisfied now, as in the past, by that fictional relationship she had maintained with Lindsay — where, like a warm toy or a perfect character in a child’s book, he could be made to rise from some nursery world, day or night, and bring her an incredible comfort, a joy not subject to change or decay, wondrous and freely imagined. She could be an artist with her father, dealing in inspiration and miracles. With me, she knew, the fiction would run out after a while: rain would fall all day on a cracked window pane somewhere and there would be scum round the edge of the bath that night.

I squeezed her hand and was bright. But I was not bright at all.

5

We came to Vienna in the evening, running down the long slopes of the Salzburg motorway into a huge flat valley which lay beneath us like a plum-coloured sea, with a pale blue velvet haze all over it, pricked everywhere with light, as if thousands of little ships had crammed a vast harbour for the night.

The coach had been largely silent for the last hour, cruising the smooth motorway, its passengers dazed with heat or half-asleep after the long day. But now they stirred in mild anticipation, gathering their bits and pieces carefully about them — newspapers, cameras, and summer hats — like tidy little animals clearing up before venturing out into an exciting dark.

Most of the orchestra were staying at the Hilton next the air terminal, a little to the east of the city. From there, having seen them off for the evening, Klaus took a taxi back to the inner city with us, then up Schwarzenbergstrasse and finally out onto a huge, ruined platz with a glittering fountain rising up in the middle.

‘Schwarzenberg Platz,’ Klaus said. ‘And the new metro.’ Spotlights illuminated great stacks of girders and piles of sand, with little builders’ huts perched everywhere among the debris. The earth thudded with drills underground and the oven of summer air was thick with dust. But soon, circling this battlefield, we drove up into a darker street away from the city before swinging round into some thick bushes where there was a meagre light above a small sign: ‘Palais Schwarzenberg Hotel.’ Beyond this a short drive circled round to a gravel forecourt where a silver Mercedes lurked in the porch light from a low two-storey building, the yellow stucco crumbling slightly between the tall shuttered windows, the whole finished with delicate architraves and other baroque doodles.

The night was dark and almost silent here, hidden away behind the hedges and trees. It was as if we had suddenly come into the country, to spend the evening in some rural estate.

‘Come.’ Klaus gestured from the porch, for we had stood there in the forecourt, looking around uncertainly at the clumps of bushes and the ghostly umber-coloured building in front of us.

‘This is a wing of the Palace. The family still live in the rest of it. Over there.’ Klaus pointed beyond the undergrowth to where we could just see a much larger edifice looming up in the shadows.

‘Come on in. I’ve made all the arrangements.’

I thought of Willis Parker a week before in Brussels, standing outside the Amigo, in similarly welcoming attitudes, and I wondered when our luck was going to run out — or Klaus’s.

Inside, the illusion of being in a guest wing of a country house was almost complete. Taste predominated in the beautiful eighteenth-century furnishings in the narrow hallway — followed some way behind by a little luxury in the shape of huge bowls of orchids and other hothouse flowers everywhere, with ugly modern facilities hardly in evidence at all, though I noticed a telex behind the reception desk where a young man in a dark coat and pin-striped trousers welcomed Klaus like a courtier.

‘Herr Doktor Fischer. How nice to see you.’ He spoke in English then, as if in deference to Klaus’s guests, whom he had already tactfully surmised came from those parts. He didn’t glance at our passports as we filled in the reservation cards. Such vulger modern identities, he seemed to suggest, were hardly necessary in these charmed circles — to which, through Klaus, we had already achieved automatic entry. A retainer took our bags upstairs.

The bath in my room was as big as a tomb, circled in dark mahogany, and the double bed was curtained away, Indian-fashion, by thin muslin drapes from the rest of what was a drawing and not a bedroom at all, with a tapestry along one wall, Louis Quinze armchairs, a rosewood escritoire and long double shuttered windows which gave out over the formal gardens at the back — a dark wilderness now in the shadows, with odd shafts of light from the rooms beneath illuminating impossibly contorted baroque statues and other more classic busts which ran down a gravel path towards what looked like a huge greenhouse at the far end of the gardens. There was a vague, clotted smell of flowers riding up on the air when I opened the windows, a perfume baked all day long and cooled now, a faint sweetness in the night. I was surprised to see a telephone by my bed. It seemed entirely out of place. Rachel and Madeleine had rooms immediately next to mine, with Klaus a little further down the corridor.

I didn’t bother going in to see Rachel this time and, since she no longer had her flute with her, there was no music. But I could hear someone talking to her, through the open window, half an hour later, when I’d had a bath and was just going downstairs for dinner. Leaning out I could just distinguish Klaus’s voice. ‘I’m glad you like it,’ I heard him say. Their voices came right up to the open window now and I stepped back. Klaus spoke again. ‘There — you can just see one of the statues. They form a semi-circle. Spring, I think that one is. He’s supposed to have written The Four Seasons here.’ I hated Klaus mildly then.

Downstairs over dinner Klaus was even more informative. ‘We can, of course, go to the police, and tell them about the phone call tomorrow night. But why not deal with it ourselves? We can even record it here. I can make arrangements. Chances are the Viennese police may have your names. But remember, in any case, you came out here to offer these Yugoslavs a financial deal yourselves. So why not leave it that way?’ He sipped the light, chilled wine — a Grizinger from the Wienerwald. ‘The concert we’re giving tomorrow night — it’s over there, in the Belvedere gardens.’ Klaus pointed beyond our own garden outside the dining-room and up to the left. ‘All this central part round here is really just one big garden. Schwarzenberg, Belvedere, the Botanic: it’s extraordinary —’

‘I wonder how far away we are from Reisnerstrasse,’ I asked, tactlessly.

‘Reisnerstrasse?’ Madeleine asked. Her face was happy in the candlelight. Klaus had been good for her too.

‘Where that woman Maria lived, who wrote the book.’

‘Did she? How do you know that?’

‘From an old address book of Lindsay’s I found up in the attics at Glenalyth. Didn’t I tell you?’

‘No.’ Madeleine was less happy now. ‘I didn’t know —’

‘Oh, yes. 32 Reisnerstrasse. And of course, as I say, I think Maria was, in fact, Eleanor.’

‘What’s the point — even if she was? It can’t help now. It’s nothing to do with this Yugoslav and the phone call —’

‘This is where Lindsay and Eleanor lived, you know. Forty-five years ago — here, in Vienna. Right here.’ I felt the others were betraying their memory. There was silence. Rachel toyed with her food.

‘I still don’t see,’ Madeleine said at last. I had become an unwelcome outsider at the feast.

‘They shot all the workers,’ I said with bitter enthusiasm. ‘They used mortars and howitzers, killed them in all their fine new model estates, the Karl Marx Hof and so on, on the outskirts of the city. Lindsay was here at the legation; Eleanor came out and joined him. They lived here together, in 1934. Willis told us that Lindsay knew this Maria von Karlinberg, that she was a socialist journalist, daughter of some great Hapsburg family here. Well, I don’t think she was; she was Eleanor. Isn’t that all worth finding out about?’

‘No,’ Rachel said firmly.

‘Why?’ Madeleine asked me more sensibly.

‘Because I think it has something to do with why Lindsay disappeared.’

‘But he was taken by these Yugoslavs — as revenge for what’s supposed to have happened on the border with all those Croats just after the war. That’s what you said.’

‘Yes. But I’m not convinced. I can’t see, for example, how they got Lindsay all the way down from Glenalyth to Vienna — over the channel and across half a dozen borders. How do you do that? You can’t drug a man for that long. Had we thought of that?’ I looked round the table.

‘He’s not here at all — is that what you mean?’

‘No. Not necessarily.’ But I had suggested an element of doubt and they were not pleased with that. ‘I just think that while we’re here in Vienna, waiting for this call… Well, I’ll go round there myself tomorrow and see. You never know …’ I left the uncertain future hanging in the warm air.

Klaus broke the unease. ‘Well, why not?’ he said. He raised his glass. ‘If Peter believes it …’

I suspected that Klaus was encouraging me to do something which the others found unpleasant, that I might the more alienate myself from them, to his advantage.

‘Reisnerstrasse is an old street,’ he went on, ‘full of Hapsburg apartments, just round the corner. One of my music professors lived there. Runs from the Heumarkt to Renn Weg — past the British Embassy in fact, half-way along. Go round by Schwarzenberg Platz, and you can’t miss it.’

Madeleine sighed. She shooked her head. ‘I don’t know what you expect to find,’ she said. ‘Forty-five years later. Even if Eleanor did live there …’

‘He expects to find trouble,’ Rachel said shortly.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Not trouble. If anything, only the truth.’

‘You talk like a third-rate lawyer. Lindsay isn’t on trial, you know,’ Rachel said.

‘No,’ I lied — for that, to my mind, was exactly the case.

I slept uneasily that night and had a guilty dream in which, loving Rachel, naked in some great ornately gilded bed, I tried to strangle her. It seemed such a classically obvious dream, in this city of Freud, that I smiled when I woke and remembered it next morning, opening the big windows and looking out on the twisted statuary, the gardens ablaze already in the white summer light.

The women didn’t come down for breakfast. But Klaus was already in the dining-room, reading through a musical score, so I had to join him over the fresh orange juice, coffee and pastries. I was surprised by his warmth towards me. He sympathised over my rebuff the previous night — and with my problems generally in helping the family.

‘They’re not easy people to do things for — or to live with.’ His face fell as though he genuinely regretted his failure with Rachel. ‘It was good of you to take on the …’ he paused. ‘Their cause,’ he added at last. Klaus lived amidst an all-enveloping caul of drama. Almost every aspect of life was like great music to him, I felt. It had to be shaped and phrased carefully and then given out fortissimo. And I sensed that he enjoyed — even thrived on — the drama that had unexpectedly come to him through us. The whole business with Lindsay was something of an opera for him, the libretto being created there and then, right in front of him, and he was giving it music, conducting it already in his mind’s eye.

Klaus drained his coffee and stood up. ‘I’ll arrange for Karl Hauptmann, our recording engineer, to come round and fix up a tape machine in Madeleine’s room for tonight. I won’t be here. So I’ll leave it with you. All right?’

We shook hands, rather formally. I liked him a little better now. Perhaps, I thought, the truth wasn’t so important after all.

Reisnerstrasse wasn’t too far: round the edge of the great Platz, splitting with noise and fire that morning, and then into the broad Renn Weg that led south out of the city. My street was a few hundred yards up this boulevard to the left. But it was a long street and number 32 seemed to be right down at the end, so that I was sweating when I got to the great arched doorway of the tall, grimed nineteenth-century apartment block. Coaches had entered a covered forecourt here in better days, picking up their robed and jewelled charges for a night at the Opera. But now, when I turned the huge handle, the great doors creaked with untended age and I was confronted with gloom and decay. Inside was a tall, vaulted space, lit only with a few beams of dusty sunlight coming from a window high up in a back wall. The plaster was damp and cracked on either side — where two doors gave onto stairways and a row of metal mail boxes stood against the far end.

I walked over and looked at the names in the little slots — some of them barely visible in the gloom. There was no Von Karlinberg. I had hardly suspected such luck. I was just about to leave, giving the names a last glance. And then I saw the firm capital lettering. I lit a match to make sure. It said simply RABERNAK — an apartment on the fourth floor.

I was dizzy for a moment when I stood up. But dizzy from excitement as much as anything. I’d found something better than Von Karlinberg. This must have been Zlatko Rabernak, the Zagreb antique dealer, or his family. Kovačič had told me: Zlatko had had a shop in Zagreb — Zlatko Rabernak, who’d collected musical boxes and given so many of them to Eleanor, who had taken Eleanor away from Lindsay that spring in Zagreb when the cherry blossom had fallen like snow in the park above the city.

I decided to take a chance there and then. It said RABERNAK: somebody, at least, of that family still lived there. And so I climbed the shallow-stepped wooden stairway, past great mirrors at each landing, badly foxed around the edges, seeing myself each time framed in the decaying gilt as I rose upwards in my summer suit, an avenging angel or a fool — I couldn’t say which.

On the fourth floor I rang a bell which pinged cheaply right behind the door, so that I jumped badly. It was opened almost at once by a fresh-faced young woman, large-boned and wide-eyed with a very toothy smile, like some Coke ad from an old National Geographic magazine. She was in a dressing-gown and smelt of soap, with her hair all twirled up in a towel. I sensed she was American. She was.

‘Yes?’ she said. ‘Can I help you?’ A pleasant southern drawl. I was in luck. I hadn’t expected my kitchen German to get me too far.

‘Forgive me, Mr or Mrs Rabernak?’ I explained my business briefly, tactfully. ‘We were friends of the Rabernak family — years ago. We were just passing through Vienna …’

‘Well come in then. I’m Clare. I just have a room with Mrs Rabernak. There’s only one. Mr Rabernak died years ago, I think. Mrs Irena Rabernak. She’s nearly eighty — and not up yet. But I’ll tell her. She likes to meet old friends. Come on in.’

The hall was dark, panelled in plaster with gilt bas-reliefs and there was a huge portrait of what looked like the old Emperor Franz-Josef himself along the back wall.

‘I’m studying at the conservatory here,’ Clare said brightly as we walked across a thick carpet. The hall smelt of shampoo. Through an open doorway I saw a bathroom, still steaming with a line of smalls drying on a string.

‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘That’s nice. There’s a concert here tomorrow night we hope to get to: at the Belvedere Gardens.’

‘Yes, the Bavarian State. Klaus Fischer. We couldn’t get tickets. We’re going to have a night at the opera instead.’

‘Opera — at this time of year?’

‘Yes. They do a few of the popular Viennese ones — for the annual Festival of Vienna. Die Fledermaus — that sort of thing.’

She had led me into a large, heavily furnished salon looking out over the street. The walls and shelves were filled with turn-of-the-century ornaments, chocolate-box portraits, old plate photographs and many potted plants. The big double windows were closed against the vague sounds of the street below and the heavy velvet curtains, running down all the way to the floor from gilded rods right up against the ceiling, added to the sense of being in an almost soundless, brown-coloured aquarium. It was a little Hapsburg museum with its bits and pieces from the Belle Epoque and earlier scattered everywhere — an inkstand shaped like a water-lily pond on a huge black dark desk; a small mirror behind where a langorous, half-clad maiden formed one side of the pewter-coloured frame, her arm leaning round over the top, dangling a bunch of grapes over the glass. The place reeked of certainty and a belief, at least, in long-settled virtue. Freud and Hitler had never been to this city; even the Crown Prince hadn’t begun to dilly-dally with popinjay Mary Vetsera up in the Hofburg.

The only modern thing in the room was a vulgar chrome tea trolley in the middle, with silver saucers of old paper-wrapped chocolates on the bottom shelf, with an empty cocktail ice bowl and a dusty, quarter-filled red Martini bottle on top. Clare left me and I could hear voices in some distant room. I picked up one of the chocolates from the trolley. It collapsed in my fingers.

It was quite some time before Mrs Rabernak arrived. She was a small, fine-faced, slightly nervous woman with straggly grey hair, but dressed in a smart red trouser-suit and neat pearl necklace, so that she didn’t immediately look her age at all. She was well made up — her mouth so much so that it formed a startling red gash right across her face. Only her hands properly revealed the years: arthritic and bony, the thin fingers weighed down with old rings, which tended to slip, so that she nursed them all the while with the other hand, moving them up and down nervously, like beads on an abacus.

She looked at me intently but uncertainly, as though I was someone with whom she had made an important appointment which she had afterwards forgotten about. Clare stood behind her — in a bright, sleeveless summer dress, her pretty, unformed face surrounded by long sheaths of corn-coloured hair which she had now combed out so thoroughly that it shone even in the dull light. They were like a Wyeth painting, standing beside each other, suggesting a relationship not unnatural but unfathomable.

‘Mrs Rabernak — you must excuse me, butting in like this…’ I made my explanations, mentioning the Palais Schwarzenberg Hotel as a bona fide.

She held up a hand. ‘My Englisch,’ she said, ‘is no very good. But Clare,’ she turned to her, smiling. ‘Clare will help.’ We all sat down, huddling round the tea trolley and the dusty Martini bottle in the middle of the huge room.

I had brought both Maria von Karlinberg’s diary and Lindsay’s address book with me. Having explained about looking for this Maria, I showed both of them to Mrs Rabernak. She looked through the diary carefully, turning the pages one by one — then skipping to the middle and stopping over a passage, reading it out in German in a low voice, intently, unaware of us. Her face withdrew into itself, the lines of age splitting the make-up and crinkling about her neck and cheeks as she sucked her breath in. I heard the name ‘Koloman Wallisch’ faintly, derisively, on her lips.

At last she turned back to the front cover, jabbing a finger at it. Then she looked at me oddly. ‘Is not Maria von Karlinberg,’ she said hoarsely. ‘Is an Englischwoman who is living here before the war.’ She turned and spoke to Clare in German. I heard the name ‘Eleanor’ and then ‘Biley’, and I could suddenly hear my heart thumping in the quiet room.

Clare translated. ‘Mrs Rabernak says it was written by a young woman called Eleanor Bally — or Bailey, I think. The Rabernaks had a much larger apartment in this same block then and she lived with them for several months, in —’ Clare turned back. But the old woman had already understood.

‘In nineteen hundred and thirty-four. Before they killed Dollfuss. In those bad times.’ She rattled her rings. She had a confidence now quite lacking before; the bite in her eyes of a gossip suddenly confronted by a juicy scandal.

‘Is this the woman you’ve been looking for?’ Clare asked.

‘Yes. I’m a friend of the family’s. But how did she come to be here?’ I asked the old lady. Again she didn’t seem to understand so I started off in German.

‘No, no, I have understood you,’ she said helpfully. ‘How was she here? I will tell you.’ Her face was tense now, even angry. ‘She was a friend of a cousin of our Rabernaks — here in Wien. A distant cousin.’ She emphasised the distance by waving her arm in the air southwards. ‘The Zagreb Rabernaks of little Zlatko’s’ she said icily.

‘Of course,’ I nodded. ‘He had an antique shop here in Vienna as well.’

‘No,’ Mrs Rabernak said firmly. ‘Zat shop was my husband’s. In Kohlmarkt.’ She spoke in German again to Clare.

‘She says Zlatko Rabernak — these Zagreb Rabernaks — all they ever collected was rubbish. How do you say it? Knick-knacks?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Knick-knacks. Musical boxes?’

Mrs Rabernak nodded her head vigorously. ‘That is it!’ She said happily. ‘Just rubbish, musik boxes.’ Again there was a flow of German addressed to the American girl.

Clare looked at her curiously before translating. ‘She says, well —’ She hesitated. ‘That her father — that’s Mrs Rabernak’s father — was a Minister here under the old regime, with the Emperor —’

‘Minister of Post und Telegraf,’ Mrs Rabernak said very shortly.

‘I see,’ I said, not seeing the relevance at all. ‘And what happened to this Eleanor Bailey?’

Mrs Rabernak put the diary back on the trolley. ‘We do not talk about her,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry —’ I said.

‘It must be that book,’ Clare added.

‘She was a socialist,’ Mrs Rabernak broke in unexpectedly. ‘A communist!’ Then she spoke in German once more.

‘Mrs Rabernak says this woman lived here wrongly — no,’ Clare fiddled for the word. ‘No — under “false colours”? Mrs Rabernak thought she was a woman of —’ Again she searched for the word.

‘A girl of good family,’ Mrs Rabernak said quickly. Her English was better than she admitted. But again she lapsed into her own tongue.

‘But they found she was a communist,’ Clare said.

‘And little Zlatko too,’ Mrs Rabernak came again like a cheeky bird. ‘He betray us all. We speak no more of him. Or of his wife.’

‘His wife?’ I asked in surprise. My hair prickled all round the back of my skull once more. ‘Zlatko married this woman?’

Mrs Rabernak nodded. ‘So ve have hert. Ve understood such. But ve do not speak of it. They are communists.’

‘You mean this woman is still alive — living somewhere?’ But Mrs Rabernak didn’t follow me this time. ‘Vat does he speak?’ She turned to Clare. Clare started to translate, but awkwardly. She was beginning to get confused.

‘Oh yes,’ Mrs Rabernak broke in again. ‘They live, I think. In communist Yugoslavia. In Zagreb still.’ She lapsed into German once more.

At the end Clare said, ‘As far as she knows they are both still alive, in Yugoslavia. If her cousin Zlatko had died, she says, she would have heard. So she assumes he’s still living. But she hasn’t seen or heard from him since long before the war.’

