The Moscow Sleepers

32

Liz had been more spooked than she liked to admit by her visit to the school – the pathetic Miss Girling clinging to the glories of the past in the face of change, the strange headmaster, the camera hidden in the bookshelves, but above all Cicero, the headmaster’s assistant, who she thought had followed her car as she drove away. She had been a lot more observant since then of the people and cars around her but so far she had detected nothing to indicate that anyone was taking a particular interest in her.

She hadn’t told anyone she was feeling uneasy – nervous was too strong a word for it – nor had she said she thought she might have been followed. Of course, in her account of her visit to the school she had mentioned the hidden camera but her colleagues didn’t find it particularly worrying that the school now had a photograph of her. Her cover as a prospective parent had been good and there was no reason to think that it hadn’t been taken at face value. Everyone agreed, though, that she would have to keep clear of any dealings with the school in future.

As she drove through Pimlico towards the M4 on Friday afternoon, she was keeping a sharp eye on the traffic behind her. But she saw no blue Mini or anything else to cause her concern. As she left London behind her, she began to relax and look forward to seeing her mother for the first time in several weeks.

‘Darling! I wasn’t expecting you for hours.’

Susan Carlyle was watering the potted fruit trees in the back courtyard of the plant nursery she still helped to run. It was next door to the Bowerhouse, the small gatehouse of the large estate where her father had been the manager. Her father had died unexpectedly young, but the estate owners had let Liz’s mother stay on, and when the estate itself had been broken up – the outbuildings sold, the land leased to two local farmers – she had used her savings to buy the Bowerhouse outright.

With an empty nest when Liz left home, Susan Carlyle had time on her hands, and she had gone to work in the new nursery when it opened. Within two years she was running it; now being well past retirement age she had moved to part-time hours but refused to quit work altogether, despite Liz’s urgings.

Liz said, ‘I left early to beat the traffic. Getting out of London on Friday gets worse and worse.’

‘Well, it’s a nice surprise. Give me two seconds and I’ll be finished. Edward should be back any minute now; I sent him out to buy supper. You’re a nice excuse for a proper meal – most evenings we seem to fall back on scrambled eggs and toast. And you’ve picked a good weekend to come down; there’s nothing on at all. Just the three of us.’

Part of the reason Liz hadn’t often visited Bowerbridge in recent months was a fear of being a spare wheel. The other part was that when Martin Seurat was alive, they had spent many happy times here. Martin had come to love the local Wiltshire countryside, and to appreciate the resonance that certain places, like the Nadder river where her father had liked to fish, still held for a grownup Liz. He had got along comfortably with Liz’s mother, and famously well with Edward – since they both shared a love of travel. So after Martin’s death in Paris, memories of their time together here had been painful for Liz.

But something must have changed – Liz found herself happy to be back in the embrace of her childhood. She still missed Martin, and there was a pang when she went into her bedroom and saw the framed photograph that Martin had teased her about of a very young Liz sitting on her pony. But the veil of sadness that had hovered over even the prospect of this kind of visit had somehow lifted.

She made the most of it. On Saturday morning she helped her mother in the nursery where the early autumn sale was on, then in the afternoon took a long solitary walk along the Nadder. When she came home she found her mother and Edward standing together by the Aga in the kitchen, her mother wearing a striped cook’s apron and Edward dressed in corduroys and a fisherman’s sweater. The radio was playing big band music, and to Liz’s amusement Edward was singing along to ‘Take the “A” Train’. Seeing her, they both laughed, then conscripted her into helping with the venison stew they were making. Soon she was chopping carrots and mincing garlic, and she felt, as she had done when Martin was there, that she was joining in.

They had a long delicious supper, fuelled by two bottles of Chianti that Liz had brought down with her, and after dinner they sat in the low-beamed sitting room. Edward had lit the first fire of the autumn, made with ash logs cut from a tree that had come down in the previous year’s big storm. When her mother yawned and announced she was going to bed, Liz stayed up to talk with Edward.

‘I’ve got something special,’ he announced, getting up to poke the fire before bending down to open the cupboard in the corner of the room. Reaching in with his long arms, he brought out a bottle in one hand, and two small glasses in the other. ‘I hope you’re joining me,’ he said.

‘Why not?’ asked Liz.

He poured out an inch or so of dark liquid from the bottle and gave Liz the glass. ‘It’s Armagnac,’ he said. ‘I bought it when your mother and I were in Quercy. We had such a lovely week that I wanted something to remind us of it.’ He poured an inch into his own glass, then put the bottle down and gave the fire another poke before sitting down across from Liz.

She said, staring at the flickering fire, ‘You remember how Martin loved Armagnac?’

‘I do indeed. It’s thanks to him I developed a taste for the stuff.’ He chuckled. ‘Though with Martin, one didn’t have much choice.’

Liz smiled. Martin’s zest for life had been infectious. On the surface, he had been a reserved man – well dressed, proper in manner, punctiliously polite. But once relaxed, he would grow passionate about his latest enthusiasms – which could be anything from Armagnac to Simenon’s Maigret stories. Martin was always on the lookout for a new interest, which had made life with him continually unpredictable, and fun.

Edward seemed to sense what she was thinking. ‘You must miss that energy of his.’

‘I do.’ She laughed. ‘I was never sure what would be next – a restaurant, a favourite film, a singer he had discovered on French radio. Once he fell in love with the Jubilee line on the London Underground. Don’t ask me why – it was something to do with its name, I think.’ She kept herself from laughing again, sensing it might soon make her cry.

