Waiting for Sunrise

‘It doesn’t need to be this hard, Herr Glockner,’ he said, as persuasively as he could. ‘You don’t need to suffer. You shouldn’t suffer.’

He wandered round the apartment and looked at the etchings on the wall – street scenes of Munich, he saw.

‘Münchner?’

‘You’ll be dead by the end of today,’ Glockner said. ‘They’ll find you and kill you – they know everything that’s going on in this town. I’ve an appointment at 11.00. If I don’t show up they’ll come directly here.’

‘Well, that gives us less than an hour for you to make up your mind and see sense, then.’

Lysander paced about the room. He drew the curtains and switched on the electric side-lights, wondering what to do. What was it Massinger had said? Cut off his fingers, one by one . . . Oh yes, very straightforward. Right, where do we start? Obviously, he wasn’t going to be able to mutilate the man and he felt a useless anger rise in him, directed at Massinger and his brutal complacency. This was exactly the situation he’d posited to Massinger – what if the bribe was not accepted? – and he had been mocked for his scepticism. In a mood of mounting frustration he walked out of the sitting room and went to find the kitchen.

The flat was small – apart from the sitting room there was a bedroom, a bathroom and a small clean kitchen with a stove and a soapstone sink and a meat-safe. He began to open drawers, looking for knives or shears – those kitchen shears for boning chickens – they’d snap a finger off at the joint. He would threaten Glockner – perhaps squeeze a fingertip between two blades of the scissors; perhaps that would work, terrorize him enough. The imagined snip would perhaps be more disturbing than anything real.

The first drawer revealed cleaning equipment – bleach, wire-wool pan scourers, scrubbing brushes of various sizes. In the second drawer he found the knives – no shears – but they were sharp enough. He looked under the sink and found a bucket – a bucket would be a good prop, as if there would be blood to mop up, that might add to the conviction of the whole charade, he thought. He stopped and stood up.

He was thinking. An idea had come to him – from nowhere. He opened the first drawer again and took out the two pan scourers and held them in each hand – a coarse steel mesh shaped into a squashy sphere. He began to think further – no need to shed a drop of blood at all . . . Then he ran them under the tap, shook the water from them, slipped them into his pockets and wandered back into the sitting room.

‘Last chance, Herr Glockner. Give me the key to the code.’

‘I tell you I don’t have it. I pass the letters on to Berlin where they’re decoded.’

‘Last chance.’

‘How do you say it in English? Fuck your mother, fuck your sister, fuck your wife, fuck your baby daughter.’

Lysander stooped over him.

‘You’ve just made a terrible mistake. Terrible.’

He pinched Glockner’s nose shut with two fingers and, as he reflexively opened his mouth to breathe, Lysander rammed the first of the kitchen scourers deep into Glockner’s mouth – and then the second.

Glockner gagged and heaved. The bulk of the two scourers had forced his jaws wide apart, belling his cheeks. He was trying to force them out with his tongue but they were too firmly wedged in behind his teeth.

Lysander strode over to the armchair and unplugged the standard lamp, ripping the flex from its base. The flex was a simple, wound double-cable, covered in a fine gold-coloured thread. With his fingernails he picked the ends clear, exposing the wires and bending them into a rough Y-shape.

He dragged Glockner and his chair closer. Then he plugged the flex back into its socket and held the now live ‘Y’ in front of Glockner’s eyes.

Suddenly the thought came to him that he might not be capable of going through with this. But then he argued with himself – it would be just a touch, after all, no severing or cutting, nothing unseemly, no blades gouging flesh, just something that occurred as a matter of unfortunate consequence on a doubtless daily basis in dentists’ surgeries the world over. Glockner was going to the dentist – no one liked it particularly, no one knew what pain would be associated with the visit. It was a risk.

‘You look like a man who’s taken good care of his teeth. Admirable. Unfortunately all that expensive dental work is now going to cause you intense, unspeakable pain. Every tooth in your head is in contact with the wire mesh of the scourer. Your copious saliva – look, it’s already dripping from the side of your mouth – is a very efficient electrolyte. When I touch this live electric wire to the scourers in your mouth . . .’ he paused. ‘Well, let’s say you’re going to remember this agony for the rest of your life.’

He waved the wire right in front of Glockner’s eyes.

‘Just give me the key to your code, then I’ll be out of here in five minutes. Nod your head if you agree.’

Glockner made some grating sound in his throat but it was clear from the way his forehead buckled and his crazy eyes glared that he was trying to swear at him again.

Without thinking further, Lysander touched the exposed live wires to the scumbled edge of the kitchen scourer visible between Glockner’s bared teeth. Just for a second.

Glockner’s inhuman throat-tearing roar of pain was hugely disturbing, made him flinch and wince in sympathy. It was the aural representation of his awful torment. He whipped the wires away and, in some disarray himself, watched Glockner writhe in his bonds, banging the back of his head against the parquet, his eyes weeping, overflowing. My god. Jesus.

Lysander fetched a pad-cushion from a chair and slipped it under Glockner’s head. He didn’t want anyone coming up from down below to see what the noise was. He held another cushion in his hand to muffle Glockner’s eventual screams.

‘Now, Herr Glockner, that was just a split second. Imagine if I apply the wires and count to ten.’

He didn’t give him time to make any response – get this over with – he jammed the wire into the scourer and slammed the cushion over Glockner’s face. One second, two – no, he couldn’t go on. He pulled the wire away and kept the cushion in place. Glockner’s screams died away to rhythmic sobbing sounds, almost like a kind of animal, panting. He felt himself trembling as he removed the cushion.

Glockner’s face was slumped as if the muscles weren’t working, had gone terminally slack. His eyes were half-closed, blinking frantically.

‘Nod your head if you agree.’

He nodded.

Carefully, quickly, Lysander picked out the scouring pads from his gaping mouth with his fingers. Glockner dry-heaved, turned his head and spat on the parquet. Lysander rose to his feet and carefully placed the live wire on the desk top, securing it with a paperweight.

‘See?’ he said accusingly. ‘If you’d just told me when I asked you first none of this would have happened – and you’d have been a rich man. Where’s the key?’

‘Central bookcase . . .’ Glockner coughed and moaned.

Lysander walked over to the central bookcase and opened it. It was full of German literature – Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Schopenhauer, Liliencron . . .

‘Second shelf from the top. Fifth book along.’