‘But this woman Eleanor and he — they married, she knows that?’

‘Oh yes — they marry,’ Mrs Rabernak broke in derisively again. ‘At least, they have the children. We have heard that. Though as communists maybe they do not marry,’ she added with even more scorn. ‘But we forget them, these communists and socialists.’ She ended up on a triumphant note.

Then she picked up the diary and wagged it at me. ‘And they are bad people,’ she started up again, enjoying this character assassination, her old eyes glittering with ancient memory and enmity. ‘They make — how you say?’ She turned to Clare, talking to her rapidly in German. I heard the name Von Karlinberg mentioned.

‘She says this woman Eleanor made fun of the family,’ Clare said at last. ‘Mrs Rabernak’s father that she mentioned — the Minister — well, he was a Von Karlinberg, a great friend of the Emperor Franz-Josef. And this Eleanor Bailey —’ She turned to Mrs Rabernak, as if uncertain of something.

‘Yes, yes!’ Mrs Rabernak nodded her head impatiently.

‘She used her father’s name — on this diary.’

‘She made bad jokes with my family name,’ Mrs Rabernak said icily, almost rising from the black armchair. Finally, unable to restrain herself any longer, she got up and started to hunt round the room for something, muttering the while in German. Clare looked at me uneasily. Eventually Mrs Rabernak found an old packet of Marlboro. She lit a cigarette shakily before coming back to us.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But why would she use your father’s name on this diary?’

‘Because she make fun of all Wiener nobility,’ Mrs Rabernak said, exhaling a cloud of smoke. ‘And all rich people, because she is a communist! I hope she is not friend of you.’

‘No. I didn’t know her. Just — a friend of this other family.’

‘She was a journalist then, you know,’ Mrs Rabernak looked at me suspiciously. ‘She is writing for all the Red papers here in Wien — and using my father’s name for meeting important people. You are a journalist too?’

‘No, no,’ I said. ‘Just a friend of the family. But tell me, I wonder if you ever met another friend of Eleanor Bailey’s here: a young Englishman, he was at the British Embassy here then. Lindsay Phillips?’

Mrs Rabernak looked puzzled. ‘Young Englishman. Phipps —’

‘No — Phillips.’

‘Never,’ Mrs Rabernak said decisively. ‘No other man was ever here. Only Zlatko, who brought her here. Mein Gott! To think —’ She turned once more to Clare.

‘To harbour a communist, she says — in those days. If she had known, how quickly she would have thrown her out of the house.’

‘Underground!’ Mrs Rabernak broke in quickly, pointing down to the floor. ‘Like rats — that is how they lived! In the drains then. After Dollfuss had got rid of them in Floridsdorf!’ She was triumphant once more; but nervously triumphant, as if these communist rats might still be there, lurking beneath the floorboards, ever about to rise again, when she would do battle with them with the belle-époque ink stand and the giant gilded curtain rods.

‘I see,’ I said. ‘But how did she find out that this woman was a communist?’

Mrs Rabernak sat down again and now she leant forward confidentially, picking up the diary again. ‘This,’ she said, whispering. I looked at the now rather grubby cover, this ‘Comrade’s Diary’. She turned to Clare once more. After a while I had my translation. ‘They were talking about it in all the cafés,’ Clare said, ‘In 1937. How a Von Karlinberg could have written such stuff? It was printed clandestinely — in Prague, she thinks — and copies were distributed illegally, among the socialists here in Vienna. It was extremely embarrassing — and dangerous for the Rabernaks: the risk of being connected with the diary in this way. But in the end everyone realised it was only some anonymous joke.’

‘A very bad joke,’ Mrs Rabernak added haughtily. And I supposed it must have been, with the fascists already in control of Vienna and Hitler with his Anschluss only just round the corner. Yet in a way I liked the cheek of it — biting the hands of a decayed and preposterous Viennese nobility like this — a class who had outlawed what Eleanor had apparently held most dear: the socialists in the city; who had driven them underground into the sewers and ruined their dream estates with howitzers. It seemed a just revenge, in a way, this diary — which had probably been exactly Eleanor’s intention.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘For all your trouble. It seems a bad business.’ I stood up then. There seemed nothing more to say, and Mrs Rabernak was showing signs of over-excitement and fatigue, ‘I’m really most grateful to you both for all your help …’ I shook Mrs Rabernak’s hand; one of the loose rings very nearly came away in my grip.

‘I hope it may be some use,’ Clare said as she showed me to the door. ‘Your friend — she seems to have been something quite strange. Really!’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Very strange.’ I thanked Clare — so very ordinary and open and obliging, another lodger in this house. I wondered that Mrs Rabernak risked having such guests after the betrayals of the first occasion forty-five years before. I glanced at the huge portrait of the Emperor in the hall as I left: authoritarian, portentous. But the cracked gilt frames and discoloured glass of the huge landing mirrors on my way downstairs gave the lie to all these former glories. The old nobility in Vienna took lodgers where they could these days, I supposed — a city thrust deep into the throat of communist Europe, where the rats might one day easily come again.

Outside in the street the sun hit me like a hot plate. It was nearly midday. I looked round at the tall, over-decorated apartment blocks. Eleanor Bailey had looked on more or less exactly the same view, I thought, leaving this very apartment by the huge archway, forty-five years before. She’d probably have turned up to the left, making for some rendezvous with Lindsay in the city: at the Blue Bar, no doubt, in Sacher’s. I took the same course myself now, walking as it were in her footsteps, back into the Schwarzenberg Platz and towards the inner city, moving towards something clandestine, just as Eleanor must have done in those pre-war years when the city was on fire and Dollfuss was shelling the workers out in Floridsdorf. But what appointment?

What kind of woman had Eleanor really been? The news that morning gave her a character very different from Aunt Susan’s — or the cool sad image in the stained-glass window in the ruined church outside Dunkeld: rather a wicked prankster — as well as a communist, and with further contradictions still in that it was she, indubitably now, who had written that ‘socialist’ love story — about her time with Lindsay in Vienna: ‘To the Fat Man in the Blue Bar at Sacher’s.’

Yet Zlatko Rabernak had apparently been her friend in those days as well, long before she’d got to Zagreb three years later. The only explanation was that she and Lindsay and Zlatko had been conspirators of some sort together in Vienna in the spring of 1934 — all helping the communist cause then, I supposed, and all with perfect cover: Lindsay up at the Embassy and the other two lying low in that heavy, impeccably bourgeois apartment down the street. That all fitted — and some time later she had written an account of it in this diary, with the cover of the German language, but unable to resist a joke in the pen-name at the expense of her previous hosts.

And I saw then why Willis Parker had told such a tactful lie about Maria von Karlinberg in the restaurant in Brussels. He had worked then in the Vienna legation with Lindsay, and must have known that the journalist Von Karlinberg. had, in fact, been Eleanor. But why, so long afterwards, should he bother to tell such elaborate fibs about it — since it was all something so much in the past; the woman herself dead. And then I realised: of course — as Mrs Rabernak had suggested — Eleanor Phillips was not dead. Chances were she was still alive in Zagreb, with Zlatko. And that was why Willis had lied — because he knew this, which meant that British Intelligence, or at least David Marcus, knew it too: which was why they had killed Willis — he had known too much. But again, about what? That Eleanor, long the ex-wife of a British agent, had been a communist prankster and had written an indiscreet diary forty years before? That wouldn’t have been sufficient reason to kill Willis. There had to be some more vital secret at stake to justify his silence in this extreme manner. The answer, I thought, might lie a little further south, in Zagreb, with some woman who was not in a graveyard there but probably lived in some old house, in a park above the city… And perhaps there were cherry trees too in the garden, and bee-hives; the sweet charm of a music box drifting out into the air — on summer evenings or when old friends called …

Old friends? A whole, other, long-lived life somewhere down there in Zagreb, a life with music and children apparently and fine antiques; presided over by a woman in her mid-sixties now — some wilful, rather extraordinary lady who forty years before had been killed under a tram outside the Palace Hotel and buried in the local cemetery. Was it possible? The idea was so preposterous that it came full circle, back into the realm of truth. And in doing so it led to another proposition — that Lindsay had perhaps gone back to this woman, his first wife.

But no; I’d forgotten Lindsay until that moment: Lindsay — lurking somewhere nearby, more likely, in a basement room, at the mercy of some louts — and another man who would call Madeleine that evening at nine o’clock. For the moment there was still a quite separate scenario to follow through with Lindsay. Our immediate appointment lay in the Schwarzenberg Hotel, in a bedroom by a telephone that night.

I decided meanwhile to tell the women as little as possible about my morning with Mrs Rabernak.

6

It wasn’t difficult to postpone my account of the meeting. Neither of them were at the hotel when I got back there at lunchtime. And it was at six o’clock, after I’d spent the afternoon looking at the seductive Klimts and Schieles in the Belvedere Gallery, before I met them again, in the foyer of the hotel, with the recording engineer, Karl, who had just arrived from the orchestra, already setting up their concert in the Belvedere Gardens beyond our hotel.

Rachel more or less looked straight through me. Madeleine asked how I’d been. ‘Hot,’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you about it later. I need a shower.’

Karl went upstairs with the two women, taking his equipment to Madeleine’s bedroom. And I left them all — to cool off in a shower and go for a beer in the hotel bar, before I joined them all again in Madeleine’s room an hour later.

Karl, a dexterous little Munchener, explained the equipment to me, before he left to supervise a recording of the concert. He’d attached an expensive 15-inch-per-second Nagra machine to the bedside telephone, together with an automatic activator line, which started the recorder the moment the handset was picked up. We tested it from the phone in my bedroom. It worked perfectly; the definition was uncannily high.

‘That was a house call,’ Karl explained. ‘An outside call may not be so clear.’

I came downstairs with Karl and saw him out. I didn’t want to lurk about with the two women. Instead I took a walk out into the deeply scented twilight of our gardens, moving down the crisp gravel paths and among the twisted statuary and baroque ornaments. I managed to identify the four allegorical busts, in a wide semicircle, representing the seasons. And then, at 8.30, Klaus’s concert suddenly began over the wall in the Belvedere Gardens. It wasn’t German music this time but something lighter, ethereal, yet precisely phrased in quickly varying tempos: balletic almost: Gounod’s Faust I thought afterwards. I wished I could have stayed outside and listened to it, the air filled now with every kind of sweetness. But at five to nine, I was up in Madeleine’s room, the windows closed against the night, waiting for the phone to ring.

It rang at exactly five past. I made a note of it against my watch. Rachel and I looked at Madeleine as she held the receiver.

‘Yes?’ she said. ‘Madeleine Phillips speaking.’ And then she listened for a bit. ‘Yes, of course,’ she went on. And then there was silence for half a minute. ‘Yes, I’ve got that,’ Madeleine spoke again. ‘You are prepared — two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Yes. We have less than twenty-four hours. And you’ll call me again at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon. Yes.’ She put the handset down. ‘Well, they have him. He’s alive anyway,’ she said, shaken but thankful. ‘Though how we get hold of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars out here, I don’t know.’

I played the conversation back. It was a young voice, exceptionally clear, a little nervous I thought, speaking good English, but with German rather than any Balkan or Yugoslav overtones. The man explained that the ‘Free Croatia’ group were holding Lindsay and since the British Government were not prepared to release the Croat in Durham jail, they would exchange him for $250,000 in cash. We had less than 24 hours to consider the proposition — and agree to make a first payment. He would call again after 3 o’clock the following day.

Despite Madeleine’s interjections, the man appeared not so much to talk down the phone as to read something prepared or memorised. ‘He hardly pauses — do you hear?’ Madeleine said.

‘Yes. As if he’s reading a statement. And in a hurry, too. In case the police trace the call. He spoke for hardly more than a minute. Any longer and they can trace it, I suppose.’

We played the conversation back once more. I turned the volume up slightly.

‘What’s that noise?’ Rachel asked. ‘There — just after the start. There’s another voice, isn’t there? Someone singing.’

I played it back again, turning the volume up and the tone to a sharper level. And now we could just hear a second voice and then, quite clearly, a faint music and what sounded like a chorus of voices. Then silence, and then, very faintly, what seemed a duet of voices — in German.

‘What is it?’ Rachel asked.

‘Just a radio or something — on in the background,’ Madeleine said.

It wasn’t until much later that evening, when Klaus’s concert was finished and we had gone round with the tape to meet him in the Belvedere Gardens, that we discovered exactly what the music was. We’d met Karl in the Bavarian Radio van that had accompanied the orchestra from Munich — and he sat now in front of a big multi-track recording console, faced with a variety of levers and switches — fade-ups, mixers, baffles, top and bottom cut-outs. He put our tape on a vertical spool above him and fiddled carefully with the machine, consulting a colleague next to him. Klaus stood behind him with Rachel. The van was air-cooled and smelt of nail-varnish. It was Rachel who had insisted that there was something strange going on in the background. I wondered what the use of all this technology was.

And then, under Karl’s careful ministrations, when the tape began to play once more, we heard the voices and the music in the background quite clearly now — distorted, as the man’s voice over had become deep and growly, but recognisable, at least by Klaus.

‘Der Zigeunerbaron,’ Klaus said at once. ‘There, listen: it’s the duet in the second act. “Wer uns getraut” — between Saffi and Barinkay. No question.’

He turned to Rachel. She nodded. Karl played the tape back once more. ‘Yes — it is!’ Rachel said.

‘What is it?’ I asked sourly.

‘The Gypsy Baron — Viennese light opera.’

‘So?’ Madeleine asked. She was as mystified as I.

Klaus was speaking to Karl in German now. Afterwards he turned to us.

‘So it’s just a radio,’ I said. ‘On in the background.’

Klaus was smiling. ‘No. Karl thinks it’s almost certainly not a radio — or from a turntable: the definition is too good. He thinks it’s probably the real voices.’

Karl had stood up from the console just then and went to look among some papers on a desk at the top of the van. He came back with What’s On In Vienna guide for the week. Flicking through the pages he stopped in the middle and said decisively, ‘Yes — I am right.’ He gave the booklet to Klaus, pointing to a column.

Klaus showed it to Rachel. ‘There — at the Staatsoper. Tonight and a matinée tomorrow afternoon: Der Zigeunerbaron. It’s just on for the Festival of Vienna. Two performances — for the tourists.’

‘I still don’t follow,’ Madeleine leaned over Klaus’s shoulder.

Klaus turned to her triumphantly, loving the drama. ‘The man who called you this evening almost certainly was phoning from the Staatsoper.’ He turned back to Karl. ‘Have you a copy of any daily paper? Check the radio column.’ Karl looked about the van. There wasn’t one. But one of the truck-drivers outside had a copy. They looked down the radio listings for that day. ‘No,’ Klaus said. ‘There was no radio relay from the Staatsoper this evening. So you see! He must have been calling from the Opera House.’

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘It still might have been a record of the Gypsy Baron.’

‘It’s just possible. But don’t you see? — the man said he’d call again tomorrow afternoon. After three o’clock. That’s about half-way through the matinée. It fits. He’s using a public phone — backstage somewhere probably. Yes,’ Klaus ran on, ‘maybe he’s not on stage at that moment, can just step out for a minute. You see, if the police had been monitoring the call — and he doesn’t know that they haven’t been — and even if they managed to trace it back to a call-box in the Staatsoper — well, there’s probably a hundred people backstage at any one time there. How could they isolate any single person? Especially if he’d gone back on stage immediately afterwards.’

‘All rather far-fetched,’ I said, suspecting Klaus’s Sherlock Holmes act had been done more to impress Rachel and Madeleine than as a pointer to any actual truth.

Klaus turned to Madeleine. ‘Well, we’ve heard it now ourselves: as you say, the man is reading or memorising the statement, so surely — he’s an actor: that well-modulated voice, and exaggerated too, just as an actor would do it — disguising it, in case anyone tried to identify him afterwards in that way. Probably a bit-part player — there’s lots of them in The Gypsy Baron. Crowds of gypsies —’

‘And hussars too,’ Rachel put in.

‘Of course. They come right after the “Dompfaff” duet — the arrival of Graf Homonay and his troop of Hussars. Of course! They interrupt the lovers. That’s why the man stops so short on the call. He’s on stage in the next scene. It’s my guess that he’s one of the Hussars. Perfect cover!’

Klaus was very pleased with himself. I really didn’t know if he had a point or not. One flaw struck me. ‘But why,’ I said, ‘should these Croatians go to all the trouble and risk of getting a Viennese bit-part actor to read the message out, when they could do it themselves?’

‘Who knows?’ Klaus said expressively. ‘Maybe they don’t speak too good English or German. Or this actor may be a sympathiser — one of the Red Brigade or some such.’

‘I think it’s just a recording in the background,’ I said. I disliked Klaus’s confident deductions. ‘It’s all too unlikely,’ I said again.

‘Well, we can find out, can’t we? We can be backstage at the Staatsoper when he calls tomorrow afternoon.’

‘We should give the tape to the police,’ Madeleine said steadily. ‘And let them handle it.’

‘You can,’ Klaus replied forcefully. ‘But you run the risk that they know about you all in Vienna by now. They may just pick you up and keep you on ice — and that will be the end of it. The Viennese police aren’t going to interest themselves in arresting bit-part players at the Staatsoper on your behalf. Besides, it’ll be too late then. The performances will be over.’ He turned to Madeleine. ‘You wait in your room at three o’clock and I’ll take Peter with me to the Staatsoper — and we’ll watch tomorrow afternoon, backstage. I can easily pretend I’m auditioning for some singers or musicians. They know me well there in any case.’

There was silence in the big van. it was nearly midnight. We were all tired. ‘Well, why not?’ I said limply, giving in once more to Klaus’s proposals, sure that I was simply placating him and his wild ideas and allowing us all to get home to bed.

All the same, Klaus was right about the Viennese police. He spoke to me next morning at breakfast, sipping his orange juice, in a white silk shirt, a confident mischievousness about his face, the day so bright once more.

He said, ‘The manager told me privately this morning: he’s had a routine enquiry from the city police — purely routine, a list they send out round all the hotels and guest-houses every week, lost tourists, credit-card thieves and so on. All three of you are on it. By name. I told him it wasn’t important — some family row in England. Lawyers chasing you. So he’s agreed to say nothing about it for a day or so. But he’ll have to report it by the end of the week. So, you can’t go to the police. We’ll go to the Staatsoper this afternoon instead.’

‘Why take all these risks, Klaus?’ I asked.

‘Risks? Where are the risks? You are all innocent, are you not? And what are old friends for? It’s a matter of action, Peter. Never wait until things happen to you!’

‘It’s dangerous. These Croatians —’

‘It’s more dangerous just to wait for them. We must take the advantage here. See if we can identify this man — follow him.’

‘But we’re not the police. We’ve no —’

‘No. But you were the police, were you not, in a way? With British Intelligence. This is really your kind of job, is it not?’ he added formally, almost coldly.

I could see that Rachel had been telling him about me. I was a man with a tradition of derring-do behind me, though they weren’t to know my bravery had not extended much beyond culling through the Arab press on damp Monday mornings in the Holborn office ten years before. Rachel had probably told him as well that I had a little ivory-handled.22 revolver with me. I had it on me now. Klaus looked at me circumspectly, waiting for me to agree or refuse the challenge.

Was it conceivable that he viewed me as a rival, as in some romantic opera, and was now contriving a match between us, to test my honour, a joust for the hand of a dark lady? I didn’t like the idea at all. But I could see it would appear cowardly of me to turn him down. Besides, it was all probably safe enough — for I doubted the truth of Klaus’s musical deductions: the clear-voiced terrorist in the Staatsoper was almost certainly pure fiction. So I went with Klaus that morning, down into the blazing city, to spy out the land.

The Opera House, a great black grimed building, straddled the Opern and Kärtner ring like some grim barracks in the crowded sunshine. Tourists queued for last-minute seats, straggling round the theatre, which seemed to have half a dozen stage doors. But Klaus knew his way about and soon he was talking to one of the stage doormen — someone he knew vaguely, but a man who remembered him precisely. The greetings were effusive.

‘Ja, Herr Doktor Fischer … Nein, Herr Doktor. Danke schön, Herr Doktor …’

The little man in a braid cap nodded his head up and down with furious willingness. In the background we could hear music, an orchestra tuning up, and musicians were coming in and hurrying past us, down a corridor.

Klaus turned to me. ‘There’s a band call this morning. They’re fitting a new Saffi in. This is the musicians’ entrance. We’ll go over to the artistes’ entrance now. It’s all fixed.’