Edward didn’t say anything for a minute. He sipped his Armagnac and stared at the fire. Finally he said, ‘You know your mother’s worried about you.’

Liz sighed. ‘If it’s because I haven’t come down much lately, then I hope she’ll realise I’ve just needed some time to myself.’

‘Completely understood. But no, it’s not that.’

‘Oh dear, I hope it’s not because of my job. Mum’s never been happy with my working in London. You must know that.’ Her mother had never seemed to rid herself of the conviction that at some point Liz would see the light, leave London and her mysterious career, and come home where she would meet her prince, preferably a landed prince, disavow any further career ambitions and settle down to be a wife and mother like countless generations before her. It would have been infuriating if it had not been so inconceivably far from anything Liz was ever likely to do.

‘To be fair, I don’t think it has anything to do with your job,’ Edward said, looking directly at Liz. He had startlingly blue eyes, which had not weakened or paled with age. Much more than her mother, he seemed to have a very clear sense of what Liz did. He had spent much of his life abroad, working for non-governmental organisations in the Third World, and had inevitably been involved with the UK government’s foreign activities, including – at least peripherally – its intelligence services. He said, more gently, ‘I think it’s just she doesn’t like to see you so alone.’

Liz sat back, slightly startled. She wanted to protest, but at the same time felt the truth of her mother’s concern. Since Martin’s death, Liz had felt alone, terribly alone – even here, on her rare visits to her childhood home.

She could not deny it, but at the same time she felt certain that this was no longer the case. Why? The image of Richard Pearson as he leaned forward to kiss her in the pub’s car park was suddenly as vivid as her view of Edward. That was what had changed.

She took a sip of Armagnac and smiled at Edward. ‘I can understand why she’s been worried. And she was right to be, I suppose. But not any more. Can you somehow let her know that? It’s early days, if you catch my drift, and I don’t want to say anything more, but please reassure her if you can. Will you?’

And Edward, who for all his rumpled country style, was a man of considerable subtlety, gave a slow and appreciative smile. ‘Count on me.’ He reached for the Armagnac bottle, then leaned forward to refill her glass. ‘And fingers crossed for you.’

Liz drove back to London on Sunday evening, late enough to avoid most of the returning weekend traffic. She felt relaxed after the weekend and it wasn’t till she got back into central London that she thought again about Cicero in his Mini. She parked around the corner from the flat, removed her overnight bag and locked the car securely. She looked around to see if anyone was lingering nearby, but no one was. In the entrance hall of her building she collected her post from her letterbox – two bills and a pile of junk mail – and climbed the two floors up to her flat. As she opened the door she sniffed the air. There was a slight smell – faintly spicy, a sort of combination of perfume and curry. She thought back: had she cooked something spicy before she left? No. It must be coming from one of the neighbours’ flats. She dropped her bag in the hall and went into the kitchen. To her surprise she saw that the door of the freezer compartment of the refrigerator was wide open. She couldn’t have shut it properly before she went away. The smell was coming from some Indian ready meals that had thawed out, as had everything else in the freezer compartment. There was a pool of nasty-looking water at the bottom of the freezer and some was dripping out on to the floor.

It took her over an hour to clean up the mess in the freezer and on the floor. Finally, tired out and cross with herself, she poured herself a glass of wine, went into the sitting room and cheered herself up by looking at the view of the square below. Its plane trees were illuminated by the street lights, their leaves just beginning to brown at the edges as they responded to the advance of autumn. Finally, exhausted, she took herself to bed and fell asleep straightaway.

She woke as usual at six fifteen. Her bedside clock radio was set for six thirty, and she usually woke a little before then, waiting for the calm voice of the Radio 4 newsreader with the six thirty news. She always listened to the Today programme while she got dressed and had her breakfast.

A blast of pop music bellowed at maximum volume from the radio. She shot up in bed and slammed her hand down on the stop button.

She sat on the edge of the bed. What on earth had happened? That wasn’t the Today programme, and why was the volume so high?

Had there been a power cut while she’d been away that had reset the radio? No, that didn’t make sense; the correct time was showing on the clock. If there’d been a power cut it would have been flashing. What else could have happened? She looked at the dial on the radio and saw that it was set to Radio 1 – she never listened to Radio 1 and what about the volume? How had it got turned up to maximum? As she asked herself these questions she remembered last night – and the open freezer door.

A cold fear washed over her. Someone had been in the flat and done these things. Who and why? Then she gasped – what if they were still here?

She stood up, trembling, and went into the kitchen. Everything looked just as she had left it last night. She opened the door of a tall cupboard in the corner and seized the iron; it was the heaviest thing she could see. Then she went back into her bedroom and flung open the wardrobe doors. No one there. She looked under the bed – no one. She went into the spare bedroom and did the same thing, gradually calming down as she searched every place in the flat where a person could conceivably be hiding.

There was no one there. The front door was locked and bolted as she had left it last night; all the windows were closed and locked.

She went back to the kitchen, made some coffee and sat down to think. She was calmer now but the flat felt less safe and comfortable than it had. Could someone have got in over the weekend? If so, who and why? The locks were secure – at least she had thought so; but she had no burglar alarm and a really sophisticated person could get through any lock, as she knew. But nothing had been stolen. Whoever had been in had just wanted to frighten her; to let her know that they knew where she lived. Who would want to do that? Her mind kept returning to one person. Could Cicero have been in her flat? Her flesh crawled at the thought. If that’s who it was then there was something very disturbing going on at Bartholomew Manor.