Lysander ran his finger along the spines. The classic book-cipher. The PLWL code, as it was also known, so Munro had told him – page, line, word, letter. Unbreakable unless you had the book.

Fifth book along, there it was. He drew it out.

Andromeda und Perseus.

Andromeda und Perseus. Eine Oper in vier Akten von Gottlieb Toller.

He felt a coldness grip him as if his organs had been suddenly packed in ice. He felt his bowels turn and flex with a powerful urge to shit.

He stopped the questions screaming at him. Not now. Not now. Later.

He turned back to Glockner. He seemed to have passed out. His eyes were closed and his breathing was shallow. With an effortful heave, Lysander righted the chair and Glockner’s head lolled, a length of thick saliva falling from his mouth and dangling there, swaying like a lucent pendulum.

Lysander untied him quickly and dragged and laid him back on the rug again. He unplugged the flex and wound it round his palm before stuffing it in his pocket. He found Glockner’s attaché case on the floor by the desk and flipped it open, sliding the wad of 25,000 francs into an internal pocket. He closed it and replaced it on the floor. He gathered up the lengths of rope and the scouring pads and threw them in his grip along with the libretto of Andromeda und Perseus. He had a final check of the room and the kitchen. He smoothed some ripples in the rug and straightened the books on the second shelf from the top so there was no noticeable gap. He closed the glass door. An unconscious man on his back, with not a mark on him. 25,000 francs inside his attaché case. A standard lamp without a flex. Solve that mystery.

He stood for a moment in the hall, running through everything for a final time. Thank you, the Hon. Hugh Faulkner, thank you. He felt himself beginning to shiver. It was terrifying how easy it had been – no blood, no effort, even – just some logical thought and the application of electric current. Stop. Concentrate. From his grip he took a light Macintosh and a flat cotton golfing cap and put them on. The man leaving the building wouldn’t look like the man who entered. He pulled the door to behind him, leaving the key in the lock on the inside. He went down the stairs calmly, meeting no one and was glad to note that the concierge was still at church and the little boy had left his post. Lysander stepped out on to the street and strode away. He looked at his wristwatch – 10.40 – he hadn’t even been in Herr Glockner’s apartment for an hour.

4. The Fiend

He spent the afternoon painstakingly decoding the Glockner letters – it kept his mind on the job. As the contents slowly revealed themselves – it was laborious work – it became obvious to him that what was being detailed in them was the movement of munitions and matériel from England to various sections of the front line.

On one page: ‘Fifteen hundred tons HE six inch to St Omer to Béthune.’

On another: ‘Twen five thou coffins to Allouagne.’

And more of the same: ‘One mil five thou three oh three Aubers Ridge sector’; ‘Six field dressing stations villages behind Lens’; ‘Ammo railheads St Venant Lapugnoy first army Strazeele cavalry’; ‘Sixteen adv dressing stns Grenay Vermelles Cambrin Givenchy Beuvry’; ‘Fourteen trch mortar La Bassee canal’.

The list grew in astonishing, minute detail as he worked steadily through the close columns of numbers in the six letters. Assuming that the dates were recorded when these letters were intercepted, he reasoned, then this data would give a very intriguing picture of the focus of an impending attack. Artillery shells, small arms ammunition, food and rations, signalling equipment, field hospitals, pack animals, transportation – it seemed almost too random but anyone who knew what was involved in a ‘push’ would be able to read the signs and narrow the sector down with remarkably precise accuracy.

It was also clear to him that this information must have been generated far behind the lines – the scale and the quantities applied to armies and brigades, not regiments and battalions. Battalions drew their supplies from dumps that these movement orders fed. And even further away – there was mention of ten batteries of 18-pounder guns being shipped from Folkestone to Havre and then entrained for Abbeville; a loco shop was being established at Borre; a new forage depot at Mautort; summary of shunts at the Traffic Office, Abbeville; total of remounts sent from England to the First Army in May. Some of these facts and figures would be known to senior supply officers in France but the range and the scope of the knowledge displayed in the Glockner letters spoke instead – as far as Lysander’s ill-informed mind could determine – of a far greater overview of the whole movement and ordnance operation for the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front. The writer of these coded letters wasn’t in General Sir John French’s high command in St Omer, he reckoned, but safely at home in the War Office or the Ministry of Munitions in London.

He put his pen down and, with some unease, picked up the source text – Andromeda und Perseus. He turned to the title page, noting with some relief that this edition wasn’t the same as the one he had. It had been published in Dresden in 1912, a year before his trip to Vienna, and had the title and author as simple text on the cover with no illustration. He knew that the fatal Viennese performances of Toller’s opera were not its premiere, so he assumed that must have taken place in Dresden, whence this copy originated . . .

Malign coincidence? No, impossible. As obscure texts went, Andromeda und Perseus was about as recherché as you could find. But the more questions he asked himself about the conceivable provenance of this, the key text in the PLWL cipher, the more confused and troubled he became. Why this particular, forgotten opera? And how come he was the one to discover it? The unwelcome thought came to him that the only other person he knew who possessed a copy of this libretto was one Lysander Rief. And what did that imply? . . .

He decided that it was pointless speculating further. He had to return home and, with Munro and Fyfe-Miller, thoroughly analyse all the ramifications of this discovery. There was nothing much he could do on a Sunday afternoon in Geneva – the Hôtel des Postes closed at midday so he’d have to wait until tomorrow to telegraph Massinger in Thonon. It opened at 7.00 in the morning – he would be there. He sealed his transcripts of the six letters in an envelope and wrote his name and the Claverleigh Hall address on the front. Best for the precise details to be kept out of everyone’s hands for the moment, he reckoned, at least until he had decided what to reveal – or not – about the key to the cipher.

He went out for a stroll in the late afternoon, thinking that perhaps he would have liked to have talked over the matter – discreetly – with Florence Duchesne but he realized that he didn’t know where she lived. Then again, perhaps it was best that she knew as little as possible.

He took a tram across the Arve River and disembarked at one of the entrances to the Bois de la Bâtre on the far bank from the city. He wandered into the thick woods and left the pathway to find a secluded spot – far from any picnickers or strolling families – and patiently burned Glockner’s copy of Andromeda und Perseus a page at a time. He kicked the small pile of frail ashes here and there, stamping them into the turf as though they might somehow be reconstituted and read once more. He was beginning to think that the crucial course of action was to keep the cipher text a secret that only he knew – he wasn’t quite sure why, but out of the jabber of questions and answers that raged in his mind an instinctive way forward seemed to be emerging. Make himself the only keeper of the secret – who knew, in that case, what others might inadvertently reveal? The minute he saw Massinger he would be asked for it – he was fully aware of that – still, he had plenty of time to concoct a plausible story.