‘Danke schön, Herr Fischer …’

The little man looked after us proprietorially as we walked down the corridor, miles long it seemed, which went right under the stage and came out on the other side of the building, leading to another stage door. Here we found a second man in a braid cap and repeated our performance with him.

I heard the word ‘telephone’ and the man offered Klaus the use of one in his office. But Klaus refused politely. The doorman pointed down the corridor. They spoke rapidly in German, the man pointing upstairs, before we left him.

‘A problem,’ Klaus said. ‘There’s one public phone here.’ He pointed to a bubble booth near the stage door. ‘But the artistes have one on the floor upstairs. Come on.’

Climbing a narrow stairway up two flights we came out onto another long corridor, running at right-angles to the stage. ‘Here,’ Klaus pointed to the row of dressing-room doors. ‘These are the male chorus rooms. And there,’ he nodded to a recess half-way along one wall, ‘there — is the phone.’ It was a few yards from the stairway down to the stage, in a fairly exposed position.

‘How do we watch?’ I asked. ‘We can’t just hang around out in this corridor all the time.’

But Klaus was already walking down to the end of the corridor now, opening each empty dressing-room door as he passed along. Splendid gold-braided uniforms hung on hooks. There was a smell of stale make-up and old sweat.

‘We can hardly pretend to be members of the chorus,’ I said. ‘Or was that what you had in mind — getting dressed up as a hussar?’

The orchestra started downstairs just then, the music coming up all round us faintly through the Tannoy system: the strains of Der Zigeunerbaron.

Klaus had disappeared through a door at the end of the corridor by now and when I got there I saw it was marked ‘Herren’. I found him standing on the lavatory seat in one of the cubicles. There was a high partition all round these conveniences. But on tip-toe one could just see down the corridor, — not to the phone itself, but there was an almost clear field of vision in which one could identify anyone going into the recess.

‘Perfect,’ Klaus said, checking the angles and heights again. Then he started to hum with the music on the Tannoy. ‘… “doch treu und wahr” …’ I’d rarely seen a man in such a good mood.

‘What? We lock ourselves in here?’

‘Precisely. Go down there, and come out of the dressing-rooms: then cross over to the phone. Just to make sure.’

I did as he asked. And he shouted back down the length of the corridor, his handsome gypsy head just visible peeking out above the partition. ‘Perfect! I can see everything.’

‘But what happens if someone wants to use the lavatory?’ I asked.

‘They’ll have to wait. Won’t they?’ He smiled. ‘“Wer uns getraut …”’ He sang the words now that we had heard on the tape, the beginning of the ‘Dompfaff’ duet. ‘That’s our cue. You wait and see.’

I thought he must be wrong — with his preposterous good humour, staking out a terrorist got up as a hussar from a lavatory seat: I was sure he must be wrong.

By three-fifteen, when the operetta was well into its second act, we’d come back up the stairs and locked ourselves in the little cubicle. The tannoy sang faintly in the corridor for us and only one person had rattled the door of our cubicle, though the pissoir outside was often filled with hussars and gypsies — and the passageway beyond had frequently been a seething mass of them, in their elaborate tat and splendid gilt uniforms, as they charged up and down stairs.

And then, just after 3.30, before the ‘Dompfaff’ duet started on stage, a rush of hussars emerged from all the dressing-rooms, stamping their heavy boots as they made their way downstairs for their entrance — to surprise the hapless lovers, with the Graf Homonay.

Afterwards there was silence — just the weak sounds on the Tannoy, the beginning of the duet: ‘Wer uns getraut …’ We literally held our breath. Then the gypsy chorus joined the lovers, the velvet music rising on the air. But nothing moved in the corridor.

I suppose I expected some great galumphing hussar in tights to emerge from one of the dressing-rooms, look both ways nervously, before making for the phone. But there was no one. The duet continued, the woman’s voice rising into ever-sweeter levels as the lovers exchanged vows. But nothing stirred and there was no sound from the empty corridor. Klaus looked at his watch. It was nearly a quarter to four. He was angry, fidgeting — a conductor on a podium which happened to be a lavatory seat, waiting for some tardy musician.

Then a door opened quietly half-way down the passage and a neatly dressed young man with a briefcase, in a grey summer suit, came out and walked confidently down towards the stairway. Would he turn into the phone recess? He did — and I could hear Klaus’s sigh of relief.

‘That’s him,’ he whispered. ‘He must have been on half call — a chorus understudy, not needed. But that’s him!’

‘Are you sure?’

‘It must be. That’s why he’s wearing ordinary clothes: he makes the call — then leaves straight away.’

The man was out of our sight for nearly two minutes. Then he emerged again and disappeared down the stairs.

‘After him!’ Klaus said. And I had to admit then to the excitement of the chase, even though it wasn’t a hussar in tight pants and braid.

I lost Klaus almost at once outside among the crowds of tourists wandering about Philharmonikerstrasse in the hot afternoon light — so intent was I on keeping my eye on the grey suit. This was, I supposed, a job I did better than Klaus. The young man crossed over the street behind the Opera House and threaded his way along beside the terrace of Sacher’s. Turning right at the end he cut into a main artery of the city, walking past the Augustiner Kirche towards the great pile of the Hofburg further down on the left, where the busy main road narrowed sharply, with an archway over it, dividing off into a clutter of little streets and alleyways, the heart of the old town. But once I’d caught up with him, after the first minute’s panic, he was an easy trail. He walked steadily, without stopping or looking for reflections in shop windows. An amateur, I thought.

Opposite the huge Hofburg entrance he turned right into the narrow streets, crossed over a small triangular platz, and went into an old shop with all sorts of expensive Austrian feathered hats and green capes and Lederhosen in the neat windows. It was very crowded inside and the heat brought out the smell of fine wool and old leather. I thought I’d lost my man: he was nowhere to be seen among the wealthy tourists trying on long hunting-green capes and busy men crowding round small mirrors — admiring themselves, their heads surmounted by ridiculous little felt hats with chamois whiskers sticking out on top.

The air was filled with strident ‘Bittes’ and ‘Dankeschöns’ and over-attentive old saleswomen. One of them approached me, smiling heavily.

‘I wanted —’ I gestured unconsciously to my trousers for some inane reason.

‘Ah! Lederhosen! Ja.’ She pointed up a narrow stairway at the side of the shop which I hadn’t noticed.

On the first floor was another small room — occupied entirely with silly men this time, fingering a variety of short leather pants, crushing them up brutally in their hands as if trying to mutilate them — and others throwing green felt capes over their shoulders dramatically and putting hunting hats on — Germans for the most part, exclaiming ecstatically as they gazed on their preposterous transformations in various mirrors.

The long mirrors were on the doors of little fitting cubicles which opened now and then, the glass swinging round into the bright light, reflecting all the frenzied sartorial change, so that the room seemed like a stage for some mad sylvan ballet, where the mirror images of men in dashing hunting capes were superseded by others emerging from the boxes with knobbly knees and lederhosen. But there was no sign of the perfectly ordinary man in the grey summer suit.

‘Ja, Mein Herr?’ A salesman came up to me.

‘I — thought: a cape,’ I said. ‘If I could look at some.’ There were three cubicles I saw now and the door of one of them hadn’t opened since I’d arrived in the room. If my man wasn’t inside it, he wasn’t anywhere.

I went over with the salesman to the other side and tried on some capes. And then, to pass the time, I put on some of the fearful little feathered hats as well.

‘Is a Styrian hat,’ the man told me, beaming.

‘Yes. It’s fine.’ I looked in the mirror. Moon-faced, capped and feathered I was like some ogre, a vast fright from one of Grimm’s fairy tales.

‘Is right size.’

‘Almost, but not quite, perhaps.’ I glanced in the mirror again, adjusting the horror. The cubicle door behind me opened and a young man in lederhosen, long white socks and a frilly summer shirt emerged. He was carrying a briefcase. He wasn’t such an amateur after all, I thought.

He pushed his way downstairs and I apologised for the hats and capes and followed him: a fair-haired, broad-faced, well-built youth in his early twenties. He might — as I soon saw when we both got outside — have been one of any number of country boys up in the big city for the day, or there for some festival, for the streets seemed full of them that afternoon, all dressed in the same manner.

He walked back out onto the main street, down past the Hofburg, turning left along a parkway, where he eventually came to a big tram stop. We waited ten or fifteen minutes in the rush hour, before he climbed aboard one marked ‘Grinzing’. I pushed my way on after him.

Half an hour’s ride took us out to the end of the line, to the northern suburb of Grinzing, an obvious tourist trap on the lower slopes of the Wienerwald, with wine taverns and folksy restaurants every few yards along the streets. The man hurried away from the terminus and started to walk uphill, out of the city. But there were still many people about and it was easy to follow him.

Indeed there seemed a great number of us — tourists as well as commuters — all going in the same direction. At the top of the rise, after twenty minutes hard walk, I saw what the attraction was: a folk-dance exhibition or festival of some sort, already under way in a kind of asphalt amphitheatre which rose further up the hill towards a shabby old building immediately behind it — some small, run-down country palazzo it seemed at first, set on a peak with a stupendous view over the whole city, lying out beneath us now in a hazy dream of late afternoon light, spires and cupolas glinting as the sun sloped, with the Danube visible at last, an almost blue ribbon by-passing the city on its eastern boundary.

Several hundred spectators had already gathered above the dancers in a rising arc — a dozen men and women stomping about to the raucous strains of a silver band. And now that my man had begun to move among the other dancers preparing to take over the platform next, it was almost impossible to keep sight of him as he bobbed away from me among waiting groups got up in every extraordinary variety of Austrian folk dress — men in tall golden stovepipe hats and peach-skinned women like summer dreams in richly embroidered lace set beneath fabulously decorated aprons and smocks. The silver band thumped vigorously and a small breeze on the hill made it less hot, but I was soaked in sweat after the long climb — and even identifying the man with the briefcase I could hardly keep up with him as he threaded his way among the dancers.

Was he part of that group there? — about to move on to the platform. Yes, he’d stopped and was talking to someone. But when I’d caught up and the man turned I saw it was someone else, equally fair-haired, identically dressed.

I was very near the silver band now, just behind the platform, and the blaring trumpets stunned me, the sun flashing on the instruments as they swayed with the jaunty folk tune. I’d lost him. The briefcase had disappeared. And then I saw him — or at least someone in lederhosen carrying something — high up above me on the skyline, beyond the circle of spectators, moving onto a terrace in front of the old palace.

Coming up towards it round the edge of the crowd I saw it wasn’t really a palace at all, imposing though it looked from a distance. It must have been some kind of extensive nineteenth-century summer house in the old days — a long, single-storeyed pavilion-like building, the pink stucco cracked now and the tall windows all boarded up. In front of it, looking down the hill, were rows of fixed tables on a wide stepped terrace, filled with people watching the dancers now, each table surmounted with a rusty green metal lampshade like some rude mushroom. And then I realised: of course, the pavilion had been turned into a summer night-club in the more recent past, with the folk people now occupying the outdoor dance floor below and the tourists taking over the expensive little tables for nothing.

I passed along the line of spectators applauding at the end of some dashing exhibition. But my man was nowhere up here. The music changed, moving into some easy Viennese lilt, a group of dexterous accordionists and a zither man taking up some sentimental melody.

I’d walked up round by the old building now and was testing the louvred shutters. They’d been closed up for some time, the paint cracked and the hinges flaking with rust. And then, wandering round to the side of the pavilion, to the main entrance where it gave out onto a car park, I stopped in my tracks. Indeed I almost fell over the bonnet of the car, parked as it was immediately round the corner. It was a large maroon Peugeot Estate, with Belgian number plates. I dodged back round the corner. But there was no one about. Looking again, I was almost certain. It was Pottinger’s hired car — the one we’d come out of Brussels in and down to Heidelberg. Pottinger and the fair-haired youth — they must be somewhere in the building behind me.

But the main hall door, I found, was locked securely, so were all the other windows. I thought I must be wrong — until I’d moved away between the cars, down a small drive towards a twisting hill road. Then I saw it: a doorway, built into the side of the hill — giving immediate access to the roadway on one side and leading into the pavilion through a tunnel, I thought, under the forecourt on the other: a servants’ and tradesmen’s entrance — so that the summer nobility would not be troubled with any chance plebeian encounters.

This old, nail-studded door opened fairly readily, giving onto a storeroom filled with sand and bags of cement — with a dark flagstoned passageway leading out of it, sloping gently, as I’d expected, back uphill towards the pavilion.

Almost at once, after I’d closed the door and was standing in the half-light, I heard footsteps coming down the corridor towards me. I took the little revolver out and crouched down behind a mound of sand. Seconds later a figure passed me and when the door opened I saw the young fair-haired man standing against the light for an instant, before the darkness came again. Was this where they were holding Lindsay? Surely I should leave and get the police now? But curiosity got the better of me and I found myself drawn almost involuntarily up the musty passageway.

At the top, above some steps, was another door partly open. Looking through the crack I could just see a row of gas cookers and some old pots and pans, on shelves above: the night-club kitchens. I nudged it open very slowly and delicately — and as I did, I could hear the strains of music drifting up from the accordion band, and just above that the slight murmur of voices — people talking somewhere beyond the kitchen.

Opening the door inch by inch I moved into a large empty space, lit by clerestory windows above. Only a long table had been left — over by the far wall, just underneath two serving hatches, one of them partly open. Walking over to it, I found I could see out only as far as a green baize serving-screen a few yards straight in front of me, so that a proper view into the big main room was blocked.

But I could hear the two voices much more clearly now — a rather bad-tempered English voice at first, familiar from somewhere, followed by incisive American tones.

‘… no problem, now that they’re in Vienna. We’ve only one more move to make …’ I lost the next bit in a spurt of music. But there wasn’t any doubt: it was Pottinger. Then the older voice came again. ‘… enough is enough. I can’t go on roaming about Europe, writing them letters …’ I thought for a second that it might be Lindsay. But then I had it: it was that petulant, upper-class, slightly whiny voice that I had last heard in a Bloomsbury flat: the bearded expert in Slavonic studies — Professor Allcock. ‘… simply can’t. I’ve done enough — leading these wretched people on.’

And then I saw what had been happening all these weeks. I’d been right in my very first estimation of these two rogues: Allcock and Pottinger were together in some intelligence manoeuvre — had been scheming against us from the very beginning, leading us on through one European city after another, ever since we’d left Glenalyth. ‘Enough is enough — I can’t go on roaming about … writing them letters …’

Why, it was the Professor we’d been following all this time, not Lindsay. It had been Allcock, the old family friend, who’d forged the letters to Madeleine for some reason: Allcock — doubling for Lindsay, using his long and intimate knowledge of the man and his family so that he could persuade us to follow him, persuade us that Lindsay was alive. And that was the worst kind of deceit.

So that it was sheer anger then, not bravery, that led me silently through the kitchen door, where I stopped behind the serving screen, gun in hand.

They’d started walking towards me just then, coming straight for the screen. I stepped out from behind it like a waiter, levelling the revolver.

They stopped dead, in the centre of the old parquet dance floor, by a clutter of empty wine bottles and a stack of little gilt chairs, dust-beams of light falling on them from the roof windows: lone dancers surprised amidst the tawdry rubbish of Gay Vienna.

They didn’t recognise me until I’d stepped further into the room. ‘Back,’ I said. ‘Over to that table. Back!’ I stumbled into a pile of champagne coolers and there was a fearful racket for a moment. But now they could see me and they retreated to one of the few tables left in the great, dusty room, sitting there like dissatisfied customers waiting for the show to start. Pottinger was a different man, in a smooth business suit, his hair smarmed down. Allcock I didn’t recognise at all for a moment: his beard was gone, his eyes lurking deep down in his skull, bright with fatigue, the skin all sucked in now about his old cheekbones: a gaunt, shorn man — his thin neck scrawnily exposed, sticking up like a sick chicken’s from an open shirt. A death’s head, somehow.

They looked at me calmly. Then Pottinger started to get up, smiling apologetically, like a man caught cheating at the tables.

‘No,’ I said, talking to him like a dog. ‘Down! This works. It’s not a toy.’

He sat down again meekly. I didn’t know what to do or say then. And they said nothing. What was I to do? Kill them both? Leave them, and fetch the police? Or march them out at gunpoint into the crowds outside? I had no experience whatsoever in these lethal confrontations.

Eventually I spoke to Allcock — and as I did so I found the anger rising in me again, saving me.

‘So you wrote those letters to Madeleine. Of course — who else could have known all the details? The silver bracelet, the nicknames? You got all that from the trip you made with them to Sweden before the war.’ I’d come a little closer to them now, round the pile of gilt chairs so that I could see them clearly, sitting under some tattered paper banner in gothic lettering on the wall, offering some ancient New Year wishes, I thought. Allcock looked at me malevolently. Without his beard he was naked and frightened. And I was so angry at him that I raised the little revolver, holding it in both hands now, pointing it at his chest, about to fire. He put his hands up about his face, cowering.

‘You bastard — you do this to Madeleine and Rachel. Your friends. They believed you, you know. They think Lindsay is alive somewhere down here. Well, let me show you …’

‘I —’ Allcock began. ‘I was forced —’

‘Say nothing!’ Pottinger interrupted him brutally. ‘He’s not going to kill you.’

I turned the gun on Pottinger. ‘No. Perhaps you first.’

He looked at me confidently. ‘You won’t, Marlow. You’re a good tracker … But not a killer —’

I fired the gun then. The music was loud enough outside to muffle the sound. The bullet hit the wall immediately above them. A lump of plaster fell on the table.

‘Where is Lindsay?’ I asked vehemently. ‘I’ll kill you both. Don’t think I won’t.’ I was furious now, almost beyond myself — and they could clearly sense it. All the pain of the previous weeks — Madeleine’s and Rachel’s pain and now their ruined hopes — all boiled up in me then and I’d have shot them both for two pins, and they knew it. Pottinger gripped the table, scratching the surface with his nails. The band played in the distance. Dusty motes rose in the disturbed air, rising up the sunbeams from the high windows. But everything else was perfectly still in the decayed room.

‘Where is he?’ I drew the gun up again.

‘We — I don’t know. We’ve been ltoking for him as much as you have.’

‘“We”?’

‘Yes. The Americans. I’m CIA —’

‘You’re a liar, Pottinger.’

‘No — you can see, I have a card.’ He reached for a pocket.

‘Don’t!’ I had the gun on him again. ‘If you’re looking for Lindsay — what are you doing having us all on, tempting us through Europe like this, pretending to be the “Free Croatia” group?’

‘Nonsense! We’ve nothing to do with them —’

‘You’re lying again, Pottinger — or whatever your real name is: I saw the little fair-haired bugger in leather pants coming out of here. And we already know it was he who made the calls from the Opera House to Madeleine, saying he represented the “Free Croatia” group. You should have paid a pro to do your leg work for you.’

Pottinger looked at Allcock with sharp annoyance.

‘So what are you trying to set up?’ I went on acidly. Pottinger didn’t reply. The music changed again outside — another raucous silver band taking over and blaring up the hillside.

‘Nothing,’ Pottinger said at last, as if resigning himself to the truth. ‘We’ve been looking for Lindsay Phillips, just as much as you have. Setting you up, if you like — yes, as decoys, that’s all. Hoping he’d contact you, if he was over in Europe.’

‘Or Moscow.’

‘Yes. Or Moscow. We thought maybe he’d come over — ask you to meet him in Berlin maybe, or here in Vienna.’

There was a touch of truth in Pottinger’s voice, in what he said. But only a touch. ‘And the CIA want Lindsay as much as we do. Is that it?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you go to all the trouble of making out he’s been taken by some Croatian terrorists? That doesn’t add up.’

‘That was just to get you all over here. I told you.’

‘Yes. You told me. But not everything. First of all you’re not CIA, Pottinger. Why should the Americans be so anxious to find him? That’s rubbish. I think you’re on the other side: Moscow is looking for Lindsay. He was one of theirs — and he’s gone missing.’ I was getting tired of holding the revolver up in my right hand. I moved it to my left. Pottinger shifted a fraction. He was desperate to have a go at me, his bland face full of barely hidden anxiety and cunning. I took the gun again in my good hand and waved it at him ostentatiously.

‘Think whatever you like,’ he said. ‘I’m CIA. I can prove it too, if you’d let me show you —’

He made a move towards an inside pocket again.

‘No. Don’t show me. Just — sit!’ I should have disarmed him. But again I’d no experience and didn’t want to risk such a close encounter. We’d reached another awkward deadlock.