He ate an omelette in a brasserie by the steamer jetties and checked the departure times of the express steamers that did a round trip of the lake in a day. He drank too much wine and found his previous clarity of purpose begin to cloud as he wandered the streets, as if suddenly cognizant of the fact that, this Sunday morning in Geneva, he had tortured a man and extracted information from him. What was happening to him? What kind of fiend was he becoming? But then he thought – was ‘torture’ the right word? He hadn’t bludgeoned Glockner’s head to a bloody pulp; he hadn’t mangled his genitalia, or torn out his fingernails. He had given him every warning, also, every chance to speak . . . But he was disturbed, as well, he had to confess – disturbed by his own swift ingenuity and resourcefulness. Maybe it was the very absence of blood – and of mucus, piss and shit – that made his own . . . he searched for the word – device – that made his device so distancing and therefore easier to live with. What he had done seemed more like an experiment in a chemistry laboratory than the wilful inflicting of pain on a fellow human being . . . But then another voice told him not to be so stupid and sensitive: he was under orders, on a mission and the knowledge he had gained by his clever, robust and admittedly brutal actions had been vital for the war effort and, conceivably, could save countless lives. Of course it could. He had been told in no uncertain terms – do your duty as a soldier – and he had.

The night porter at the Hôtel Touring sleepily and grudgingly opened the main door for him after midnight. Lysander went up to his room, feeling tired but sure he would be denied even a minute of sound sleep, such were the relentless churnings of his thoughts. They were added to, considerably, when he saw that a note had been pushed under his door. It was unaddressed but he tore it open, knowing who had sent it.

‘Your brother Manfred is gravely ill. Leave for home at once. People are very concerned.’

It could only be Florence Duchesne. Manfred – how did she know about Glockner? And what was the significance of that underscored ‘concerned’? . . . He lay on his bed fully clothed, running through the possibilities for the following day – what he should try and do and what he absolutely had to do in his own best interests. He was still awake, waiting and thinking, as the sunrise began to lighten the curtains on his windows.

At seven o’clock in the morning Lysander was third in the queue at the main door of the central post office on the Rue du Mont Blanc. It was a huge grand ornate building – more like a museum or a ministry of state than a post office – and when it opened he strode to a guichet in the vast vaulted vestibule and immediately sent a long telegram to Massinger in Thonon.

HAVE THE KEY COMPONENT STOP AS SUSPECTED THERE IS A SERIOUS MALFUNCTION IN THE MAIN MACHINERY STOP STRONGLY ADVISE NO EXCURSIONS IN THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE STOP ARRIVING EVIAN LES BAINS AT

440

PM STOP

The last Glockner letter had been intercepted little more than two weeks previously. It was reasonable to suppose that its detail of ordnance supply would be relevant for any attack due towards the end of the summer. The autumn offensive, whatever and wherever it would be, was well advertised now as far as the enemy was concerned.

He then posted the six transcribed letters to himself at Claverleigh and left the post office at 7.20. The first express steamer making the round trip to Nyon, Ouchy, Montreux and Evian left at 9.15. Madame Duchesne’s note the night before seemed to imply that steamer points and railway stations might be watched – he had almost two hours or so to make sure he wouldn’t be apprehended.

5. Tom O’Bedlam

He locked the door of the below-deck gentlemen’s lavatory and placed his sack and seatless chair to one side. He sat on the WC and, with a sigh of relief, removed his shoes and shook the pebbles out. Then he washed the Vaseline off his upper lip and raked his fingers through his chopped hair trying to flatten it into some vestige of normality. Looking at himself in the mirror he could see he had gone a bit too far with the scissors.

After he’d left the post office he had made his other essential purchases as soon as the relevant shops on the Rue du Mont Blanc opened. First, was a coarse linen laundry bag into which he’d stuffed his raincoat and his golfing cap – he had left his cardboard suitcase and his remaining clothes in his room at the hotel – Abelard Schwimmer had no further use of them. Then he bought a glass jar of Vaseline and a pair of hair-scissors from a pharmacy before going on to a furniture shop where, after some searching, he found a cheap pine straight-backed kitchen chair with a woven straw seat. Any chair would have done – it was the straw seat that was important. By 8.30 he had re-crossed the river to the Jardin Anglais and in a quiet corner, sitting on a bench, he had unpicked and unravelled the lengths of straw-raffia that made up the seat of the chair. He then looped and wound the straw into a loose figure-of-eight that he hooked on to the chair-back. He had his prop – now he just needed his costume.

His idea – his inspiration – came from a performance of his father’s that he remembered when Halifax Rief had played Poor Tom, Tom O’Bedlam, Edgar in disguise, the madman whom King Lear meets during the storm. To feign Tom’s madness his father had put axle grease in his hair to make stiff spikes, had smeared more grease on his lip below his nose and had filled his shoes with sharp gravel. The transformation had been extraordinary – unable to walk normally or comfortably, his gait had become at once rolling and jerky, and the smear of grease looked like snot from an uncontrollably running nose. The uncombed, outlandish greasy hair added an extra aura of filth and neglect. A tattered jerkin had finished off the transmutation.

Lysander couldn’t go that far but he aimed in that direction. He picked up some round pebbles from the gravelled pathways and put them in his brown shoes that he loosely and partially laced. Then he unbuttoned the cuffs on his serge jacket and rolled them up towards his elbow, letting the link-free cuffs of his shirt dangle. He buttoned the jacket badly, fitting buttons to the wrong buttonholes so it gaped askew at the neck. He put his tie in his pocket. Then he scissored off clumps of his hair at random, adding swipes of Vaseline – not forgetting a thick snot-smear under his nose. Then he picked up his seatless chair and his looped skein of straw, slung it over one shoulder and his linen sack over the other and shuffle-limped off to the jetty where the steamer was berthed. He looked, he assumed, like some poor itinerant gypsy simpleton, earning a few centimes by repairing furniture.