Then quite suddenly the Professor stood up — surprising both of us — a tall, emaciated figure in his old linen tropicals and sandals. He had the air of some pre-war Hampstead intellectual, down from a tour of the Low Countries and a hike through the Black Forest, about to set off now into the Wienerwald — a socialist with Marx in his rucksack, quoting Strachey and Das Kapital in the intervals between Biergarten — a man once full of happy, racidal certainties, now quite gone to seed. I moved the gun onto him.

‘You can shoot me if you like,’ he said briskly. He regained some of his old pedantic authority now, as when he’d lectured me so confidently about Lindsay in the Wigmore Hall a month before. It was as if he’d suddenly found his great Edward Lear beard again and put it on. ‘I can’t go on with this anyway,’ he said to Pottinger, scrawny hands buttoning his creased jacket. ‘I told you: I’ve done enough.’

Pain moved across his face. He winced suddenly, closing his eyes tight for a moment, as though against some imaginary blow in the air. Or perhaps it was some painful memory crossing his secret vision. ‘I’m too old for all this in any case. Service ends — at some point.’ He looked at Pottinger calmly, smoothing out the crumpled pockets of the old suit. ‘I’m leaving now. I’m going back to Bloomsbury.’

He walked towards me and I simply couldn’t shoot him then — straight past me, towards the serving screen. And as I turned to watch him, just before he disappeared behind it, Pottinger shot him — a heavy-calibre bullet thumping into his back, another great hand that pushed him straight over into the serving screen so that he collapsed over it like some fearful accident in a restaurant.

Pottinger had left the table as I threw myself to one side behind the pile of gilt chairs. And when I got to my feet he was running round to the other side of the dance floor, fast as a sprinter, where I got a shot at him before he disappeared behind an old piano. But again he was better than me at these things: another shot from him kept me behind the chairs and when I looked out again he’d moved right round by the far wall, behind some shabby curtains on a small stage. And from there he made a dash for it, through the kitchen doors and away.

I let him go. My first thought was that he hadn’t shot at me when he’d had the chance, when my back was turned: he’d gone for the Professor in some vital preference. And I saw why: I was ignorant, of course. It was Allcock who had possessed some secret, some knowledge of Lindsay which had to be preserved at all costs — the other, deeper truths which the Professor might have released but which Pottinger would never have told me.

The band thumped away outside. It must have drowned the gunshots. Allcock was pretty dead. The Socialist millenium — and all the good brave causes of the thirties — had come to an end in a pair of old sandals, sticking out from some dented champagne coolers in a ruined night club. I looked through his pockets. He was unarmed. There was an air ticket home, a lot of Deutschmarks and Austrian schillings and a well-rubbed, bulky leather wallet. Among other bits and pieces from a long life I found an old street photograph of Lindsay as a very young man, smiling awkwardly in a Fair Isle pullover, standing in the sun on a cobbled pavement of some foreign city, just beneath a circular kiosk with advertisements all over it in cyrillic script. It must have been Moscow or Sofia or Belgrade in the early thirties. And the man next to him — taller, the more confident travelling companion — was Allcock himself; younger then by far, with only a mild beard, but nonetheless the happy father-figure.

‘I wonder why I ever believed it — those Croats. It was too unlikely — all that way from Glenalyth. Too easy.’

Madeleine was calm — too calm, dazed, like someone after an accident not yet back in the world. She sat on a bench, a tortured baroque maiden rising up behind her, in the gardens of the Palais Schwarzenberg. Klaus and Rachel were at a table opposite. ‘But I never thought … How could the Professor —’

‘The sneak!’ Rachel interrupted bitterly. She was nervous, like a schoolgirl once more, using the playground slang, comforting herself with an old and secure language.

‘He and Pottinger must have been together — for a long time. With the Russians. It’s quite clear — that was the truth at least: they thought Lindsay would contact us over here.’

‘He’s still in Europe somewhere then?’

‘I think so. I think maybe in Zagreb.’ I’d told them now about my meeting with Mrs Rabernak that morning.

‘With Eleanor?’ Madeleine shook her head. ‘I can’t really believe that. That couldn’t be.’

I looked at Madeleine carefully. ‘It could, I’m afraid.’

The garden was quiet and still very warm after the long heat. I’d come straight out to them on the lawn and now I wanted a shower and a beer inside in the cool bar. ‘Well, I’ve told you,’ I said, standing up. ‘I don’t know about Eleanor. But I think he may have gone there. He’s not in Moscow, else they wouldn’t be looking for him. And we have to leave here anyhow. It’s up to you. But that’s where I’d look for him.’

Klaus nodded. ‘You could be right —’

‘Rubbish!’ Rachel interrupted again. ‘How could he? How could he?’ But she was speaking of Lindsay, not me. A vision had come to her of some real and awful betrayal by her father — and she wouldn’t face it. But she knew it had existence at last; she had admitted the thought for an instant, and so she herself would have to prove it wrong.

An hour later they agreed we should try and fly to Zagreb next day.

7

Klaus couldn’t come with us. But he saw us off willingly enough, with many promises to Rachel about a position with the orchestra in Munich, which she took account of in a vague way — far more anxious that he should come with us at that moment.

‘But I can’t! We’ve another concert. Innsbruck, tomorrow night.’ He said he’d try and join us in Zagreb at the end of the week. And we’d keep in touch, wouldn’t we? I sensed that his renewed suit with Rachel might have cooled — that he was anxious to be up and out of Vienna. And away from us too. At some time in the near future Allcock’s body would come to light — a scene in his opera which I think he had not imagined.

But no one stopped us in Vienna and we picked up tourist visas without any trouble at Zagreb airport, when we got there the following afternoon. Ironically, the only hotel with three rooms available was the Palace, where Eleanor had fallen under the tram. It was still there — a staid old turn-of-the-century building, facing out over some fine public gardens right in the middle of the city. And the trams were still there, too — possibly the very same pre-war coaches: little blue trams clanging up and down in the sunlight of the long green avenue outside.

The women had rooms in the back. But mine was in the front, like a tree house, perched high up on the top floor, looking directly out onto a tremendous cage of summer green — a double line of huge plane trees that almost touched my window. Beyond was a bandstand, fountains and heroic statuary in the middle of the leafy gardens, with a long row of tall dark nineteenth-century apartment blocks looming up on the other side.

The hotel itself was from the same belle-epoque period — when Zagreb was ‘Little Vienna’, last civilised outpost of the Hapsburgs before the crude horrors of the Balkans proper took over. But the interior of the building had been partly and hideously redecorated in a selection of modern plastic veneers; the gilded cherubs and mirrors had gone, my room smelt of some choking floor polish and the hot water was no more than a rusty dribble in the bathroom.

But the view from the high window made up for everything — over the trees, across to the sun-flecked square, the city beginning to revive, it seemed, with a slight coolness, after the desperate heat of the afternoon. Up to my left there was a hill which I could just see the top of, cream and terra cotta roofs poking out steeply over the town, with two needle-like cathedral spires to one side, mica embedded in the slates, so that one roof shone like a mirror in the slanting light. And beyond the hill, a mountain just visible — with thunder clouds, I saw now, rolling in over it from the north: the first rain of the summer, I thought.

There was an oppressive stillness in the air below me, I noticed then, and soon the bruised skies began to tumble in over the city. And suddenly, after the endless heat of the past months, I wanted to be out in the open when the rain came — out and about like any tourist in a new place, letting the water fall over me and the thunder crack, cleansing the frustration and violence of the past days.

I left the hotel, skipped between the blue trams and into the park, and as I got to the line of trees on the other side the first peal of thunder echoed round the dry gardens and drops of rain fell delicately on the wilting herbaceous borders. In a few minutes the whole city went very black as the rain came, the leafy streets emptied and the plane trees started to weep. I moved along beneath them to the top of the park by the old apartment blocks where soon, in the watery onslaught, the peeling stucco fell in dirty chunks into the gutters.

The dark storm swept along the roads in vicious little eddies of warm damp, raindrops as large and bright as pearls hammered on the cobblestones. And I was happy in it, running before the weather, released at last from care.

But I was too carefree. I should have seen the two men following me earlier — and with a head start I might have dropped them entirely. I’d been in the mouth of a shopping arcade at the top of the park, sheltering from the downpour, when I saw them moving towards me for the second time. And I had to run then, out into the storm and across a main street.

And I ran fast — and appropriately, as others did, escaping the storm. But soon the only others I saw, braving the weather in a similar gallop, were my pursuers. I set off madly, turning into a collection of little streets beyond the park, dodging great rivers of water flooding the gutters and puddles moving like tides, running further into a city where I knew no roads, where one turning might liberate me while another could end in a blank wall.

By the time I found some cover under the broad umbrellas of the little flower-market I was soaked. Old women in head-scarves and great billowing black skirts were tidying up for the day, nursing bunches of carnations and roses back into cellophane wrappers — waiting for the storm to die, as was a surrounding crowd, pressing together about the trestle tables, a damp crush of commuters, smelling heavily of salami and garlic which killed the remnants of all the fresh blooms.

It was difficult to hide amongst them, so tightly bunched were they in the middle of the tiny square, with a small baroque church at one end. And so I had circled right round to the far side of the market — before I saw one of the men coming at me, from the opposite side, holding his hat in the wind, blinded by the rain. I pressed hard in among the tables then, stooping down among the commuters. He hadn’t seen me. I managed to push my way right through the market eventually and out by the church, immediately in front of me now. I made for it, jumping the steps two at a time, pushing open the side door into a dark, baroque interior. Several old women knelt on the bare stone at the back but there was nowhere to hide — apart from the few confessional boxes along one wall.

And it was in one of these that they got me in the end, one of the men pushing the grill aside violently, where a priest might be, and facing me with a gun — while his companion waited outside the curtain.

‘Milicija,’ the taller one said, keeping his gun on me while his colleague frisked me, taking my little revolver away. Then they led me from the church and out into the storm again.

The police station was back in the middle of town, next the park, housed in a gracious nineteenth-century apartment block, now given over to harsher matters, the other entrances all down the street severely bricked up. I was pushed through a crowded hallway full of damp petitioners and grudging authority — a few desk sergeants, peeping through small windows, intent on minding their own business. There was that sour, acid smell of an animal cage — an air of bureaucratic delay and ready injustice that I remembered so well from my years in Durham Jail. I was angry. Though in a way I had expected it: luck couldn’t hold forever and we’d all had a long run of it.

But at least I wasn’t delayed. I was taken upstairs at once and into an anteroom in front of the building, giving out onto the park: an office of some importance, with a male secretary picking his way delicately about a new electric typewriter. The man picked a phone up and almost at once another small, agile fellow seemed to jump into the room through some large double doors. He looked very young, though in his forties perhaps, not typically Balkan at all, but with rather fuzzy, partly fair hair neatly parted at one side with rimless specs over narrowly placed eyes, dressed most smartly in a lightweight Windsor check and pointed shoes. He gestured me inside casually, as though he knew me, a doctor vaguely welcoming a patient.

It wasn’t an office but a long conference room, with a glass-topped table, old sofas down one wall and a large photo-portrait of Tito in profile like a Roman emperor.

The secretary handed my little revolver to the man, closing the doors behind him.

‘Gospodin Marlow?’ he asked.

‘Do you speak English?’

‘Yes — I speak English. But I thought you would speak Serbo-Croat — being sent all the way here specially. Sit down, please.’ He fingered Lindsay’s revolver delicately, opening it, sniffing the empty chambers. The thunder cracked overhead, more faintly now. The room was dark and badly lit — an old salon, it must have been — a high gilded ceiling with mock electric candles set in antique wall brackets.

‘Fired quite soon. Quite recently.’ The man corrected himself. ‘Not normal issue, is it? Since when are British Intelligence using this?’ He looked at me with quizzical interest, peering at me through his specs, quite close, like a careful scientist, as though here was an interesting case indeed.

‘I’m not with British Intelligence.’ I wiped my face with a hanky. The thunder broke again, much further away over the city. The storm was dying. The man went over to the better light by the window, looking down the barrel of the gun. ‘Strange weapon.’ He rubbed the ivory handle, then examined the silver chasing. ‘An antique.’ He turned to me quizzically again.

‘I told you. It’s not an official gun. It belongs to the friends of mine I came here with. At the Palace Hotel —’

‘Yes, yes. We know about all of you. The Phillips. The family of Lindsay Phillips, I assume.’ He put the gun down on the table and leant towards me. ‘And you are Marlow. Peter Marlow, also with British Intelligence,’ he added punctiliously.

‘No, I’m not. We’ve just been looking for this man Phillips. He was with Intelligence.’

‘Yes. We know about him. We’ve been waiting for him. He was to come here. But he never did. Not yet — unless he did it — clandestine? How do you —?’

‘Lindsay Phillips? To come here? How do you know? You’re looking for him too?’

The man didn’t reply. He just went on gazing at me carefully, his calm blue eyes magnified in the glasses. The thunder disappeared completely in the distance. The rain had stopped, and now a shaft of sunlight suddenly brightened the gloomy room.

‘Who are you?’ I asked. But again there was no reply. Just that steady inquisitive stare. He picked the gun up again. It glinted now — like a pretty thing in the light.

At last he spoke. ‘No. Perhaps you are not with British Intelligence.’ His tone was deeply considered. ‘You would have a proper gun — not this toy. And you would be alone, not with this man’s family.’ He walked back to the window. ‘I do not understand it yet. But we will. We will.’ He turned. ‘Tell me, who were you shooting at — with this?’ He held the gun up.

‘No one.’

‘But it has been fired — recently.’

‘It came from Scotland. It belongs to Lindsay Phillips. Someone must have fired it up there.’

The man sighed, sat down and opened a file on the table. ‘But you have needed a gun, yes? On your travels.’ He looked at a typewritten sheet. ‘First we were warned to expect this Gospodin Phillips — chief of your Department Nine: the “Slavs and Soviets” is it not? He did not come. Then we learnt that you would come instead. And it is so. That is good. You are here.’ He looked up smiling.

‘Warned? But I had no idea I was coming here — until yesterday. Who could have warned you?’

‘No, no! You go too fast.’ The man shook his head, ‘I am still thinking.’ And he was, furrowing his brow like a caricature of someone thinking, looking again into the file.

‘Let me explain,’ I said, feeling he was a sympathetic listener and that I could help him out. ‘I was with British Intelligence. But only as a clerk, no more. I left it over ten years ago. The Phillipses are old friends of mine. I agreed to help them find Lindsay Phillips, entirely as a private matter …’ And then I decided to explain the whole affair to him. Why not? There was nothing to lose. And I did so with very few omissions. I told him about Pottinger, too — how I was sure that we’d been led on by this man, by the KGB in fact, down through Europe, in a wild-goose chase after a man who had never been kidnapped by any Croatian terrorist group at all.

And now my man took an extreme interest in my story and I could sense he believed me. ‘So each time,’ I said, ‘we were led on by these letters. But not here. That was entirely my idea. You see, Lindsay Phillips once lived in Zagreb, with his first wife, in the thirties. And she was killed here, so they say, under a tram opposite the Palace Hotel. But I don’t think she was killed …’ And I ended my tale with an account of Eleanor and Zlatko Rabernak, and how I’d thought that Lindsay might have come back here to rejoin his first wife.

‘So how,’ I said finally, ‘could you have known I was coming here?’

The man went over to the double doors. He spoke to the clerk outside. I heard the name ‘Rabernak’. When he returned his bemused indecisiveness was gone. He was brisk, businesslike — a man at a board meeting who had got the agreed losses out of the way and could now concentrate on the potential profits.

‘I would not have believed you,’ he said. ‘But, yes: what you say fits very well … with,’ he glanced at the file again. ‘With our other investigation.’ He took up another fatter file. ‘A few weeks ago we arrested one of our own men here — a very important man. The Chief, in fact, of our Croatian Milicija. We had thought for some time he was with the Soviets; then we were able to prove it. It was from him that we took our information about Lindsay Phillips — and yourself: that one or other would come here. You were then to be arrested, charged, exposed. It was part of a plan he — and his friends in Moscow — had to show that Western Intelligence was interfering in our internal affairs, so that they could promote a new hard-line, pro-Soviet policy in the country — and eventually replace President Tito with one of their own men. He was waiting for you — our chief of police: to take you.

‘But!’ The man waved his hands ambitiously in the air. ‘But we took him first — this old man. We have trouble from every side, do you see?’ he went on confidingly. ‘From the old men here who are still with Moscow — the Stalinists! And the other old men abroad who are still with Hitler and Pavelič.’ He shook his head, almost mournfully. ‘Too many old men who will not let us alone. So you see — we are on our guard!’

The phone rang just then on the table and he spoke rapidly for a minute in Serbo-Croat. Then he turned to me. ‘We have no immediate record of any man called Rabernak in the city. Perhaps before the war only —’

‘He had an antique shop here then, yes.’

‘Ah, there are few such shops here now. The war.’ He gestured again, less confidently this time. ‘But we can check maybe with the old files. However, they are nearly all lost too — in the war.’ The man was off-hand now. ‘But for the moment — what are you to do here?’

‘This Scots woman — Eleanor Phillips: I wanted to see if she was still alive.’

‘I do not follow you there. She was killed by tram you said.’

‘Yes. And buried here apparently — in some big cemetery on a hill.’

‘Mirogoj, yes.’

‘But I don’t think she was killed. You see, her husband, this Lindsay Phillips — I’m almost certain he was a double all his life: he was with the KGB in fact, like Philby and the others we had in our intelligence service —’

‘You say Phillips is with Moscow?’ The man leant forward now — intently, suddenly interested again.

‘I think so.’

‘Then perhaps his wife was too — this woman you are looking for?’

‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘She was certainly very left-wing before the war.’

‘But how could she be here, an English woman, even if she was alive?’

‘I told you: she married this Zlatko Rabernak, I think: secretly, in Vienna. Then they came back to live here — or so his relations in Vienna think. No one has heard from him since. So they may not have survived the war.’

‘They may have changed their names, of course.’ He was vaguely excited now, my man, dreaming of some intelligence coup, his eyes alert, dancing behind the thick lenses. ‘You see,’ he went on, ‘we know for certain there are several others with Moscow — living here in Zagreb right now. “Deep cover illegals” you call them?’ I nodded. ‘Yugoslavs,’ he continued, ‘living and working here. And some, we know, who have been with the Soviets maybe since before the war. Other old people,’ he added distastefully. ‘I wonder maybe if this Rabernak and his wife are like this?’

‘Perhaps.’ There was silence in the long room. The sunlight blazed in now, a golden evening fire slanting over the huge trees in the park. ‘I should let my friends know,’ I said. ‘In the hotel. They’ll be anxious.’ I looked out over the city.

‘Yes.’ The man stood up and went over to the window again. ‘Yes,’ he said again slowly, gazing out at the moist trees and the glittering, rain-washed roofs and steeples rising on the hill away to the right above them.

‘Lindsay Phillips once lived in a house here,’ I said. ‘Above the city, in some park. With trees. Cherry trees —’

‘Tuškanac, for sure. The diplomatic area.’

‘I wondered if they might be living there, if they were here at all.’

‘Unlikely. It’s nearly all diplomatic there. Consulates, Residencies, members of the government here. Too exposed for an agent.’ He turned to me now. He was authoritative, businesslike once more. ‘Good,’ he said, ‘We will help you look for this woman.’

‘She may be dead, of course. I could be quite wrong.’

‘Indeed. But that is easy to prove. She was buried in Mirogoj?’

‘In some big cemetery here.’

‘There is only one such. You have her name — at that time? And the date?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then they will have the records up there. They will not have gone in the war. So it is simple. We can dig her up.’

‘I see,’ I said, alarmed at this precipitous, slightly macabre enthusiasm. ‘I don’t know,’ I went on. ‘Maybe —’

‘No, no! It is the answer. “No stone unturned” as you say. And I may assure you the need is urgent: it is our chief concern right now — to find these Soviet cominformists here. These agents and sympathisers. If we do not, Moscow may easily take us when Tito is gone.’

So I gave him the details about Eleanor and he came over to me afterwards, offering his hand. ‘Good. We will work together. Go back to your hotel. I will make arrangements with the cemetery. Perhaps this evening … And perhaps we can trace this Rabernak from before the war. My name is Stolačka. Brigade Commander Pedar Stolačka.’

I shook his hand. ‘Pedar — Peter? My name too.’

‘Good. Good — we will work together. And I will keep this for the moment.’ He picked up the little silver revolver. Then he paused for a moment at the doorway. ‘Tell me — we are not so foolish: who were you shooting at?’