He could see no police or evident plainclothesmen eyeing the small queue of passengers waiting to board. He let most of them embark before he clambered painfully up the gangway, showed his ticket and went immediately to the seats at the stern, where he sat down, head bowed, muttering to himself. As expected, no one wanted to sit too close to him. No passports were required as the steamer was making a round trip and would be back in Geneva at the end of the day. Massinger would have received his telegram and would have plenty of time to make his way to Evian in time for the steamer’s arrival. Once they were together he could brief him on the essential contents of the Glockner letters. He imagined it would not take long to discover who was the source of the information in the War Office – only a few people could be privy to that mass of detail.

He heard the engines begin to thrum and vibrate through the decking beneath his feet and he allowed himself a small thrill of exultation. He had done it – it had not been easy, it had been the opposite of easy – but he had done the job he had been sent to do. What more could anyone ask of him?

The steamer began to ease away from the pier and head out into the open waters of the lake. The morning was cloudy with a few patches of blue sky here and there but, when the sun broke through, the dazzle from the lake-surface made his eyes sting so he sought the shade of the awnings. Soon they were out in the main water, at full steam, making for Nyon, and Lysander felt he could safely go below and remove his disguise.

In the lavatory, as cleaned-up as he could make himself, he stamped and levered the kitchen chair into pieces and stuffed the lengths of splintered pine and the bundle of straw into the dark empty cupboard that ran beneath the two sinks. He put on his Macintosh and his flat golfing hat and checked himself in the mirror, adjusting his cuffs and re-buttoning his coat correctly. Fine – just another tourist enjoying a tour of the lake. He tossed his empty linen sack into the cupboard as well – everything he needed was in his pockets. He flushed the lavatory for form’s sake and unlocked the door.

After Nyon, the steamer ceased hugging the shore and made directly across the lake for Ouchy, the port of Lausanne. From Ouchy the course was directly to Vevey before turning back a half-circle west, with Montreux and its wooded hills in full view, the wide mouth of the Rhône backdropped by the jagged peaks of the Dents du Midi in the distance.

He wandered down to the stern and leaned on the railings, looking out at the wake and the retreating vistas of Geneva and its ring of low hills and distant mountains. There were a few of the famous Genevan barques out on the water, low free-boarded, two-masters with big-bellied, sharply pointed triangular sails that seemed to operate independently. From certain angles they looked like giant butterflies that had settled for a moment on the lake, their wings poised and still, to drink. He watched their slow progress and waited until there was no other passenger near him and quickly tossed his small revolver into the water. He turned, no one had noticed. He walked away from the stern.

On any other day he would have enjoyed the spectacular views but he patrolled the decks restlessly, instead, his mind busy and agitated. There was a small glassed-in salon set behind the tall thin smoke stack where light meals and refreshments were served, but he didn’t feel hungry; he felt suddenly weary, in fact, exhausted from the stress of the last twenty-four hours. He climbed some steps to a small sun-deck in front of the bridge where he hired a canvas deckchair from a steward for two francs. He sat down and pulled the peak of his cap over his eyes. If he couldn’t sleep at least he might doze – some rest, a little rest, was what he needed, all he asked for.

He was dreaming of Hettie who was running through a wide unkempt garden holding the hand of a little dark-haired boy. Were they fleeing something – or were they just playing? He woke – upset – trying to remember the little boy’s features. Had he somehow encountered Lothar in his dream – his son whom he had never set eyes on, not even in a photograph? But Lothar was only a year old, now – this little boy was older, four or five. Couldn’t possibly be –

‘You slept for nearly two hours.’

His head jerked round.

Florence Duchesne sat in a deckchair three feet away from him, in her usual black, a baggy velvet hat held on her head with a chiffon scarf.

‘My god,’ he said. ‘Scared me to death. I was dreaming.’

He sat up, regaining his bearings. The sun was lower in the sky, the hills on the left were less mountainous. France?

‘Where are we?’

‘We’ll be in Evian-les-Bains in an hour.’ She looked at him – could that be the hint of a smile?

‘I almost missed you,’ she said. ‘I thought you hadn’t boarded. I had seen you – the chair and the sack, the curious limping way you had walked. Then, just as the steamer was about to leave, I realized. That’s him, surely? I remembered Massinger had warned me – be alert, he won’t look like the man you’re expecting to see.’

‘How would Massinger know that?’

She shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea. He just warned me that you might be disguised. Anyway, bravo – no one would have guessed it was you.’

‘You can’t be too careful . . .’ He thought for a second. ‘But what’re you doing here, anyway?’

‘Massinger wanted to be sure you got away safely. Asked me to chaperone you, discreetly. I’ve had a nice day out – I’ll just take the steamer back to Geneva.’

‘What did you mean in your note when you said people were “concerned”?’

‘Manfred Glockner is dead.’

‘What?’

‘He died of a heart attack. He was found unconscious in his apartment and rushed to hospital – but it was too late.’

Lysander swallowed. Jesus Christ.

‘Do you know any reason why he should have died?’ she asked him, casually.

‘He was fine when I left him,’ Lysander improvised, thinking of the meshed wire of the scourer, the strong domestic electric current . . . ‘I gave him the money, he counted it, then he told me the key to the cipher and I left.’

She was looking at him very closely.

‘The money was found in his attaché case,’ she said.

‘How do you know?’ he countered.

‘I have a contact at the German consulate.’

‘What kind of contact?’

‘A man whose post I opened. It contained photographs that he would prefer remained private. Some of them I kept in case I had to remind him. So when I need to know something he’s very happy to tell me.’

Lysander stood up and went to the railing. He had to be very, very careful, he knew – yet he wasn’t exactly sure himself why he had lied to her so instantly. He looked across the placid lake waters at the French shore – the hills were rising again and he saw a small perfect château situated right at the water’s edge.

Madame Duchesne came to join him at the railing. He turned and had a good view of her profile as she stared at the slowly approaching shoreline. The perfect curve of her small nose, like a beak. Her nostrils flared as she inhaled deeply and her breasts rose. There was something about her that stirred him, she –

‘Beautiful château – it’s called the Château de Blonay,’ she said. ‘I’d like to live somewhere like that.’

‘Might be a bit lonely.’

‘I wasn’t imagining living there alone.’

She turned to him.

‘What’s the key to the cipher? Did Glockner give you the text?’

‘No. It’s in my head. He told me how it worked – it’s very simple.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s the bible – in German,’ Lysander said. He had never expected her to ask him this, directly. ‘But the trick is that the first number doesn’t correspond. It’s a double-cipher. You have to subtract a figure or add to get to the right page.’

‘What’s the trick? It seems very complicated.’ She didn’t seem convinced, frowning. ‘What makes it correspond?’