‘At Pottinger,’ I said, admitting it, glad to be involved at last with someone whose interest in the truth appeared at least as great as mine. ‘A little fracas with the KGB in Vienna.’

‘Did you kill him?’

‘No. I had several shots at him, but he got away.’

‘Unfortunate. But then, of course, you are no intelligence officer. And even if you were — with this!’ He looked at the gun, shaking his head. ‘But remember, since his plan was to get you to Zagreb in any case, he may come on here himself anyway. Beware.’

‘He doesn’t want to kill me. Just the opposite: he thinks I can lead him to Phillips. They want to get him home, I suppose.’

Stolačka laughed. ‘They want to kill him, Mr Marlow — if what you say about him is true. Before his British friends get hold of him. A double agent for so long? He knows too much. Both sides must want him out of the way — for ever.’ He opened the door. ‘I’ll keep your passports, too,’ he added.

‘I didn’t know you had them.’

‘We are not so inefficient. And, by the way, I should not speak of our business — to the British Consulate here, for example.’

‘I’ll have to tell the two women.’

‘Yes. I suppose you will. Lies can come to nothing.’ He smiled, showing me out graciously, and I walked back to the hotel across the damp park, the grass steaming in the evening warmth, wondering what on earth the two women would make of it all.

They made very little of it, in fact, that evening over dinner in the hotel. They were numbed by the twisting course of events and tired by the strange travel — and without Klaus to support her, Rachel seemed almost acquiescent. Indeed, she was flippant about Stolačka’s plans.

‘I don’t know what the British authorities will say — digging up their graves like this,’ she said quietly.

‘They’re not going to know.’

‘It’s all the most awful, criminal nonsense,’ Madeleine had added. ‘Eleanor can’t be alive.’ She looked at me incredulously, as she had so often done before after my comments about Lindsay. ‘She’s dead, don’t you see? She must be. Lindsay would have told me otherwise.’ She paused, seeing the implications. ‘Why, he’d never have married me, if she had been alive. He couldn’t have done.’

Madeleine still believed in simple, straightforward answers — faithful as always to her whole life with Lindsay. I wished I could have supported her in this. But it was too late.

‘We’ve no alternative,’ I said — like a hanging judge, I suppose.

A police car called for me very early next morning, while it was still dark, and we drove through the silent streets up a long sloping avenue out of the city for several miles until we came to high walls and a great arched and columned gateway — like an Imperial fort from the Indian plains set down here on the hillside, with the city — a few winking lights in a creamy mist — just waking beneath us.

It was a vast place inside, too, like another city, with endless criss-crossed avenues stretching down the far side of the hill, back into the mists. Ornate tombstones and marble funerary groups lurked at every corner, granite violins, weeping angels and sad pet dogs cast in stone at Daddy’s spatted feet; great family mausoleums sprang up at us quickly, one after the other, out of the morning dark like blind houses on a real street as we drove down the main avenue.

Then, in a dell of land on the far side, we saw the floodlights shining through the mist, set round a van and piles of earth and shadowy figures moving carefully about the site like patient archaeologists. We walked the rest of the way down a winding cypress-bordered path and Stolačka emerged from a group — brisk and confident, like a sewage engineer in yellow oilskins and gumboots. His breath hung in wisps for an instant in the chilly air. ‘We’ve had no trouble. It was all clearly marked in the records.’

I saw the headstone then, lying on its side at the top of the gaping hole, where they were still digging — with the same brief legend chipped on it that I had seen on the window in Dunkeld church.

In Memoriam

Eleanor Phillips

1912–1937

‘When the day breaks,

and the shadows flee away …’

And I felt a shiver of awful disgust at this desecration of simple love which I had helped to bring about. Even the dead were not to be free of my inquisitions.

A spade struck a stone — or a skull, I thought, and I turned away, unable to look any longer, suddenly pierced with the morning cold and hatred at myself. The sun rose just then, climbing above the cemetery walls, and the morning flooded over us quite suddenly in a lovely white-blue light, the mist dissolving all round me. But still I could hear the spades scraping on something hard behind me, scooping up the bones — and I could bear it no longer. I turned and pushed my way back in among the circle of people. Stolačka was on the other side of the hole, bending down intently, hands on his knees, peering into the dark hollow.

‘Bricks,’ he said. ‘Nothing but bricks.’ A man below handed one up to him and he threw it across to me — a badly eroded red brick. And I saw a line of them now, like stepping stones, running the length of the grave beneath me, covered in scraps of rotten wood. I stood up, dizzy, my trousers damp with the grave soil. A first gold beam struck the hollow then, sloping over the walls like a spotlight illuminating the empty tomb.

My stories had come true. The vague ghosts I had conjured with throughout the last weeks had substance at last — and one, at least, had risen long before and might be out there, now, I thought, somewhere in the fresh blue morning, waking in the bright city beneath me.

‘You may be right.’ Stolačka came up to me. ‘Anyone who made such bother to arrange all this —’ He held a brick up. ‘Well, they must have had something big to hide. But where do we start — to look?’ We both gazed out over the wide city as the sun touched the Cathedral roofs far below us in the centre and the slates brightened slowly into a fiery mirror.

At first Madeleine and Rachel completely refused to believe what I had told them, back in the lobby an hour after — thinking I had become entirely malicious. It wasn’t until Stolačka himself came to the hotel in the middle of the morning and confirmed the details that they began to accept the truth of the matter. And it was a bad few minutes when they did — for now at last they were faced with the incontrovertible evidence of some great lie directly involving Lindsay. Their expressions changed. The places in their skin where they were confident and smiled entirely disappeared now, like a lost map of happy islands, and were replaced by grievous battle plans, lines of deep suffering. They were quite innocent victims, which made it worse — refugees caught in what seemed the most wicked machinations, a vast familial deceit which they were part of through inheritance and love, but which they could only attempt to explain quite blindly now, still trapped in their original faith.

‘Of course it’s possible that my husband knew nothing about her survival at all.’ Madeleine offered the rather limp excuse.

‘Well, at least we know now — he certainly didn’t push her under that tram,’ Rachel added, looking at me viciously — taking a small victory.

Stolačka was tactfully precise. ‘You mean, Mrs Phillips, that your husband really thought she was dead?’

‘Yes. He must have done.’

‘But he must have seen her, surely? That she was living, after the accident. Alive somewhere — either at the hospital or —’

‘Someone may have “arranged” her death,’ Madeleine interrupted. ‘Without Lindsay knowing.’

‘Yes — certainly someone arranged it. And it would not have been too difficult in those Royalist days here: a good bribe for the hospital workers, the funeral people. But are you really thinking your husband did now know of it?’

‘I think it’s possible, that’s all. I didn’t know my husband at the time, you see.’

‘Of course. I understand. It must all be a very unhappy business for you, Mrs Phillips. I am sorry. But you will see — that we have to make our researches now.’

He stood up. ‘Before you go,’ I asked him. ‘Could you get hold of a list, a street directory perhaps, of the various shops here before the war? The antique shops?’

‘We are doing that right now, Mr Marlow. Many of the street records are gone in the war. But there are people here who will remember. I will let you know.’

Stolačka left us then, courteous as ever, without any suggestion of keeping us under house arrest. We were free to go and do as we wanted. But what was there for us to do? To walk the streets and gaze at every face, to look in shops and cafés and restaurants, at tram stops and public gardens — looking for Lindsay and his ex-wife? We knew now that some great confidence trick had been played out between them, and with Zlatko too, almost certainly. But why? And were any of them still here? Or alive at all? Despite the bitter revelations we were no further on into any real truths.

Rachel was blazing angry. There was no help she would let me give her. Madeleine was stunned. I offered to get them a drink, but they refused. Rachel went to her room — retreating into one of those long moans of self-disgust and enmity, I supposed. Yet now she had real reason for her pain, I thought. And I wished she hadn’t. I wished once more that I had never set eyes on the Phillipses again, at the Chelsea Flower Show — and all for the sake of a set of new radials and a sherry bill. For I had lied too — the lies of omission, like Lindsay, which kill in the end far more painfully.

‘Look,’ I said to Madeleine, trying to absolve myself. ‘It doesn’t really matter what went on here forty years ago. All we have to do is to see if Lindsay’s here. That’s all. If he is, then I’m sure he’ll be able to explain everything.’

‘Yes,’ Madeleine replied vaguely. ‘I’m sure he will.’ But I wondered how any man could explain away a line of bricks, for his first wife, in an empty grave.

‘I think I’ll rest a bit,’ she said. ‘What will you do?’

It was midday. I was tired as well. But again I had a great urge to walk the streets, tempted by some truth which I was convinced lay out there — in an antique shop, or an old house on a hill. ‘I’ll take a look round outside,’ I said.

‘For what?’

‘I don’t know.’

Madeleine studied me for a moment, sadly. ‘Rachel is right in a way, you know,’ she said. ‘You have a kind of demon in you now, about Lindsay.’

‘Do I?’ I was annoyed, for this was partly true. But there were other parts — not daemonic at all — in my attitudes towards the man, which she seemed conveniently to deny now. ‘Remember,’ I went on, ‘you thought I could help find him. Are we to stop looking just because — unpleasant factors arise?’

‘Unpleasant?’ Madeleine seemed surprised.

‘Doubtful, then. But it’s ridiculous to expect perfection in any case. Surely you see —’

‘Yes, of course I see that. But all this about Eleanor is much more than “unpleasant” or “doubtful”. It changes everything, don’t you see? If it’s true.’

‘Yes, I see that. But it’s hardly my fault. Are you saying you’d prefer not to find Lindsay, rather than learn the truth about him?’

She didn’t answer directly. Instead she prevaricated: ‘The “truth” — is there such a thing?’

‘I think so. But I’m not moralising about it. As I said, what does it matter what he did in the past — if we can find out where he is now — if he’s alive?’

‘Of course,’ she agreed, and we left it at that. But I could see that what Madeleine feared was the final proof of Lindsay’s death, where these fearful truths would have emerged all the same, without his then being able ever to explain them to her. Perhaps, at worst, my inquisitive demon could save her from that silent fate.

Apart from Cairo years before, caught in the depths of its midsummer desert blaze, I had never seen a place so threatened by the sun as Zagreb that morning. The weather had become a dangerous event; a state of war had come down over the city and what few people were about darted quickly across the streets, from one shadow to another, like a beleaguered rearguard under fire.

The plane trees opposite the hotel in Strossmayer Square gave some cover but by the time I’d reached Republic Square up at the top, the main crossroads of the city, I was nearly done for. Trams jostled to and fro across the huge expanse of concrete, pushing through dancing spirals of heat, and people avoided the soft puddles of tar like minefields, going to ground wherever they could — beneath awnings, in shopping arcades and in the interiors of dark cafés.

Beyond the square the red-roofed medieval town rose steeply, a glimpse of watchtowers and greenery poking out high above the melting-pot beneath. Confusing steps and alleyways seemed to lead up to this terra-cotta haven. But further along I found a more inviting access to it — a little funicular, and for a penny I went up with it to the heights. And here was a different world — a village of tree-lined walks and parapets, where heavy chestnut leaves leaned right out over the city, stirring in a faint breeze, with minute squares behind and alleys which threaded their way back over the hill between shaky old houses and stately baroque buildings, small Venetian palazzos wreathed in tentacles of lime-green creeper, once the homes of a merchant aristocracy here, now restored as government offices, museums and art galleries.

There were no cars and it was almost silent up in this blazing summer perch, as families took their lunch in curtained rooms, bureaucrats scuttled along the shadowed side of lanes, back down the hill into the city, while a few sun-dyed tourists huddled in the cool of a church porchway. There were several shops — a state tourist office with curios and knick-knacks in the window, an old apothecary’s shop down a dark lane by a candlelit shrine, and a number of inviting little restaurants. But there were no antique shops. It was an impossible search, I thought then, as I crossed the square towards the tempting shadows by the tourist shop. I wiped my face and thought of a cold beer back in town, gazing vacantly at the thick, brightly painted Dalmatian pottery in the shop window There was some cut glass as well, and some little woody men with red elfin caps and feathers cleverly made out of pine cones and a row of nicely carved wooden boxes — cigarette boxes, I thought.

I was just moving away when the door opened, and someone came out, and for an instant I heard the music, the delicate tinkling of a music box, biting out some old polka inside. I forgot my cold beer then, stopping in my tracks and turning back into the memory of weeks before in Hyde Park Square where I had last heard such music.

The shop was empty apart from two middle-aged American women over by the counter with an assistant. They were examining what I had thought to be cigarette boxes — a row of them on the counter. I picked one up. They were little contemporary music boxes, I saw then, pretty modern things, hardly more than toys, latticed in matchwood on the sides, the lid roughly inlaid with a fairly cheap mechanism underneath.

‘Don’t you have any other tunes?’ the big American woman asked. She was dressed in what looked like a floppy winding-sheet which she hitched impatiently about her now while her companion fiddled with the key.

‘No,’ the Yugoslav girl smiled nicely. ‘Just those two: the Blue Danube and Imperial Polka.’

‘Well, I don’t know. 6000 dinars — that’s around ten dollars, isn’t it?’ Big patches of sweat had come beneath her arms, staining the sheet. She seemed rooted to the spot now, fatigue and indecision overcoming her impatience. ‘Play it again, Martha.’ Her companion set the music off once more, the sweet notes filling the room, a distant gracious age renewed.

‘Are they made locally?’ I asked the Yugoslav girl, turning my box over, looking for a marking.

‘Yes. Yes — here in Zagreb,’ the girl beamed.

‘You don’t know who makes them, do you? I’d like to — I’ll tell you: I specialise in these kind of things in London, you see. I’d very much like to meet the man — to see how they do it over here.’

‘Oh, I don’t know —’

‘Well, look — I’ll have this one in any case. And if you could give me his name. Or where you get them from …’

The girl melted a little. ‘I’ll ask my friend.’

The two Americans continued to ponder the quality of the merchandise against the financial outlay and the girl disappeared behind a curtain. A minute later she reappeared, with a piece of paper.

‘Is a wood shop near here. A wood …’ She searched for a better word.

‘A carpenter’s shop?’

‘Yes,’ she said slowly. ‘Is not quite a carpenter’s shop.’ She smiled awkwardly. ‘Is for pompes funèbres. You know? How you say? They make boxes for people as well.’

‘Coffins?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’ She beamed hugely. ‘Coffins. Is near here.’

She gave me the name and address. ‘Gospodin Josip Radja. Is a little road going back to Republic Square: Radičeva.’ Then she found me a street map and pointed it out to me. Finally she wrapped up my box for me very neatly with a ribbon over coarse brown paper. She couldn’t have been more helpful and the place seemed only just round the corner. The only thing I missed when I came back out into the sun was my little silver revolver.

Of course, it was a remote chance — difficult too, for I had none of the language. But I had one of their music boxes to prove my bona fides and I thought I could bumble my way through a few sensible enquiries with a bit of French or German.

There was no sign above the shopfront in the narrow old street that twisted down back into the city — just grimy glass windows and a broad doorway — wide enough for coffins — and I could only identify the place by carefully checking the street numbers of the other small second-hand shops on either side of it: a furriers with a moth-eaten silver fox growling in the window — and a shop on the other side which seemed to sell nothing but old Ford gearboxes and mysterious refrigerator parts. The steep alleyway was a last bastion of private enterprise in the city — a shadowed place, covered by long eaves, where the sun hardly penetrated at all. And when I opened the door I came into an even darker world, a medieval workroom it might have been: a long narrow space, like a cave leading back into the hill, littered with drifts of sawdust and coffin sides and lids and brass fittings, the air cloudy with motes of wood and smelling of sharp new varnish. In the gloom they might have been making strange boats, little angular craft, golden-coloured bath tubs, specially designed to sink without trace.

Two men were carefully tending a casket in the middle of the room, I saw, when my eyes took to the shade; one of them polishing it, the other fixing screws. Two others in the wood mist beyond were stripping elm planks in a rotary sander — and there were other, unidentifiable thumps behind them in the invisible gloom at the end of the workshop. To my right was a glass partitioned office with an old man inside, like a pre-war Soho waiter, leaning over sheaves of paper — a man from the true Balkans, with a droopy white moustache, heavily lined peasant’s face and eyes sunk like dark stones deep into his skull.

He came out at once, agreeing that he was Josip Radja. I showed him the music box and for a minute or two we stumbled through a variety of languages without getting anywhere. But he understood what I was getting at.

‘Yes,’ he said at last in halting English. ‘I have you one girl,’ and without knowing what he was up to I followed him right down to the end of the workshop and out into a tiny sunny courtyard at the back. And there, sitting at a table beneath a stand of huge sunflowers, was a pretty schoolgirl, dark-haired, thin-faced, in a linen school smock, eating lunch from a tin canteen — a watery mix of cold rice and peppers, dipping hunks of fresh bread into it. She must have been fourteen or fifteen — an attractive girl, slim, in long pig-tails, her hair parted severely in the middle. But when she stood up, at the old man’s bidding, and looked at me, I saw that her beauty was marred by an awkward squint in one eye, a flaw in her vision, so that she gazed askance at the world.

‘Is Enka. My big daughter. English! English!’ The man waved his hands about, speaking to the girl in Serbo-Croat then.

‘I speak English — leetle,’ she said in a shy way. ‘I learn now school. This is my grandfather,’ she said slowly. ‘We help you?’

‘Well, I just wondered …’ I showed her my music box. ‘I wanted to know how these were made here. I’m very interested. Who makes them here?’ I turned to the old man.

‘I make it.’ I turned back in surprise. The girl was examining the box carefully. ‘This one — I make,’ she added confidently.

‘Yes?’ I queried.

‘Yes! Yes!’ The old man waved his hands vigorously in the air again, encouraging the girl like a boat-race coach. ‘She make him!’ He laughed out loud in pride now, pointing towards another rickety wooden doorway on the far side of the postage-stamp garden. They brought me over. Inside, in a space as big as a lavatory, was a small work-bench, a selection of wood veneers and match strips, fret-saws, chisels and several medical scalpels: a complete miniature workshop. The old man picked up a little tissue packet and unwrapped it. Inside was the spring mechanism for the music boxes. ‘Nematchka,’ he said.

‘It is from Germany,’ the girl explained. ‘But everything other we make here.’

‘Marvellous,’ I said, looking at a half completed box in a vice. ‘But how did you learn — where did you get the idea of making these?’

‘Pardon?’ The girl looked at me queerly.

‘How — did — you — start — making — these?’ I almost spelt the sentence out, holding up one of the music boxes. ‘Who taught you?’

‘Take me?’

‘No — taught you.’

‘Please?’ Still she didn’t understand and she looked over to her grandfather now for help. He spoke to her in Serbo-Croat, a slight note of urgency in his voice, I thought.

‘Ah, yes,’ the girl went on much more confidently now. ‘I am learn it in my school. In woodtechnic studies.’ She smiled happily and the old man smiled too, so that I decided to risk the next question then, both of them seemed so friendly and willing to help.

‘I wonder,’ I said, ‘if you remember a man here in Zagreb years ago — before the war — who collected these music boxes? A Mr Zlatko Rabernak.’ I repeated the gist of the sentence again, even more slowly.

But the girl looked quite blank. ‘I don’t know —’ She turned to her grandfather again.

‘Rabernak?’ he said. ‘No — who is? No …’ He spoke haltingly, shaking his head. I’d obviously come to an end; with the language problem there was no other real progress I could make. We’d come out again into the dazzling little concrete square and I’d started on my thanks and goodbyes when the old man patted me on the shoulder and said ‘Slivovitz’ several times, gesturing me to take a chair beneath the huge sunflowers. He spoke to the girl in their own tongue and then said, ‘Chekai, chekai,’ to me, in great good humour — and I felt I could hardly refuse his hospitality, though the heat was uncomfortable in the enclosed space and I needed a cold beer far more than plum brandy.

So I sat down as the old man went back into the main workshop — and the girl watched me curiously, flirtatiously, it seemed now, flicking her pigtails over her shoulder, leaning against the wall a few yards from me, hands behind her rump.

‘“Chekai” — it means “wait”,’ she said, smiling like a much older woman. And we waited. She crossed her legs over as she stood there — indolently, asking to be admired, hands still behind her back, her small breasts pushing through her smock, arched away from the wall, never taking her eyes off me. But was she really looking at me? It was hard to be sure with her squint and the sun in my eyes whenever I looked up.

The whirr of electric machinery stopped suddenly in the workshop behind me. And something warned me then — the tempting schoolgirl with the cast in her eye, perhaps — that I shouldn’t be here any more, that it was time to be up and away. I got to my feet quickly, making for the door.

But the girl was quicker still: in a flash she was round to the other side of the little yard, barring my way, and now I saw what she’d been hiding behind her back, as the scalpel in her hand glittered in the sun.

8

The girl didn’t move, holding herself very firmly against the door, the scalpel at arm’s length, pointing it at my throat like a bayonet. Her knowing smile was gone but she wasn’t frightened and the smooth brick walls all round were impossible to climb. I was the one who was sweating. I hated knives anyway and here was a real tomato slicer. But there was the table, I saw, to keep me away from it. I picked it up and, using it as a shield with the legs outwards, I moved behind it towards her — before lunging forward with it, pinning her to the door, trapping her between its legs on all sides as she flourished about with the scalpel, narrowly missing my fingers. Then I gave the table a great thrust to one side, two legs catching her in the ribs and spinning her over onto the ground where she lay stunned.

I was into the back of the workshop then, seeing nothing in the sudden gloom. And there was no sound either — the place deserted, the men put out for lunch, I assumed, by the old man, the machinery stilled and all the main lights turned off. I could hardly see my way forward at all. Suddenly I felt something soft coming round my legs — a pile of sawdust, I realised, as I fell into it. I moved to one side then, feeling my way gingerly along what I thought must be the wall.

But my fingers came to a blank space almost immediately and I stopped. There was another room, it seemed, off to my right. Then I heard footsteps ahead of me. The old man, I presumed, was on the move — someone who knew the geography of the place intimately, a sure-footed walk towards me, between all the obstacles I remembered ahead.

But I couldn’t see a thing, though my eyes had become used to the gloom by now. Then I realised why. The room I’d come into, off the main workshop, was a store room — and I was standing behind a tall pile of coffins, in all shapes and sizes, which had blocked my vision ahead.

The footsteps stopped then. He was waiting for me to move. Then the door from the backyard opened: the girl with the scalpel was up and about again. There were two of them now, one on either side of the long workshop, waiting for me in the dark. I was trapped in the little store-room.

A diversion was required and the material for it was readily to hand. I got behind a coffin on the top of the stack and pushed it suddenly, with great force, out into the main room — and then a second and a third, the light wood casings speeding away like torpedoes. There were smaller missiles available, too — little white children’s caskets — and these I was able to pick up high in the air above my head and hurl like shot at my invisible uncharitable hosts. Soon there was pandemonium in the stuffy cave as the wood splintered again and again on the hard floor beyond me. Now that the stack of boxes in front of me was depleted, I could see through the gloom into the workshop. But there was no one there. I got my hands behind another large coffin and shoved. It didn’t move. I shoved again. Then I saw it was made of aluminium and had a lid on it. Someone or something was inside.

I was damp with sweat and fear and the energy suddenly ran out of me, bile rising in my throat, and I sagged to my knees. Someone called then, standing in the doorway, open now onto the street.

It was Stolačka, I saw, silhouetted against the light.

‘Gospodin Marlow? Cease fire, cease fire!’ He came towards me, walking jauntily in his Windsor check through the splintered debris, in what seemed high good humour. I got to my feet, covered in sawdust, the wood sticking to my sweaty skin like breadcrumbs. He started to brush me down.

‘It’s good that we were following you all morning,’ he said easily. ‘I told you: not inefficient.’

‘The two people — an old man, a girl?’ I asked.

‘Yes — they tried to run. We have them. Outside.’

‘And there’s someone else,’ I said. ‘Here — in this box. Or maybe it’s just some more bricks.’

And I thought: it’s Lindsay. It must be Lindsay.

But it wasn’t. When Stolačka pulled the lid off I saw the dead features of Pottinger lying out flat in the bottom of the metal box — the keen bright face that I remembered like a dark negative now, the skin a rich plum-colour.

‘It adds up,’ Stolačka said to me later, when Josip Radja and his impudent grand-daughter had been taken away. He had brought me to a workers’ buffet a little further down the lane and bought my cold beer at last. ‘This man who you call Pottinger,’ he said. ‘They put him in that metal box because he was wounded. In the chest, some days ago. So you must have got him with that little gun in Vienna after all.’

‘How? If he’d been wounded in Vienna — he’d have gone straight to the Russian Embassy there.’

Stolačka shrugged. ‘Yes, maybe. So perhaps they killed him here then. Your friend Josip Radja. We will tell maybe for sure — if there is a bullet.’

‘Who is this Radja?’

‘They are checking now — on the phone.’

‘You see, the moment I started talking about Rabernak, that’s when he changed his mind about me. And of course — those coffins. That’s his business. Isn’t that how they managed with Eleanor Phillips? If that workshop was there before the war?’

‘Maybe. We will find out. Come, we will see.’

We went back out again. The police had blocked the narrow street off now and Stolačka’s men were going through the workshop inch by inch. The place was brightly lit and there was a man on the phone in Radja’s little glass office. Stolačka spoke to him for a minute, before turning to me.

‘They have checked this Josip Radja against our files. There is nothing wrong with him — on paper. This workshop has been here for many years. Yes — since before the war. We will question him. But he has a brother — which may be of more interest to us — Dr Ivo Radja. He lives just up here above us, in the old town.’ Stolačka shook his head in surprise.

‘What?’

‘This man is distinguished; he is well known here for — what you say? — a picture fixer?’

‘An art restorer?’

‘Yes. Restoration. Wall paintings in the church —’

‘Frescoes?’

‘Yes. And he is expert in the baroque time as well’ Stolacka turned back to his colleague on the phone and took the handset from him, talking directly for a minute to some central registry, with long pauses as he jotted down various information.

When he’d finished he read from his notes: ‘Dr Ivo Radja, Professor at the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts: married to Liesl Radja — once Liesl Schlüsselberger — an Austrian woman, born in Vienna 1913, a naturalised Yugoslav citizen of course now. They have two children: Stepan and Stanka Radja. He is a research chemist — at the Scientific Institute here. And she, of course, is the pianist.’

‘Of course?’

‘Yes, of course,’ He looked at me in surprise. ‘Stanka Radja — one of the best in Croatia.’

The little office had become unbearably hot and we went outside into the road again. ‘Liesl Radja,’ I said. ‘Born in Vienna in 1913. That’s very close to Eleanor Phillips’ birthday. She lived in Vienna, too. And spoke German fluently.’ Stolačka had taken his glasses off, wiping them as I spoke. Now he looked at me carefully. ‘You are thinking what I think?’

‘I wondered. Is this Liesl Radja perhaps —’

‘Perhaps the woman who should have been in that grave?’ Stolačka interrupted.

I shrugged. ‘Maybe. But it seems unlikely — if they’re all so well known here.’

‘Come.’ Stolačka spoke quickly. ‘We may make our enquiries. They live only up the hill here.’ He called to a colleague and together the three of us moved up the little alleyway back towards the old town, the red roofs peeking out from the chestnut trees high above us.

It was a magnificent old, two-storeyed baroque merchant’s house, finely restored, the stucco delicately veined with young Virginia creeper, set on the highest part of the hill, half-way along a narrow street of similar little palazzos. A graceful archway divided the building which was now an art gallery and museum, representing the entire history of this medieval hill town. Stolačka spoke to a woman inside at a ticket desk. ‘Of course,’ he said when he returned. ‘The Professor has an apartment at the back. But he is not here. They are away on holiday. Come.’

We went through the archway, across a courtyard and climbed some circular wooden stairs, leading to an apartment above what must have been stables in the old days. At the top were two fairly large arched barn doors, beautifully restored with their original latches and studs — but firmly closed now, with some tactful modern locks. And there was no reply from a distant bell.

Stolačka sent his colleague back for the caretaker and a few minutes later we were inside a long and wonderfully decorated attic room, running almost the length of the building, a stone-vaulted hay or grain store, I supposed, originally, but now converted with easy taste and skill into a richly ornamented salon. A row of dormer windows gave out onto a jig-saw of umber tiles and beyond that a vision of the city beneath us; a sylvan tapestry ran along the other wall; a big refectory table piled with art books ran down the middle of the smooth pine floor. There were silver icons and other odd bits of baroque ecclesiastical decor set about on shelves, in niches between more books and small pictures — Guardi architectural engravings and some naïve art from the Croatian countryside. Two twisting barley-sugar sticks, in yellowed wood, the remnants from some baroque pulpit, I thought, held up a mantelpiece over a grate at one end and there was a small piano in a corner, a Liszt concerto open on the lectern.

We wandered round the salon, the other two looking in the neat bedrooms which led off it. The place was empty and wonderfully cool, a glittering treasure-house, edged in black and old gold with golden varnishes, set off with fine Dalmatian pottery and bright red peasant-weave chair-coverings.

I shook my head when Stolačka came back. ‘It seems unlikely,’ I said. ‘It’s all too grand surely? People like this wouldn’t be the sort …’

‘The sort of? — what?’

‘To play tricks with graves — all that. To work for the Russians. Besides, there’s nothing English here. If she’d been Eleanor Phillips …’

‘You’d expect — what?’

‘I don’t know. Tea, marmalade — something.’ We’d come into the kitchen then and I was looking over the provision shelves. There was a great variety of bottled fruit, pickles and red cabbage — with hams, and long bronzed sausages of old salami hanging down from hooks. But there was no Twinings Best Darjeeling or Oxford coarse-cut.

A small study led off the salon. And there I saw the music box — just one, on a shelf above the desk — but a Fabergé of a music box, the sides ribbed in latticed gilt with an enamelled lid depicting an airy bunch of cherubs flying through a blue empyrean, each one puffing a golden horn. I lifted the top and a tune emerged: the tone was extremely delicate, precise — a mazurka. There was a list of half a dozen other tunes, written in fine copperplate inside the lid. It was a perfect object.

But still I wasn’t sure — even when Stolačka’s colleague switched on a large transistor radio back in the salon. The crisp English accent immediately flooded through the room. It was the two o’clock news summary from London. ‘… British Leyland have again shown a net trading deficit for the year. The government intends to take steps to ensure that public money involved will be accounted for …’ The transistor had been tuned to the BBC World Service — and someone had been foolish enough to leave it on that wavelength; foolish, that is, if they were guilty of anything. But why should they be? And I disliked spying then: it was like wartime in occupied Europe and we were SS men wickedly on the move, searching out the innocent, tuned to freedom.

I said ‘Lots of people listen to the BBC abroad. It doesn’t mean a thing.’

‘No. Perhaps not.’

‘Lots of Yugoslavs who want to improve their English —’

‘Of course. I did that myself. I know. But here — look at this.’ Stolačka had picked up a little red-covered book. ‘This is perhaps not so typically Yugoslav.’ It was one of Ward Lock’s Red Guides, I saw: The Highlands of Scotland, a fairly new edition, taken from the British Council’s library in Zagreb. ‘You told me this Eleanor Phillips was originally from Scotland, no?’

‘Perhaps the Radjas were just thinking of a holiday up there.’

‘Yes,’ Stolacka agreed. ‘Except that they have already gone on holiday. The caretaker told me. They have a dacha, you know — a place in the woods, north of here, near the Slovenian border. The Castle of Trakošćan. It’s a museum now. But there are some small houses in the forest. The Radjas have one. They are there now.’

‘Let me go there first, will you,’ I said at once. ‘If we are right Could we see them first?’

‘Why not? They are not guilty of anything — yet. But we will be behind you. In case.’

We left the fabulous apartment then. A music box, the BBC lunchtime news, a guide to Scotland: it wasn’t conclusive evidence. But it was just enough, I felt, to tip the balance.

Back at the hotel I went through the same routine with Madeleine and Rachel, taking the role of Devil’s advocate once more. Though now I was less insistent. I put it on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. ‘I’ll go up there in any case,’ I said, after I’d explained all the day’s events to them.

‘It’s not a lot of proof,’ Madeleine said.

‘It’s enough — to take a look. And Lindsay may well be with them, hiding out there for some reason.’

Madeleine’s face twitched in pain for an instant. ‘Look,’ I said gently. ‘You have to face it. If you don’t, what will you think for the rest of your life? It’ll haunt you.’

She didn’t reply. Rachel had said hardly anything all along. She was calm — a steely calm like that of a gambler waiting over a roulette wheel. Now she shook her head in disbelief.

‘It’s all so unlikely, isn’t it?’ she asked me, smiling, looking at me in a friendly way for the first time in days. ‘It’s just a story. It can’t be true.’ And I saw then, in the depths of her face, way behind the solid calm, that she feared it all was true, because it was so unlikely. She had that confident look, with a great crack of unease running through it — like that of a faithful spouse, the last to realise her partner’s infidelity.

She laughed, still shaking her head. ‘I’ll go. Why not?’ she said. ‘I’ll do this one more thing before I leave — just to show how wrong you are.’

‘Fine. And you?’ I turned to Madeleine.

‘How can I refuse?’ she replied. But she didn’t smile.

Stolačka arranged rooms for us in the local tourist lodge at Trakoščan and a car for me to drive up there. It was several hours north-east of Zagreb, on the main road to Maribor, up in the hills. He showed me the route on a map back at the police station.

‘Through Krapina,’ he said. ‘Then here at Donji Macelj, you turn right. It’s a small road — not more than a forest track, I think, along the river valley here for about fifteen kilometres. At the end there is the hotel, the castle — and the woods. You can’t go any further.’

‘And their house?’ I asked.

‘It is in the forest.’ He showed me another large-scale map of the Trakošćan area — which included, at the centre, a rough triangle about 20 kilometres long, an outline of the old castle estates, an area coloured almost entirely in green, with a few small lakes, the rest of it wooded and with what appeared to be a large marsh some distance beyond the castle.

‘Is all forest now,’ Stolačka said. ‘Apart from this limestone quarry.’ He pointed to what I’d thought was a marsh. ‘Here — from this hill behind the castle, down to the river.’

‘Fine. But if it’s all forest — how do I find their house?’

‘Is not a house. A wooden dacha, an old hunting lodge, converted. From what I learn from our forestry department there are three or four such places in the estate. Summer rest houses — they belong to the artists’ unions, the writers and so on. Are rented out — and are not on this map. But the Radjas’ place is here, we think.’

He pointed to a spot near a lake, several miles beyond the castle. ‘There are tracks,’ Stolačka went on, ‘with notices — all through the woods. And they will have a more detailed map at the hotel to help you. You will find them easily enough.’

‘And you?’

‘We have already made arrangements. Happily this terrain around Trakošćan is one where our military reservists take training every year. The local people are well accustomed to seeing soldiers in the forest all through summer. So we have just added to these reserve men — a group of our own, in uniform of course. They will never be far away from the dacha. They will have it in vision, in fact — camping nearby. Here, I will give you this whistle. Blow hard if there is emergency. And this, too.’ He handed me back Lindsay’s little revolver. ‘Perhaps you will feel better with it. There are field glasses in the car you will have.’

‘How many are at the lodge?’

‘The caretaker said the whole family: that would mean five adults and the two grandchildren — the son, Stepan, is married.’

‘Quite a crowd,’ I said doubtfully. ‘I wonder if it’s really possible, if we’re right at all …’

‘That is for you to find out. Remember, you asked to see them first. And I agreed — because of course you have a better chance than us to find the truth. With us they can easily lie, after all. But with you and Mrs Phillips — you who know their history — perhaps they cannot so easily lie.’

Stolacka nodded sagely. And I felt like a cheap police informer again, as I had with Basil Fielding when he’d first made his offers a month before. I thought of throwing the whole thing in there and then. But, as usual, it was just a little too late.

We drove out of Zagreb first thing next morning in a small Fiat — along a good main road for an hour or so, sloping gently up through broad valleys of vine and sweet corn, then rising higher through passes and over torrents of water, towards the hills, the last remnants of the Alps, near the Slovenian border.

After we turned right beyond Krapina — off the main road and along a narrow, twisting strip of tarmac — the landscape changed at once. The open rolling valleys disappeared as we ran along the bottom of a long, heavily wooded defile in the land — beside a flashing stream which snaked down from the steep wooded crags and hills ahead of us. We were already in some lost country now, absolutely without habitation, a vast forestry reserve with no evidence of man but the road and a few loggers’ tracks and firebreaks, gashed through the pine forest now and then, with the small river wandering about on the other side of us, curving through swamps at times — great fields of tall grass, taller bullrushes and storms of blue and yellow wild flowers.

The women said little. The sun was fearsome again under the tin roof. But with all the windows open I could smell the watery marsh airs, touched with pine. And I looked forward suddenly to the future. What did it matter, I felt once more, what ugly deceits had transpired years before — in this fabulous green world of trees and strange flowers and rushing water under the pure white light?

‘Cheer up,’ I said gently, to neither of the women in particular.

‘Yes,’ Madeleine said, sitting beside me, sunglasses covering her eyes. But she said no more.

After twenty minutes the narrow pass opened out into a small valley, like a neat green saucer hidden between white crags and pine-crested hills crowding in all round. On one side, high up, dominating the whole valley, was the castle — a great fortified medieval keep in white stone circled with four wedding-cake turrets and a tall square tower rising up in the middle. On the other side, across the saucer of open meadow where they were scything hay, was the tourist lodge, a low flat building, a large terrace in front, with tables and sunshades and a few people in wicker chairs over coffees and beers looking over the miniature valley. And when we got out of the car it was like some childhood summer long before — a reek of freshly cut hay in the air and the remembered promise, in those better times, of some great summer adventure.

There was at least an hour to go before lunch, so I said, after we’d checked in and met again in the lobby, ‘We might as well go on now.’ I’d got the binoculars and a more detailed map of the estate from the receptionist.

‘There,’ I said, ‘that must be the Radjas’ lodge — up here beyond this lake.’

‘What do we do? Just walk in on them?’ Rachel asked. ‘Saying “You’re Eleanor Phillips and Zlatko Rabernak, and I claim my five pounds”? — or “Hello, Daddy, where have you been all this time”?’

‘What else?’ I said.

‘And if he’s not there, and they’ve nothing to do with Eleanor or Lindsay?’

‘We’ll soon know.’

‘How will we soon know? They can lie to us as well as anyone. We don’t even know what they look like now,’ Rachel added aggressively.

‘I’ve a fair idea, from those old photographs. Besides, Eleanor must look a bit like Aunt Susan.’

We were on the terrace, looking out over the valley, the sun burning us, directly overhead. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s not hang around here anyway. It’ll be cooler in the woods.’ I looked at the two women. They were more shaken than I was. But then, of course, it was their family, in a way, who they might possibly be going to meet for the first time in their lives, in half an hour.

We crossed the meadows through the haystacks and climbed some sharp steps, zig-zagging through rhododendrons, up to the castle, where a few American tourists marvelled at a portcullis. On the other side of the great squat building the land fell steeply away again, in a series of stone terraces and formal grassy slopes, towards a lake filled with weed and lily pads. We took a flower-bordered path along the edge here and soon the rather severe aspect of these water-gardens gave way to a whole countryside of informal little lakes and twisting waterside paths which snaked beneath great stands of copper beech casting dark shadows far out over the water.

Further on the lakes narrowed and stopped, and the land opened out into great stretches of virgin meadow — tall grass dancing with insects and butterflies, awash with daisies and blue cornflowers, uncut for years — set round with huge haphazard clumps of oak and chestnut, a ruined English parkland here, like some primeval forest now, the trees gone way past full maturity, some rotten at the top, a world forgotten, long since gone to seed.

A track led across this parkland to a much thicker ring of trees on the far side — and pushing through these we were soon by another lake again, a darker lake with deep, leaf-filled inlets and a little pagoda-roofed boathouse halfway along with a pier jutting out over the still water. Standing on this, just above a rubber dinghy, I could see faint damp footmarks and a towel left behind and bicycle tracks on the hot wood. And then, a few yards out in the bronze-coloured water two great fish swam into view — long and dark — moving slowly in line ahead just beneath the surface. We’d come into a place preserved, where there was no fear, it seemed, a world before the fall.

We’d been walking for more than half an hour, twisting ever deeper into the forests, and now I got the map out. ‘This lodge, at least, is just off here — at the end of the lake: we turn right.’

The two women were sitting by the boathouse, resting in the shade. Madeleine was tired. ‘Do you want to stay here while I go and take a look?’

‘No. We’ll come too,’ she said at once. Before I had always gone on my own towards Lindsay. But now they were to be there as well — in at the kill, or as witnesses to my folly.

Two boys on small chopper bikes suddenly came along the waterside path — riding fast, chattering, dark-haired. They barely noticed us. We followed them down the path, further into the woods, a minute afterwards. I wondered where Stolačka’s task force were hiding themselves, looking into the silent canopy of beech and evergreens all round.