‘It’s probably best if I don’t tell you.’

‘Massinger will want to know.’

‘I’ll tell him when I see him.’

‘But you won’t tell me.’

‘The information in the letters is extremely important.’

‘You don’t trust me,’ she said, her face still impassive. ‘It’s obvious.’

‘I do. But there are times when the less you know, the better for you. Just in case.’

‘I’ve got something to show you,’ she said. ‘Perhaps when you see it, you’ll trust me.’

She led him down the stairway and through a door and down further stairs. The churning grind of the steamer’s engines grew louder as they descended through a bulkhead to another deck.

‘Where are we going?’ he asked, having to raise his voice.

‘I’ve hired a little cabin, right down below.’

They found themselves in a narrow corridor. Lysander had practically to shout to make himself heard.

‘There are no cabins down here!’

‘Round this corner, you’ll see!’

They turned the corner. A door said, ‘Défense d’Entrer’ and there was a steep metal stairway rising to the upper decks again. They seemed right above the engine room.

‘Wait one second!’ she shouted, rummaging in her handbag.

She drew out her small, short-barrelled revolver and pointed it at him.

‘Hey! No!’ he yelled, completely shocked and knowing instantly that she was going to shoot him. He raised the palm of his left hand reflexively in a futile gesture of protection.

The first shot, misaimed, hit him in the left thigh, making him stagger from its impact, though he felt nothing. He saw the second, immediately after, blast through the back of his raised left hand and felt the blow, like a punch, as the bullet hit his left shoulder, canting him round sideways for the third shot to slam into his chest, high on the right-hand side.

He went down heavily on to the studded metal floor and heard the noise of her feet clatter up the stairway. He raised himself off the ground on his elbows and caught the shockingly distressing sight of his own vibrant, red blood beginning to spill and pool beneath him before he slumped back again and felt his body begin to go numb, hearing the jocular, breathy phoot-phoot! phoot-phoot! of the steamer’s whistle announcing its imminent arrival at the sunny bustling quayside of Evian-les-Bains.

PART FOUR

LONDON, 1915

1. Autobiographical Investigations

So, the one agreeable bonus of all this is that I finally found a way of gaining admittance to Oxford University. Here I am in Somerville College on the Woodstock Road experiencing a simulacrum of the varsity life. While I have a room off a staircase in a quadrangle in a women’s college there are no women (apart from nurses and domestic staff) – the undergraduettes having been decanted to Oriel College for the duration of the war. We are all men here, wounded officers from France and other battlefields with our various incapacities – some shocking (the multiple amputees, the burned) and some invisible: the catatonic victims of mental dementia caused by the concussion of huge guns and images of unconscionable brutality and awfulness. Somerville is now part of the 3rd Southern General Hospital, as the Radcliffe Infirmary, a few yards further up the Woodstock Road, has been renamed.

Florence Duchesne shot me three times and caused seven wounds. Let’s begin with the last. Her third and final squeeze of the trigger sent a bullet through my chest, high on the right-hand side, entering two inches below my collar-bone and exiting above my shoulder blade. Her second shot blasted through my left hand – that I’d raised in futile protection – and sped on, undeterred, through it and through the muscle of my left shoulder. I remember seeing – in a split second – the flower of blood bloom on the back of my hand as the bullet passed through. The scar has healed well but I have enduring stigmata – one in the middle of my palm, and one on the back of my hand – puckered brown and rose badges the size of a sixpence. Her first shot was a miss, of sorts – a misaim, certainly: she hadn’t raised the gun sufficiently when she fired and I was hit in the top of my left thigh where the bullet smashed into a small bundle of change in my pocket, driving some of the coins deep into the rectus femoris muscle. The surgeon later told me he’d extracted four francs and sixty-seven centimes – he gave them to me in a small envelope.

The shot in the chest caused my lung to collapse and I think produced the copious flow of blood that I saw before I passed out. My good fortune – if such a concept is valid in a case of multiple gunshot wounds – is that six of my seven wounds were entry and exit. Only the pocketful of coins denied egress and – now I’m feeling much better – only my thigh still causes me discomfort and makes me walk with a limp and, for the moment, compels the use of a cane.

I’m also lucky in that, after Florence Duchesne shot me and disappeared, some mechanic or stoker emerged from the engine room and found me lying there in the widening pool of my own blood. I was swiftly taken to a small nursing home in Evian and then Massinger, who eventually tracked me down, had me transferred immediately across country by private motor ambulance to the British base hospital at Rouen.

I convalesced there for four weeks as my injured lung kept filling with blood and had to be aspirated regularly. My left hand was in a cast as some small bones had been broken by the bullet on its way through but the persistent problem was my left thigh. The bullet and the small change were extracted in Rouen but the wound seemed continually to re-infect itself and had to be drained and cleaned and re-dressed. I was obliged to walk around on crutches for most of my stay there.

I was shipped back to England and Oxford towards the end of August. My mother came to visit me almost as soon as I was installed in Somerville. She rushed into my room wearing black and for a fraught, shocked moment I thought Florence Duchesne had returned to finish me off. Crickmay Faulkner had died a month before – while I was in Geneva, in fact – and my mother was still in mourning.

She told me that the worst night of her life had occurred when she received the telegram that I was ‘missing in action’. Crickmay was close to death and she thought her son had been snatched away, also. The next morning, however, she had a visit from a ‘naval officer’ – bearded, with a most curious, eerie smile, she said – who had come all the way to Claverleigh to tell her that I was believed to have been captured, unharmed. She found it very hard to understand how it came about that I was now in hospital in England, ‘riddled with bullets’. I told her that the naval officer (it could only have been Fyfe-Miller) had been well intentioned but not in possession of all the facts.

Despite her new status of widow she seemed in excellent spirits, I had to admit, and she’d made the most of her mourning subfusc with a lot of black lace and ostrich feathers on display. Crickmay’s passing was a blessing, she said, much as she loved him, sweet old man, and Hugh was preparing a perfectly adorable cottage on the estate to serve as a kind of dower house for her. The charity fund was growing incrementally and she was to be presented at court to Queen Mary. After we had walked through the quadrangle and I had seen her into her taxi, one of my fellow wounded – who knew about my former life – wondered if she were an actress. When I told him no, he asked, ‘Is she your girl?’ War affects people in all manner of different ways, I suppose – in my mother’s case she was flourishing, visibly rejuvenated.

I received a telegram from Munro today, commiserating and congratulating simultaneously, and saying that we needed to assess the intelligence from the Glockner letters. And when that moment came he had a proposition to put to me. I reasoned that with Glockner dead the pressure to find the War Office source might have reduced somewhat – whoever our traitor was would have to seek out someone new to communicate with and that would obviously take some time.

Hamo has just left. He was very affected to see me – I was in bed, having just had my lung aspirated again – a concern that took the form of very specific questions about my wounds: what exactly were the physical sensations I felt at the moment of impact? Was the pain instant or did it arrive later? Did I find that the shock anaesthetized me in any way? Did the numbness endure for the length of time I lay out on the battlefield – and so on. I answered him as honestly as I could but kept deliberately vague about the reality of who had shot me and where. ‘I had the strangest feelings when I was wounded, that’s why I ask,’ Hamo said. ‘I’ve seen men screaming in agony from a broken finger, yet there I was, blood everywhere, and all I felt was a kind of fizzing, like pins and needles.’ When he left he took my hand and squeezed it hard. ‘Glad to have you back, dear boy. Dear brave lad.’

I walked up St Giles this evening all the way to the Martyrs’ Memorial and back – as far as I’ve walked anywhere since Geneva. I stopped in a pub on the return journey and had half a pint of cider. People looked at me oddly – my pallor and my stick signalling the ‘price’ I’ve paid, I suppose. I keep forgetting I’m an officer in uniform (Munro has arranged for me to be resupplied). Lt. Lysander Rief, East Sussex Light Infantry, recovering from wounds. It was a warm late summer evening and St Giles with its ancient, soot-black college to one side and the Ashmolean Museum on the other looked timeless and alluring – motor cars and tradesmen’s lorries excepting, of course – and I rather envied people who had had the chance to study and live here. Too late for me now, alas.

I was sitting on a bench in the front quad this afternoon, around the corner from the porter’s lodge, reading a newspaper in the sun, when one of the nurses appeared. ‘Ah, there you are, Mr Rief. You’ve just had a visitor in your room. We didn’t know where you were.’ And stepping diffidently into view came Massinger, in civilian clothes.

He sat beside me on the bench, very tense and awkward, and seemingly unwilling to look me in the eye.

‘I never thanked you properly,’ I said, wanting to ease the mood. ‘Whisking me off to Rouen. Private ambulance and all that. The best of care, really.’

‘I owe you an apology, Rief,’ he said, looking down at his hands in his lap, fingers laced as if he were at prayer. ‘I can’t tell you how glad I was to see you alive in Evian. How glad I am today.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. Then, curious, asked, ‘Why so? Particularly.’

‘Because I think – I have this horrible feeling that I ordered you killed. Terrible error, I admit. I got it all wrong.’

He explained. There had been a rapid exchange of telegrams between him and Madame Duchesne on the Monday morning after Glockner’s death had been discovered and reported. Madame Duchesne had been very suspicious, convinced that it had something to do with me and my meeting with him. They had even spoken by telephone about an hour before my steamer was due to depart. Massinger had received my telegram by then and knew from the steamer timetable when I would be leaving. At this point he had ordered Madame Duchesne to accompany me on the boat, interrogate me and, if she had any reason to believe I was a traitor, she was to take the necessary steps to bring me to justice.

I listened to this in some shock.

‘Then when I saw her at Evian she told me she’d shot you,’ Massinger said. ‘You can imagine how I felt.’

‘Saw her?’

‘We met on the quayside. She said you had lied about the cipher-key – the source text. She said you were hiding something. She was convinced that you had murdered Glockner. She was incredibly suspicious of you. I think your disguise was enough proof for her.’

‘Yes, how did you know that I’d disguise myself?’

Massinger looked a little taken aback at this, confused.

‘Munro told me. Or was it Fyfe-Miller? About what happened in Vienna when I saw them there.’

‘You were in Vienna?’

‘Off and on. Mainly last year before the war began – while I was setting up the network in Switzerland. Everybody spoke about your escape.’

‘I see . . .’ I was puzzled to learn about my notoriety. I put it to the back of my mind. ‘Anyway, I didn’t think I was obliged to tell Madame Duchesne everything. Why should I? I was about to meet you and report in full, for Christ’s sake – on French soil. And all the while you’d ordered me killed.’

Massinger looked a bit sick and grimaced.

‘Actually, I didn’t in so many words. Madame Duchesne was going on and on, raising her suspicions about you. So I said –’ he paused. ‘My French is a bit rusty, you see. I don’t know if I made myself totally clear to her. I tried to reassure her and I said words to the effect that we cannot assume he – you – is not a traitor. It’s unlikely, but, in the event it was confirmed, you would be treated without compunction.’

‘Pretty difficult to say that in French even if you were fluent,’ I said.

‘I was a bit out of my depth, you’re right. I got confused with “traître” and “traiter”, I think.’ He looked at me sorrowfully. ‘I have this ghastly feeling I said you were a “traître sans pitié” . . .’

‘That’s fairly unequivocal. A “merciless traitor”.’

‘Whereas I was trying to say –’

‘I can see where the confusion arose.’

‘I’ve lain awake for nights going through what I might actually have said to her. We were all rather thrown by Glockner’s death. Panic stations, you know.’

‘That’s all very well. The woman shot me three times. Point-blank range. All because of your schoolboy French.’

‘How did Glockner die?’ he asked, clearly very keen to change the subject.

‘A heart attack – so Madame Duchesne told me.’

‘And he was fine when you left him.’

‘Yes. Counting his money.’

Why do I keep on lying? Something tells me that the less I tell everyone, the better. We chatted on a bit more and he informed me that Munro was coming to see me about the decryption of the letters. Finally he stood and shook my hand.

‘My sincere apologies, Rief.’

‘There’s not much I can say, in the circumstances. What happened to Madame Duchesne?’

‘She took a train back to Geneva. She’s back there now, working away as Agent Bonfire. Worth her weight in gold.’

‘Does she know I survived?’

‘I’m pretty sure she thinks you’re dead, actually. I thought it best not to raise the matter – I didn’t want to upset her unnecessarily, you see. She thought she was acting on my orders, after all. She couldn’t really be blamed.’

‘That’s very considerate of you.’

My mother had brought my mail from Claverleigh, including the letter I’d sent myself from Geneva containing the Glockner decrypts. I made fresh copies of all six and gave them to Munro when he came to see me yesterday.