Further along, a grassy track led away from the lake at right-angles, through a long archway of trees, towards another open meadow in the distance. And here, stopping just before the end of the wood, we looked out across the wide field and saw a wooden lodge nestling in a clearing of trees on the far side, less than half a mile away. The two boys were riding across the middle of this meadow now, their heads bobbing up and down in the grass — a space impossible to cross without being seen.

I took the binoculars out and focused them, the heat shimmering frantically above the land, magnified into translucent water spouts by the glass. The mop-headed boys came into vision and then, raising the glasses a bit, the lodge itself.

The first thing I saw was a big table on the covered terrace being prepared for lunch by two young women, one in a bikini, laying plates and cutlery, with what looked like a muslin-covered Moses basket to one side. I handed the glasses to Madeleine.

‘I can’t see,’ she said. ‘Just grass.’

‘Up a bit.’

‘Yes. There — there’s someone in the background now.’ She handed me the glasses. ‘There — in the shadow of the doorway, a figure.’

I looked again. It was a woman, middle-aged, her back half-turned towards us. Then she came out into a better light and I could see she was carrying a big platter, a large ham it seemed. And I could see her face then — a broad face with a peasant kerchief triangled over it — and a broad woman, too, in a dark smock dress. A nanny, perhaps, or a servant? A man followed her out — youngish, in bathing trunks, carrying a collection of bottles between the fingers of each hand, holding them like ninepins by their necks — mineral water and wine.

The boys had arrived at the lodge by now and, throwing their bikes down, they started to mob the man — their father I assumed, running round him in circles, the three of them doing a little dance before the man managed to get all the bottles down on the table safely and cuffed them away. We could just hear the laughter then, drifting across the heat haze.

We stood there, in the cover of the trees, watching for a few minutes in silence. Then Rachel took the glasses.

‘Well, there’s no sign of Lindsay,’ she said with relief. ‘You must be out of your mind,’ she went on, gazing intently. ‘That fat old woman is nothing like Susan.’

‘No,’ I had to agree. ‘Perhaps she’s just the babushka. Or a wet-nurse. You see the Moses basket?’

‘This isn’t feudal Russia. She’s the Mamma. And she isn’t like Aunt Susan.’ She handed the glasses back.

A much older man came out onto the terrace just then and seemed to confirm Rachel’s point about the big woman, for he put his arm about her and squeezed her in a familiar way. I had a close look at him: it must have been Dr Radja — small, sixtyish, some thin grey hair, well preserved in a pair of old shorts and a string shirt. Was his hair parted in the middle — as Zlatko’s had been? I looked carefully; it wasn’t — but simply because he had so little hair. It could have been, years before. And the face? Was it impish? Yes, that was more possible, I thought. His eyes were close together, at least.

‘Come on, let’s go back,’ Rachel said. ‘Lindsay’s not there. And it’s not Eleanor. Or Zlatko. And we can’t just push in on them in the middle of their lunch. It’s rude. Come on — let’s leave them in peace.’

‘Wait,’ I said. The older man had picked up a jar from the table, while the younger one started to carve the ham — a yellow jar; a jar of Colman’s English mustard I saw quite clearly when I focused carefully on the bright yellow label.

‘Rubbish!’ Rachel said. ‘They sell that all over the world now.’ But already I was out from the cover of the trees and into the light, starting to walk across the meadow. I’d had enough prevarications, a month of violent mystery and indecision. It was now or never.

They must have seen us as we walked across the open field. But they showed no sign of it until we were almost upon them, moving up a path into the centre of the little clearing in the trees. They were all seated round a long table, heavily laden with inviting salads and cold meats — and I saw now that there was a barbecue going to one side of the wooden terrace for a later course, with steaks on it. The table was littered with bottles: wine and Coke and mineral water. It was quite a feast — a family gathering of great intimacy and happiness.

I suddenly felt horrified at my interruption — a lout broaching this familial ease, a harbinger of pain. But I was in the lead. It was my show after all. I felt like an actor then, sagging at the knees with nerves, at the moment of curtain-up, about to embark on a part probably far too big for him.

‘Excuse me,’ I said weakly. They stopped eating — just a blur of faces on the shaded terrace, gazing at me like an expectant audience. ‘Yes, I’m sorry …’ I went on. Then I dried.

‘Are you — lost your way?’ the older white-haired man enquired politely in good, slightly accented English, a glass of deep purple wine in his hand.

‘Dr Radja?’

‘Yes. Can I help?’ Rachel and Madeleine were standing behind me and I couldn’t see them. But I could see the large woman clearly now sitting at the end of the table, presiding over the spread like an Earth Mother. She was looking intently over my shoulder: at Madeleine, I thought.

‘Can we help? Are you lost?’ the old man spoke again.

A waft of blue smoke from the charcoal grill drifted over the table, a fine smell of singed garlic burning with the meat. The two pretty younger women tended to the boys’ lunch in hushed voices — a fair-haired woman in a print blouse, her hair up in a bun; and a much darker one with a thin, incisive intelligent face in the bikini. The baby in the Moses basket was still asleep. I turned to Rachel and Madeleine.

‘This is Madeleine and Rachel Phillips,’ I said in clear tones, like a toast master. ‘From Glenalyth, in Scotland.’ I looked carefully at the big woman as I spoke. And I was almost certain I’d hit home then, for the lady shuddered a fraction — just for an instant, involuntarily, as if caught in a cold draught.

‘Yes?’ the old man asked. ‘So what should we …? I don’t understand.’ But I think he did understand. For he’d suddenly stood up — and he was leaning across the table towards us now, tense, annoyed. He spoke in Serbo-Croat to the old lady.

‘Eleanor? Zlatko?’ I asked before they’d finished talking together. But they heard me well enough. And there was silence then. Absolute silence. Only the meat crackled and spat in the background. The two boys looked round at everyone enquiringly and the younger man in bathing trunks sat quite still, his hands laid out in front like an animal about to spring.

But it was the old man who moved suddenly, the chair grating on the wood, turning back quickly into the lodge.

‘No! Don’t do that,’ the woman called after him in English. ‘It’s too late.’ Then she turned to me. ‘You have come at an awkward time.’ She spoke very pleasantly, like a fine hostess from the shires, the English pure as glass even after so many years exile, with just a hint of Scots in it. ‘It’s my daughter Stanka’s birthday you see.’ She leant back in her chair now and took the kerchief from her head — relaxing, twisting her neck about so that her still dark hair dropped round her shoulders. And now she looked quite a different woman suddenly — younger, the face much more finely cut, something chiselled about it now as it became defined by the frame of hair; no longer the babushka — apart from the body beneath which had swelled out over the years on too much good ham and pork sausage.

‘So,’ she went on. ‘You see: you must sit down and not disturb things for the moment. The others don’t speak much English — we will say you are old friends. From London. Sit down and enjoy yourself. You must be tired? You’ve walked all the way from the hotel. No?’

‘Yes,’ I said. The old man had come back now and I had my eye on him. I don’t know what he’d gone away for — a gun, I supposed. But the woman spoke to him in English then. ‘These are our old friends — you remember? The Phillips. They will join us. We will talk later.’ The man seemed to accept this meekly.

She addressed the rest of the family then, in her own tongue, and happy introductions were made all round — to the two boys, the woman in the print blouse and her nervous husband — and to Stanka, bronzed and match-like in her bikini, with fine almond-shaped eyes, whose birthday it was.

Drinks were offered liberally then and I needed it — the full dark red wine in a chunky glass — for it was an eerie situation, sharing this warm birthday feast with the family, pretending to be old friends for the sake of decorum, but with all the huge questions now hanging impatiently in the air about us. And though the family were friendly, asking polite questions in halting English, they were none of them fools and everyone sensed the strange pressures, keeping so many lids on that it couldn’t last.

And it didn’t — and I suppose the fine local wine loosened tongues, without food which we barely picked at, so that at the end of the meal, when the boys had gone to play with their father, the mother had left to tend her baby, and Stanka had gone inside, the five of us remaining sat back and started to talk.

9

It was the big generous-looking woman at the end of the table who took charge — offering us a cherry liqueur with our coffee, smiling at us all, particularly at Madeleine who sat now immediately across the table from her.

‘Mrs Phillips.’ She raised her glass. ‘In a situation like this you either laugh or cry, don’t you think? Forgive me —’ She smiled broadly, ‘I think it better to laugh.’

Madeleine didn’t entirely respond to this toast, though she tried. ‘So you are Eleanor?’ she asked, but not incredulously; more a polite enquiry, confirming an expected thing.

‘I am Eleanor — and this is Zlatko. You are right.’ She waved a hand over towards the old man. ‘My husband.’ He was sitting rather hunched up, his eyes lowered over his coffee, saying nothing. He seemed, for the moment, to be entirely in the thrall of his wife. But I didn’t trust him. I was sure he’d gone back into the lodge for a gun — or a knife.

‘You have been very clever finding us,’ Eleanor went on. ‘After all these years. Why did you bother?’ Her voice fell. ‘We have been very happy.’ She looked around at the terrace, at the afternoon sun filtering through the trees beyond, where the boys were throwing a frisbee with their father. The charcoal embers smoked very slightly. There was a sense of peace, for the moment, far more powerful than the air of strife we had brought with us.

‘I’m sorry — we were looking for Lindsay,’ Madeleine said. ‘He’s disappeared. Three months ago.’ Madeleine’s eyes were glassy with trapped emotion. She was not so calm at heart. ‘We thought — he might be here.’ She looked round vacantly at the heavy canopy of trees.

‘Disappeared? Like me.’ Eleanor shook her head good-naturedly, like a nanny sharing notes over a recalcitrant charge. ‘There’s only us, I’m afraid. He’s not come here. I’d be the last person he’d want to see in any case. But how did you find us?’

‘A grave,’ I said. ‘We found an empty grave up at Mirogoj.’

‘I told you, Zlatko.’ She looked over at the little man reproachfully. ‘So the police must know too.’ And she looked around again, peering through the beech trees towards the thick ring of fir beyond. ‘They’re not here alone,’ she went on.

‘No,’ I said. ‘We are not alone. The police — they know too. At least, about the empty grave.’

‘Why on earth did you do that?’ Rachel spoke suddenly, with childish exaggeration, looking at Eleanor in amazement.

Eleanor turned to her slowly. ‘You are Lindsay’s good daughter. I can see it, so well. Do you really want to know?’

Rachel didn’t reply. It seemed, indeed, from her tense face, that she’d been struck dumb.

‘You were dead — under the tram opposite the Palace Hotel,’ I said, breaking the silence.

‘Ah, yes. That too.’

‘And a memorial — a window in the church outside Dunkeld.’

‘Is there?’ Eleanor asked lightly. ‘That would be Susan, wouldn’t it? She was very formal, of course. Little memorials — very much her. She was like that.’

‘She still is. She’s still alive, you know,’ I said.

‘I didn’t. You see I — Zlatko and I — have had no connection, obviously.’

‘But how could you have cut yourself off like this — from all your own family, for forty years. With such — such …’ Madeleine searched for a word. ‘Telling such fibs,’ she finally said, the nursery word starkly inappropriate.

The table indeed had become like some nightmare version of the Mad Hatter’s tea party, in which there were so many crossed wires, and so much time now all to be re-accounted for that it was difficult to know where to begin on this necessary rearrangement of old life and memory. It was as if the natural order of the world had been entirely contradicted — and we had come to a secret place in the woods where the dead lived again and all temporal order was completely confounded.

Eleanor sipped her coffee. She seemed completely at ease in her re-incarnation for all of us. Indeed, she seemed to find it rather an original joke, a touch of mischief in her eyes, I thought — and I could see the prankster in her then, the funny vital woman she must have been years before, embarrassing her hosts in Vienna — the darling girl of the diplomatic circle in that city before the war, pretending to be a Von Karlinberg. But why the ruse of the empty grave? That seemed just beyond a joke.

‘Cut myself off?’ she said brightly. ‘Yes, I did. I couldn’t stand the family pretence any more: the Phillips family and mine. Lindsay and Susan. The social pretence — and the worse lies behind that.’ She looked round at us efficiently. ‘The thirties at home weren’t just a political cheat, you know — MacDonald and Chamberlain pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes. It was a family betrayal first of all — and families like ours particularly: such a lot of self-righteous, comfy, Christian do-gooders — pretending they didn’t know what was happening, keeping out of things, ‘It’s not our affair” — what frauds they were! Yet they were the one sort of people — rich, influential — who could have helped.’

Eleanor became vehement now, but in a perfectly controlled manner. She wasn’t acting anything, merely intent on offering us, as clearly as she could, a whole part of her old life, a memorial revisited.

‘You see, at heart they knew, these families — knew political right from wrong. Yet they didn’t just let Chamberlain and all the other wishy-washy cowards take over — they actually encouraged them! Yes, I cut myself off — though in a way I had no choice: Lindsay wanted rid of me, for other reasons.’

‘We met an old friend of Lindsay’s in Brussels,’ I said, ‘Ivo Kovačič: he thought Lindsay had pushed you under that tram —’

‘Oh, Ivo …’ Eleanor beamed. ‘He was always so strong and forthright. He’s still alive? I’m glad. But he had no head for subtleties. He was gullible.’

‘Everyone seems to have been pretty gullible — except you and Zlatko. And Lindsay, I suppose. It seems a funny trick,’ I said. ‘Oh, and Willis Parker,’ I added suddenly remembering the little diplomat. ‘He knew about it all, as well. He must have done — which is why they got rid of him.’

‘Willis?’ Eleanor said, with alarm. ‘They killed him?’

‘Yes. And they tried to do the same for me several times, too — anyone who was likely to know. We were dangerous. But why? What was so vital that we might have found out about Lindsay?’

‘What I found out — here in Zagreb forty years ago, in the spring of 1937.’

‘That Lindsay was a double agent — really working for Moscow?’

‘That he wasn’t,’ Eleanor said triumphantly. Her husband interrupted her now — talking bitterly, excitedly in Serbo-Croat — seeming to condemn her. But she took little notice of him, saying in English, ‘They know, Zlatko! They know about us already. The Milicija are somewhere out there — in the trees, watching us now probably. They’d never have allowed the Phillipses to come here on their own. So what’s the point?’ She turned to Madeleine then. ‘And in any case I’m so tired of lies, you see? It’s nearly fifty years now — my lies. And Lindsay’s. While there’s time,’ she glanced out again into the trees. ‘You ought to know now. No one else will ever tell you —’

‘It’s not your business,’ Zlatko interrupted angrily.

‘Whose then?’ she said equally sharply. ‘My life is my business — and years of it was with Lindsay. And it was he, after all, who originally encouraged me — before you came. It was Lindsay who first persuaded me: about Moscow, all that world — before I found out about him.’

‘Found out what?’ I asked. There was silence again in the clearing. The boys had gone down to the lake again and the two women were somewhere in the sun, sitting on the other side of the lodge. ‘Found out that he wasn’t with Moscow?’

‘No. Lindsay was something much more dangerous from their point of view. Like our old friend Philby — there were very few of them — he’d been specially created by the British — a long time before, at Oxford — as a Trojan horse: to pretend he was a communist — which he did very well, so well that while I was up at College with him, he persuaded me to take on the same cause. And of course, just as the British intended, he was duly spotted and recruited by the Soviets — by that Professor friend of his in London. They told him to give himself suitable right-wing cover, while he served his apprenticeship with them. And he did that very well, too: the Foreign Office took him on at once — though God knows I didn’t understand why he changed his views at the time. It was the start of our rows. The fact is — I think Lindsay was totally loyal to his British masters from the very start — or at least to the very few people in British Intelligence who knew he was this Trojan horse.’

The picture at last began to make sense. Of course, I thought, John Wellcome had been the initial recruiter on the British side, at Merton and in his father’s little cottage at Bow Brickhill with the model railways — and it had been David Marcus, latterly, who probably alone, with Wellcome and Willis Parker, knew of Lindsay’s real stance and had thus been so determined to preserve the secret: Lindsay, whom the KGB had thought to be their most reliable man, at the heart of British Intelligence, had in fact been nothing of the sort: it was the KGB he must have so thoroughly betrayed over the years — a worm near the centre of their apparatus. Or had he fooled them? There was a flaw in this — for of course one other person had apparently known of the ploy: Eleanor herself.

‘But you — you knew this too?’ I asked her.

‘Yes. I came to suspect it. Then I knew it. You see, we were both with Moscow by then — after we were married. And there were things he wouldn’t tell them — political matters in the Embassy in Vienna, and here at the consulate in Zagreb. I knew it in the end — you do when you are close, that close, as I was — to someone. Which is why he tried to kill me. And of course he thought he had killed me: Ivo was right. He did push me under that tram. But I survived. An injury, that’s all — but it was a very dead-looking body in the nursing home apparently.’ She smiled, looking over at Zlatko. ‘My friends — we managed to fake it all very well, didn’t we?’

‘You must not say such things,’ he said curtly.

‘Yes, yes — I must.’

I looked at Zlatko. ‘Your brother Josip — of course, he must have helped arrange all that, with his shiny coffins. The police are holding him in Zagreb now.’

‘You see?’ Eleanor turned to her husband. ‘I told you. It’s all too late. They’ve even got Josip.’

‘And another man — who really is dead. Someone called Pottinger, who is certainly with the KGB. So you must all be associated with Moscow — you and Zlatko and Josip. You’ve been together — for years.’

Eleanor looked at me confidently. ‘Can they prove it?’

‘I don’t know. But you’ve told us.’

‘Since it’s a family matter as well — all this — I wanted you to know the truth, that’s all. Wasn’t that why you came here? — before the police: to find out the real truth?’

‘Yes, I — we wanted —’ I looked at Rachel and Madeleine for help. But both of them seemed frozen in the heat — Rachel staring intently at Eleanor with her arms wrapped across her tightly — each of them right round her ribs, like the sleeves of a straitjacket.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We wanted to talk to you first.’

‘About Lindsay and me?’ I nodded. ‘Well, he’s not here. As I said, I’m the last person he’d want to see, I think. You see — on a purely personal level, we rather fell out.’

She looked at us all inquisitively — staring, as it were, into a huge silence. ‘Forgive me,’ she went on in a lower but still decisive voice. ‘I can see you don’t know — Susan never told you. But now that you’ve found me, there’s really no point in lying any more. Patrick wasn’t my child. He was Susan’s, with Lindsay. How is he? Where is he?’

Madeleine’s face had become quite expressionless. She sat there in the hot silence — without stirring, eyes wide open, unblinking, like a woman about to sleep-walk. Rachel appeared to take no notice of this news whatsoever, looking with boredom out into the woods. But I felt it was the assumed uninterest of a clever child or someone deranged — plotting mischief or revenge.

‘Patrick died,’ I said, breaking the silence. ‘Just after the war. An illness.’

Eleanor was genuinely moved. ‘Oh — I am so sorry.’

‘I find all this an unlikely story,’ Madeleine spoke calmly.

‘Why should I lie?’ Eleanor asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I butted in. ‘But on the other hand why have you told us all this about you and Lindsay in any case, throwing over a lifetime’s commitment? That doesn’t make much sense. You could go back to Moscow. A dacha in the Moscow woods.’

‘It’s too late and I’m too old. This is my world. Here. My home is here. And my family. I’m too old. I’ve done my stuff.’

‘But Lindsay? From what you say he never managed to do his stuff at all, did he? Though he must have thought he had — believing you were dead. But you weren’t — and you told Mos cow about him, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Eleanor admitted, looking unhappy for the first time. ‘I had to. They neutralised him, carried him. At least I assume they did.’

‘So Moscow fed him a lot of nonsense for more than forty years. What a waste of a life — trotting between the KGB and SIS all those years with equally useless information.’

It was sad to think of abilities so stupidly wasted: almost a lifetime down the drain. Yet I wasn’t really surprised; the whole business, I’d known for years, was a mug’s game from start to finish. I suppose I was surprised, simply, by someone of Lindsay’s calibre involved in such a charade — a nonsense that wouldn’t have mattered if he’d been a stranger. But he wasn’t. He was someone I’d known very well — a sane, reasonable, loyal man, as I’d kept telling myself. And yet now, I saw, it was exactly these qualities which were in question, for what sane, loyal person could have behaved in this way — putting away his wife, with a child by another woman, her sister? Here was madness, not sanity — the acts of someone else altogether.

‘So now you know,’ Eleanor said, a note of tiredness in her voice, as she fanned herself with a napkin in the drowsy afternoon heat. But we were all still awake. ‘You know now — and they are out there, I suppose, waiting for us.’ She turned and looked at me.

‘The trouble is,’ I said, ‘I feel I don’t know. It all sounds so unlike the man I knew.’

‘Who knows — the person we know? Not even that person himself. And he’s someone different for each of us. That’s not strange. Lindsay — he was a lot of other men, even for me, who lived with him. So how do you expect to “know” him?’ She leant towards me intently, as if with some vital secret. ‘But you mustn’t think it was all a betrayal. Only at the end. There were lots of other times.’

‘Yes, I know. I found your book — your “Comrade’s Diary” by Maria Von Karlinberg. “The snow wedding” … Before Christmas that year, at Dunkeld, when the champagne was too cold. I spoke to your sister.’

Eleanor nodded her head as I spoke, agreeing with me happily, wordlessly. ‘But of course! You’ve seen already. So you mustn’t take away the impression of lost lives entirely. We had two lives — and one of them was marvellous, as fine as you could wish for. But I couldn’t compromise, settle for less. While Lindsay so doubted himself at heart. He always did — telling little lies about things. And about the big things — like Patrick. A wonderful man — but something of the coward there, too — like so many wonderful men.’

Eleanor could see now the numbing effects her words were having on the two women: this old storyteller, a myth herself describing another myth, deep in the woods, holding us all in thrall, giving us the true version, it seemed, of a man we had all of us entirely misunderstood.

‘You’re a lying, malicious old woman,’ Rachel said suddenly in a high voice, still with her arms tightly wrapped about her, like the precocious child again, at the foot of a soothsayer, intent on exposing the fairy tale.

Eleanor looked at her kindly. ‘We shouldn’t deny the truth, you know — it’s the one thing that can’t finally hurt us.’

As Eleanor spoke there was a strange, faint thundering in the distance, the noise approaching from somewhere deep in the woods beyond the lodge. I thought the weather was changing again. But the afternoon out on the meadow was still brilliantly fine.

‘It’s only the train,’ Eleanor explained. ‘The limestone waggons. There’s a small railway down there — taking the stone out from the hill beyond the lake.’ The invisible waggons rumbled away from us then, a faint threat in the air. We were not so far away from real life after all.

‘You talk of the truth,’ I said, trying to take the two women’s part. ‘That it won’t hurt us. Yet you’ve gone to such lengths in you life to hide it: working for Moscow — and the elaborate ploy of that diary you wrote, in German, under an assumed name. It seems a lot of lies, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes — which is why I tell you all this: it can’t “finally” hurt us, I said. I think I’ve lied for too long —’

‘A convenient confession — before execution?’

‘No — I don’t expect necessarily to avoid the consequences of what I’ve told you. I meant — that the truth is worth having anyway. Better late than never.’

‘You know,’ I said, ‘I can’t really see you as a communist — least of all as a communist agent. You’ve got too much fun in you — and sense. I wonder if you’re lying — even about that.’

I had this image of double creativity about Eleanor: of a woman partly of such broad sense among earthly things — fine hams, bronzed salamis and chunky glasses of purple wine: and yet someone of crystal-sharp vitality in the mind as well — of literary conceits, a sweet imagination. And none of these happy gifts sat easily — they didn’t sit at all — with the criminal bureaucracies of Moscow.

‘No, it’s the truth,’ she said. ‘Or it was. It’s not any more — which is another reason for my telling you all this. It’s an old bible now.’

‘But how was it ever fresh for you? The horror was there almost from the start — Stalin, long before Hungary and Czechoslovakia?’

‘Almost? You weren’t there in the thirties. It was all very fresh for me. So fresh — even the memory makes it so, all over again.’

‘What? All that privileged socialism? Earnest, pimply youths in sandals, running through Daddy’s money in East-End soup kitchens for a month or two — before they became Lloyds underwriters and said what a fine chap Chamberlain was? You said that’s what happened yourself.’

She smiled. ‘There were others — lots of them. Who weren’t like that, who didn’t change. If you’d been in Vienna in 1934, it would have marked you for ever. Not in Hampstead running through Daddy’s money. But in Floridsdorf or Ottakring — you’d never have forgotten.’

I could see the faith renewed in her eyes then — the dream of all the fair people in the thirties. Eleanor ceased to be myth then, and I saw the white puffs of smoke from so many righteous guns of the times going off again in her mind: the workers behind the barricades at Floridsdorf, or in the Plaza Mayor in Madrid — or storming Franco’s garrison on the heights of Teruel: the whole dirty decade made bright again for a moment in the old woman’s vision.

‘And now?’ I said, cruelly perhaps. ‘You’re just one more person who’s seen the dreams go sour: a liberal without a belief in progress — common as clay. We have to do better than that, don’t we? Even if it’s nice to know the “truth” in the end Maybe it’d have been better if we stuck with Lindsay’s world — cultivating his own garden, even if it was five thousand acres. The traditional virtues — a little grouse-shooting, apples for the tenants at Halloween, and God always very much at home on Sundays.’

Eleanor had leant forward as I spoke and now she was intent once more, over some vital matter, on her way with another truth which we could never have guessed. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘the strange thing is — I often wondered if Lindsay really believed in all those Tory virtues at all. There were so many times — when I lived with him — when I was sure, so sure, that at heart he really believed in everything I did.’

‘Of course, being a Trojan horse, it wouldn’t have been very difficult — would it? — to pretend he believed in the workers and so on.’

‘No, I don’t mean that. He really did believe …’ She shook her head in the certainty of memory. ‘I could feel it. He was like me — but really more so. In Vienna then, in ’34 — especially then. It marked him too. He believed entirely. And I suspect he never entirely lost the faith either.’

‘He served his two masters, you mean — both genuinely?’

‘Yes — I think he did. I think he must have done.’

Here was a glimpse of the sensitive, civilised, so fair-minded Lindsay that I remembered. In what Eleanor had just said I saw him again in that way: as a man of real justice deep down, involved in some agonised search for the truth. And yet, if the other things she’d said about him were only half true, there must have been another quality in him, at a deeper level still — some horrific flaw, which had betrayed his good sense and with which he had so betrayed others. Eleanor had spoken of his true feelings just then, of his life at ‘heart’. Yet for all her insight this heart of his remained as ambiguous as ever — at least for me, if not for Rachel, who came to bitter life then.

‘Now I’ve come all this way,’ she said, loosening her arms at last, relaxing like a defence counsel about to make a killing, ‘and I’ve listened to you, Eleanor — and it’s all so stupid.’ She shook her head derisively, gazing down her long straight nose with patrician disdain — as she’d looked at me in the old days, before our collapse in Notting Hill: a dismissive glance of ageless, inherited power — a look which attracted and repelled in equal measure, beauty in a heartless beast. ‘So stupid,’ she went on. ‘Talking about Lindsay’s politics — and his family’s, and all the dirty deeds of the thirties. What does that matter?’ she nearly shouted. ‘Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. I know him now, a person — not part of any manifesto or crusade or stupid theory about the rights of man. Someone who was such fun —’

‘I knew him that way too, Rachel. We had an old blow-telephone in our house in Zagreb, from the bedroom to the kitchen. We sang arias up and down it all one evening.’

Eleanor left this one incident from the past — which so well summed up their lives together, in pre-war Vienna and Zagreb, with all its youth and dazzle — she left it hanging on the air, like a few chords in music so richly evocative that they bring the whole symphony to mind without another note being struck.

This remark hit home, I think. But Rachel only swayed her head again — slowly, dismissively, a canny puritan critic who would not join the dance.

‘I don’t believe you,’ she said. ‘You had a few years with him. I’ve had nearly forty —’

‘The length of time doesn’t matter — if it did, everyone would love Christ by now. A day or a year can give you someone equally well. It’s just that you and I have different Lindsays, that’s all.’

Rachel leant forward intently, just as Eleanor had done. ‘Exactly — but your Lindsay is always in shadow. And Peter’s too.’ She turned to me. ‘I see him quite clearly, in the light. And there’s no need to doubt what I see. None at all. But you — you two — for the sake of your wretched political dreams and failures, you’ve tried to blame Lindsay, and fit him into your failure, into your whole shoddy scheme of things: about his being a double agent and all that nonsense — and having a child wth Susan and trying to kill you. But all that is just your hurt, Eleanor. Don’t you see? Because he didn’t get on with you — or something.’ She glared at both of us, uncertain for a second. ‘You two can’t see goodness when it stares you in the face — nor ordinary tact nor decency. You see only corruption — because you are corrupt. You look for deceit in Lindsay, when it’s your deceit. And you pass on the evil, people like you — like an illness. Soiling your own nest, you have to soil others’, too. You carry the plague, not Lindsay.’

‘My dear, I haven’t questioned your love for your father. Why do you try to rub out mine for him — once?’

Rachel was bright-eyed with dismissive woe and bruised faith — a grief-laden child without her father, dumbly snuffling late at night, long after he should have come upstairs and kissed her to sleep. She was living through the hour of the wolf now, where there is nothing and no one, rustling about desperately for something living to touch. And I thought she’d found it when she seemed to relax and said lightly. ‘We had music too, you know — he and I, ever since I can remember. Nursery rhymes and Scots ballads round the piano at Glenalyth — romantic nonsense about the Bonny Prince and the Road to the Isles. And polkas round the dining-room table on New Year’s Eve — and flute cadenzas in London later on. Even a barrel organ once, you won’t believe it, that I turned in the square — quite frosty one evening just after the war, going tinkety-tonk. That sudden frost in a city, after it’s been warm, in autumn,’ she went on in a chatty way. ‘You know — when you hear the clap of people’s boots a long way away, echoing clearly in the dark.’

She looked up at us serenely. But she was lost to us. ‘You see, there was nothing I didn’t have with him — nothing.’

And it seemed a truth. They may not have believed it — but I did. Rachel saw her father again with that perfect recall which she possessed — as when she remembered, a few weeks before, seeing him from the top of the copper beech at Glenalyth as a child — going down to the boat on the loch, to join Susan. But now they were purely happy incidents of her life with him which she rescued from time, stepping into once more, completely inhabiting an old holiday photograph — kissing to life all the marvellous things of the day.

Rachel — possessed by her magic again, by a knack of mind, or a need so inspired, that with it, as in her music, she could reclaim vast landscapes of perfection, offering a world re-achieved — the dross turned to gold, where all misdemeanour and even tragedy are shut out.

‘You see, there was absolutely nothing — nothing I can’t remember. I had everything …’

She had gone back onto one of her many pedestals now — where she would not be reached any longer, living in some hermetic place, that playground where for years, with her father, she had happily committed herself to a lifetime growing up. Her brief hurdle at maturity — where there are lies to overcome and other people’s inexplicable betrayals — this had failed. And she was bright now — certainly she was bright now — but in a way I could never share.

It all happened very quickly then. Though I should have foreseen it — and would have done, I think, but for my concern with Rachel’s terrifying isolation. She’d left the table and gone inside the lodge; Madeleine had followed her, as a comfort. The three of us were left then at the table. The afternoon had begun to die a bit, the sun slanting on the waves of grass in the meadow in front of us. A minute breeze heralded the evening.

‘I’m sorry — about everything,’ I said rather limply to Eleanor, limply because I couldn’t see that anything that had happened was exactly my fault. But there was a need then, after the storms of revelation, for some polite inconsequential chatter. She didn’t oblige me, however.

‘Sorry? Perhaps it’s us. We should never have started it all. But then you don’t start a belief, do you? You catch it. That’s the infection Rachel talked of — not corruption, just the opposite: the blinding light department. We were all struck by it then, in the thirties. I was dazzled longer than most. I still am, in many ways. Though not Moscow’s way.’

She sat back in her high wooden chair then, kneading the two arm-rests gently with her fingers, looking at me candidly. ‘Of course, we never expected to be found. It’s your fault there — from what I can gather — pursuing us so.’

‘We were looking for Lindsay; not you.’

She smiled weakly. ‘Indeed — and after all this,’ she gestured round at the lodge, the meadow and the woods as things already lost to her, ‘you seem as far away from him as ever. The body, I mean.’

It was a point I hadn’t considered until she mentioned it — and it was thinking of it that took my mind off events about me. I never noticed Zlatko leave the table. And when I saw him again it was too late: he was in the doorway of the lodge, holding Rachel, dazed and uncomplaining, round the neck with one hand, the other with a gun or a knife at her back. He was barely taller than her in his short pants and string shirt, and the two of them looked ridiculous, standing there for a moment, frozen in this act of violence. They were like children, undecided about some mischief.

‘Don’t be silly, Zlatko. Let her go.’ Eleanor spoke so casually, yet authoritatively, that I really believed it was a game then. But Zlatko didn’t reply — and he didn’t let her go. He shuffled away like a crab, holding Rachel in front of him, sideways down the back of the covered terrace, towards a small stone balustrade at the end where the barbecue was.

‘It’s so well — that you all talk the truth,’ he said as he went, glancing at us waspishly, an angry imp of a man again, peeping over Rachel’s shoulder. ‘But you have forgotten me, Eleanor.’

I saw he had a gun in Rachel’s back then. ‘I still have commitments, you know — matters to keep silent about.’

He clambered over the barbecue pit then, manhandling Rachel with him. And I don’t know — perhaps she thought he was going to roast her alive — but at any rate she started to resist and shout just then and a moment afterwards the fools started shooting from the woods to the front of the lodge — Stolačka’s men, some trigger-happy sniper, seeing Zlatko over the balustrade and out in the open now, and believing he could get him in one.

But he failed — and Zlatko managed to wrench Rachel away with him, using her as a shield, pulling her across the twenty yards of open space before the thick wood and undergrowth to the side of the lodge gobbled them up.

The trees in front of us, and the long grass in the meadow beyond, burst with their hidden store of soldiers then — bounding towards us, yelping with enthusiasm as they came, Stolačka in the vanguard, his Windsor check replaced now by a sort of floppy, ill-fitting commando’s outfit.

‘You have your little gun!’ he shouted when he got to me. ‘Why did you not use it?’ He was extremely excited, flourishing a heavy automatic like an officer leading his men over the top. It struck me that being in charge of these quite unaccustomed military manoeuvres had gone to his head. In fact, it was soon obvious that he and his platoon of dressed-up urban secret policemen had little or no experience of these jungle search-and-destroy operations — for they thrashed madly about in the bushes all round the lodge for a minute or two, going in opposite directions, before I was able to persuade them of the right path. As a result Zlatko got a good head start on us, which he should never have had at all.

He’d gone into thick scrub to the side of the lodge and a tight fir plantation beyond that, an area of land that sloped down gently between long rows of trees, but with hillocks rising up here and there, so that it was impossible to get a clear line of vision for more than 20 or 30 yards ahead.

And Zlatko obviously knew his way round this land — which we didn’t — a fact made very apparent by the nervousness of Stolačka’s storm-troops in this leafy wilderness, where the sun filtered through the layers of green and played strange tricks with the light, so that the men jumped at emerald shadows, stumbled into drains and generally behaved like city folk stampeding from a flash flood. One of them even managed to empty his machine pistol at a pheasant, jumping suddenly to our left. Thus our general progress was slow. And soon Stolacka and I, unencumbered and perhaps more adroit on our feet, found ourselves dangerously ahead of the gun-toting heavy infantry behind us.

But then the land fell away sharply and we found ourselves on a steep slope — and as the plantation thinned out I heard the rumbling in the distance of a train. A deep cutting opened up immediately below us, a few hundred yards away, and we saw the quarry railway line then at the bottom of it, a broad-guage single track running straight in this section, with a train half-way along — a great diesel shunter ploughing heavily through it, with a snake of high-sided waggons behind. And there, running beside it half-way along, was Zlatko, a tiny figure trying to grasp the sides of one of the waggons.

We were on our backsides suddenly, as the land slid away beneath us at 45 degrees — slithering down the hill through brambles and prickly gorse and little outcrops of stone, Stolacka yelling at the engine driver as he went. But the man couldn’t hear us.

Zlatko was still running along the rough track beside the rails when I last saw him, before a boulder caught me, twisting me over, so that I lost sight of him for several moments. And when I had my wits about me again, he was gone — and the train had passed, the last waggon disappearing into another turn in the cutting.

It wasn’t until we were standing on the track itself, and looked down a small incline the other side, that we saw Zlatko — or several parts of him. The heavy wagon wheels had cut him up like a twig.

‘Rachel?’ I shouted, looking wildly around. But she was nowhere. The train rumbled away in the distance and the slanting sun glinted on the high white escarpment ahead of us, at the end of the cutting — and Stolačka’s men joined us, slinging their machine pistols, well pleased.

‘Where is she?’ I said violently.

Stolačka rubbed his chin doubtfully, speaking to his men. He shook his head. ‘Well, we came through the wood between the lodge and here very carefully,’ he said. ‘All the same, perhaps when he let her go she went back to the lodge. If not — well, she could not have gone up there.’ He looked across, up at the almost sheer rise on the other side of the cutting. ‘She must have gone that way — towards the quarries.’

I ran along the track through the cutting then, as fast as breath would take me, Stolačka behind — only to be faced with a tunnel round the next bend. ‘No!’ he shouted. ‘No — up! Up there!’ And we climbed then, round the tunnel opening, up a path over the rock face, and a few minutes later we were standing on top of the hill looking over an utterly changed landscape.

The woods had all gone, eaten away by the great white gash in the earth, a mile or more square, bounded all round on one side by a huge cliff of limestone on which we stood, with old workings and flooded quarries some hundreds of feet immediately beneath us. A mile away, in the distance, were the newer cuttings, a jumble of cranes, great tongs and scoops and mechanical diggers all grinding away with a faint roar, the air about them dust-white.

But where we were, high up on the rim of land, the air was pure and cool and there was silence — a pleasant silence, where you could hear birds about again after the heat of the day.

‘Beyond here she could not have gone,’ Stolačka said. ‘So — she must have gone back to the lodge.’ But both of us looked down at the watery pits beneath us, without saying anything. The sun slanted over the huge valley from the west, piercing a few thin clouds on the horizon like beams of the apocalypse, a fiery orange ball which turned the whole harsh place beneath us into sheets of blazing communion-white.

‘Rachel?’ I called, looking round me. But there was nowhere she could have hidden. I came to the rim of the crater again. ‘Goddam you — what have you done now,’ I said under my breath, my stomach falling about inside me. ‘Maybe she went along the cutting the other way,’ I said. ‘Or into the tunnel.’

‘I hope not — for the train was coming in that direction. She is sure to be back at the lodge.’ Stolačka put his arm on my shoulder. ‘Come.’

But Rachel was nowhere about the lodge when we returned, or further back along the track, or in the tunnel when they went through it later — or in the woods, which half a local army brigade dragged through high and low for a week afterwards. She’d disappeared just as Lindsay had, in the midst of life, another great hand that had come out of the sky and scooped her up. And they couldn’t find her in the watery quarry pits either, with frogmen and all sorts of elaborate mechanical drags. But there were so many old pits and nooks and crevices which she might have fallen into. There wasn’t a lot of hope that way. Many others, we learnt during the week we stayed on at the tourist lodge, had disappeared before into this quarry without trace. It had been one of several convenient mass graveyards at the end of the war — thousands in Pavelič’s Croatian army had been consigned by the partisans — the men, like Ivo Kovačič and his family that the British had sent back from Bleiburg a hundred miles or so to the north-west: the British, of course, so ably staffed there by officers like Lindsay, packing them back into the cattle-waggons, across the border to their execution.

It was all the saddest, dirtiest business — that week and these memories. Eleanor was taken away, of course — though her children and grandchildren were spared. And my God, George’s sudden arrival didn’t help — George Willoughby-Hughes who tracked Madeleine and me down to the Palace Hotel in Zagreb when we got back there. Marcus had had to release him in London and he’d managed to contact Klaus who had told him where we all were. He stood in the lobby of the hotel, sweating horribly in his old linen tropicals, and made a scene — British officials from the consulate and the embassy in Belgrade all round us, shouting fearful old-fashioned abuse at me: ‘You … louse!’ and such-like, mad with grief, his huge body twitching round on his little feet, like a monstrous clockwork toy — a masterwork of mourning now. As though he’d been the only one to love Rachel, I thought.

He left straight away, up to Trakǒsćan, to continue the search for Rachel himself. But even George’s great skill — in which, like a water diviner, he had so often before successfully unearthed his love — would meet with no reward this time, I thought.

After a few days I took Madeleine home to Glenalyth.