We sat in what used to be the Junior Common Room. There was a foursome playing bridge but otherwise it was quiet. A rainy, fresh day, the first inklings of autumn in the air.

I spread the transcripts on the table in front of us. Munro looked serious.

‘What’s disturbing me is that this man seems to know everything,’ he said. ‘Look – construction of two gun spurs on the Hazebrouk–Ypres railway line . . .’ He pointed to another letter. ‘Here – the number of ambulance trains in France, where the ammunition-only railheads are . . .’

‘Something to do with the railway organization?’

‘You’d think so – but look at all this stuff about forage.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I don’t get that.’

‘There’s one horse for every three men in France,’ Munro said. ‘Hundreds of thousands – and they all have to be fed.’

‘Ah. So, follow the forage trail and you’ll find the troop build-up.’

Munro mused on. ‘Yes, where is he? Ministry of Munitions? Directorate of Railway Transport? Quartermaster-General’s Secretariat? General Headquarters? War Office? But look at this.’ He picked up letter number five and quoted, ‘“Two thou refrig vans ordered from Canada.” Refrigerated vans. How can he know that?’

‘Yes. What are they for?’

‘You want your meat fresh in the front line, don’t you, soldier?’

Munro smoothed his neat moustache with the palp of his forefinger, thinking hard. Then he turned and looked at me with his clear enquiring gaze.

‘What do you want to do, Rief?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Do you want to return to your battalion? They’re still in Swansea – but you can’t keep your rank. Or you can have an honourable discharge. You’ve more than done your duty – we recognize that and we’re very grateful.’

It didn’t take much thought. ‘I’ll take the honourable discharge, thank you,’ I said, knowing I couldn’t go back to the 2/5th E.S.L.I. ‘I should be out of here in a couple of weeks,’ I added.

Then he stiffened, as though he’d just thought of something.

‘Or you could do one more job for us, here in London. What do you say?’

‘I really think I’ve more than –’

‘I’m phrasing it as a question, Rief, to allow you to reply in the affirmative.’ He smiled, but it was not a warm smile. ‘You’ll stay a lieutenant, same pay.’

‘Well, when you put it like that – yes. As long as I don’t get shot again.’

Just at that moment some catering staff came in and began to lay the long table for lunch, with much clattering of plates and ringing of silverware.

‘Do you fancy a spot of lunch?’ I asked Munro.

‘I don’t fancy hospital gruel,’ he said. ‘Can we go to a pub?’

We walked through the college and out of the rear entrance on to Walton Street.

‘I’ve never been in this college,’ Munro said. ‘Though I must have walked past it a hundred times.’

‘What college were you in?’ I asked him, not surprised to be not surprised that he’d been an Oxford undergraduate.

‘Magdalen,’ he said. ‘Other side of town.’

‘Then you joined the diplomatic service,’ I said.

‘That’s right, after my spell in the army.’ He glanced at me. ‘What was your college?’

‘I didn’t go to university,’ I said. ‘I started acting straight after my schooldays.’

‘Ah, the University of Life.’

The pub was called The Temeraire and its sign was a lurid misrepresentation of Turner’s masterpiece. It was small and wood-panelled with low tables and three-legged stools and prints of old ships-of-the-line on the walls. Munro fetched two pints and ordered himself a veal-and-ham pie with mashed potatoes and pickled onions. I said I wasn’t hungry.

‘There’s a big attack due,’ Munro said, sprinkling his pie and mash with salt and pepper. ‘In a matter of days, in fact. Supporting a French offensive. In the Loos sector.’

I spread my hands and looked at him with some incredulity. ‘For heaven’s sake,’ I said. ‘I suggested strongly that we stopped all operations. I urged that we stopped. They’ll be waiting for us – look at the last two Glockner letters. You can pinpoint the area yourself.’

‘If only it were that easy. The French are being very insistent.’ He smiled thinly, unhappily, obviously feeling the same way I was. ‘Let’s hope for the best.’

‘Oh, we can always do that. Costs nothing, hope.’

Munro made a rueful face, said nothing and tackled his pie. I lit a cigarette.

‘There’s one thing our correspondent missed,’ Munro said. ‘Curious. We’re going to use poison gas at Loos – though we refer to it as the “accessory”.’

‘Well, they did it to us at Ypres,’ I said, carefully. ‘All’s fair in love and war.’ I was wondering why he was telling me this. Was it some kind of test?

‘I wonder why he missed it,’ Munro went on. ‘Maybe it’ll help us locate him.’ He took a sip of his beer. ‘Have a week’s leave when you get out of hospital. Then I want you to meet someone in London. We need to plan our course of action.’

‘So I’m still to remain a lieutenant.’

‘Absolutely.’ Then he said, trying to make it sound throwaway. ‘You never told me what the cipher-text was.’

‘I told Massinger and Madame Duchesne.’

‘Oh yes, a German bible. But that obviously wasn’t the truth.’

It’s always dangerous to forget how clever Munro is, I now realize as I write this account up. He seems at times so boringly proper – the career soldier, the career diplomat, a neat and tidy man secure in his status and ever so slightly smug and superior, though he tries not to let it show. But not at all – that’s what he wants you to think. I don’t really know why – maybe because he had tried to test me with news about the ‘accessory’ – but I decided to test him, in turn.

‘I decided not to tell them,’ I said. ‘In fact it was the libretto of an obscure German opera.’

‘Oh yes? Called?’

I watched his face very carefully.

‘Andromeda und Perseus.’

He frowned. ‘Don’t think I know it,’ he said with a vague smile.

‘No reason why you should, I suppose. By Gottfried Toller. Premiered in Dresden in 1912.’

‘Ah, modern. That explains it. I was thinking of Lully’s Persée.’

I felt a chill creep through me and I decided there and then not to trust Munro any more, however much I was naturally inclined to like him. Anyone living in Vienna in 1913 would have known about Toller’s Andromeda. Anyone – certainly someone who was familiar with Lully’s Persée. Why was he lying? Why were we both smilingly lying to each other? We were on the same side.

‘Did Glockner give you his libretto?’

‘Yes. In return for the money.’

‘What happened to it?’

‘I lost it. In all the fuss over the shooting. It was left behind somewhere in the nursing home in Evian, I assume. I haven’t seen it since.’

Munro put down his knife and fork and pushed his plate aside.

‘Shame. Could you lay your hands on another copy – through your contacts in the theatrical world, perhaps?’

‘I could try.’

‘Let’s have another pint, shall we? Celebrate your speedy recovery.’

2. A Turner Two-Seater with a Collapsible Hood

Lysander was discharged from Somerville College a week later and decided to take his leave in Sussex as Hamo’s guest in the cottage at Winchelsea. Hamo had acquired a motor car – a Turner two-seater with a collapsible hood – and together they went for drives over the Downs and into Kent to Dungeness and Bexhill, to Sandgate and Beachy Head and one epic journey to Canterbury where they stayed the night before motoring home. Lysander punctuated the motor tours with walks of increasing length as he began to feel stronger and his injured left leg showed signs of bearing up. The scar on his thigh was still unsightly, buckled and lurid – a lot of muscle had been cut away in search of the evasive coins – and after his walks, steadily progressing through half a mile, a mile, two miles, he felt the leg stiff and sore. Still, it was the best thing for it, he reckoned, as he felt his love of walking renewing and, as soon as his confidence had grown sufficiently, he threw his stick away with relief.

On his final Saturday before his return to London they motored into Rye for lunch and then went for a walk on Camber Sands. They made their way down a path through the barbed wire and the crude anti-invasion defences on to the beach. The tide was out and the huge expanse of sand seemed like the vestige of an ancient, perfect desert washed up here on the south coast of England, unbelievably flat and smooth. A mile away someone was flying a kite but otherwise they had the great beach to themselves. Lysander stopped – he thought he could hear the rumble of distant explosions.

‘That’s not from France, is it?’ he said, knowing the offensive was due any day now.

‘No,’ Hamo said. ‘There’s a range up the coast – training gunners. How’s the leg?’

‘Getting better. No pain, but I’m still aware of it, if you know what I mean.’

They strode on in silence. There was a coolness lurking in the afternoon air.

‘Do you know who I mean by Bonham Johnson?’ Hamo asked.

‘The novelist?’

‘Yes. He lives not far away. Over by Romney. Turns out he’s a great admirer of my African book. He’s asked me to his sixtieth birthday party.’

‘You can drive over.’

‘He wants me to bring a guest. In fact he rather specified you – the actor-nephew – I think he’s seen you on stage. You up for it? Week tomorrow.’

Lysander thought – it was the last thing he wanted to do but he rather felt Hamo’s invitation was more entreating than its casual delivery inferred.

‘Assuming I have weekends off – yes. Might be interesting.’

Hamo was clearly very pleased. ‘Literary types – ghastly. Feel I need moral support.’

‘You’re the one who’s written a book, Hamo.’

‘Ah – but you’re the famous actor. They won’t notice me.’

Lysander went up to London on Sunday evening. The Chandos Place flat was still sublet so he booked himself into a small lodging house in Pimlico – with the grandiose name of The White Palace Hotel – not far from the river. He could walk to Parliament Square in thirty minutes or less. Munro had asked him to meet at a place called Whitehall Court on the Monday morning but had been vague as to who else would be there and what would be discussed.

As it turned out, on the Monday morning, Lysander realized that Whitehall Court was one of those London buildings he’d seen from a distance countless times but had never bothered to identify properly. It looked like a vast nineteenth-century château – thousands of rooms with turrets and mansard roofs, containing a gentleman’s club, a hotel and many floors of serviced apartments and offices. It was set back from the river behind its own gardens between Waterloo Bridge and the railway bridge that serviced Charing Cross station.

A uniformed porter checked his name on a clipboard and told him to go up to the top floor, turn left at the top of the stairs, through the door, down a passageway and someone would be waiting. Lysander saw him pick up the telephone on his desk as he made for the foot of the stairway.

That someone turned out to be Munro – in civilian clothes – who showed him into a simple and severely furnished office with a view of the Thames through the windows. Massinger was there waiting, uniformed, and greeted Lysander stiffly, as if he were still guilty for his near-fatal error with his imperfect French. There was a large, leather-topped, walnut desk set back against a wall facing the windows with the chair behind it empty. Someone of greater eminence had yet to arrive.

The three men sat on the available chairs. Munro offered refreshments – tea – and was politely declined. Massinger asked Lysander how he was feeling and Lysander said he felt pretty much back to normal, thank you. A train clattered over the railway bridge from Charing Cross and, as its whistle sounded, as if on cue, the door opened and a grey-haired elderly man in a naval captain’s uniform limped in. The clumping sound as he set his right leg down made Lysander think the limb was artificial. He had a mild, smiley manner – everything about him, apart from the wooden leg, seemed unexceptional. He was not introduced.

‘This is Lieutenant Rief, sir,’ Munro said. ‘Who did the splendid job in Geneva.’

‘Exceptional,’ Massinger chipped in, proprietorially. Switzerland was his territory, Lysander remembered.

‘Congratulations,’ the captain said. ‘So you’re the man who found our rotten apple.’

‘We haven’t quite found him yet, sir,’ Lysander said. ‘But we think we may know what barrel he’s in.’

The captain chuckled, enjoying the metaphor’s resonances.

‘So, what do we do next?’ he said, looking at Massinger and Munro.

‘Not really my area,’ Massinger said, defensively, and once again Lysander wondered about the hierarchy in the room. The captain was the big chief, clearly, but who was the senior between Massinger and Munro? What autonomy did either of them have, if any?

‘I think we have to get Rief into the War Office somehow,’ Munro said. ‘His best asset is that he’s completely unknown – unlike us. Fresh face – a stranger.’

The captain was drumming his fingers on his desk top. ‘How?’ he said. ‘He’s just a lieutenant. Nothing but bigwigs in the War Office.’

‘We set up a commission of enquiry,’ Munro said. ‘Something very boring. Send in Rief with authorization to ask questions and examine documents.’

‘Sir Horace Ede chaired a commission last year on transportation,’ the captain said. ‘There could be some supplementary matters arising –’

‘Exactly. That Lieutenant Rief had to cover and account for.’

‘And there’s a joint nations’ conference coming up which would explain why we have to have everything ship-shape.’

‘Couldn’t be better.’

Massinger was looking increasingly uncomfortable at being sidelined in this way with nothing to contribute. He cleared his throat loudly and everybody stopped talking and looked at him. He held up both hands in apology. Then took out his handkerchief and blew his nose.

‘How long would you need, sir?’ Munro asked.

‘Give me a couple of days,’ the captain said. ‘The higher the authorization the easier it’ll be for Rief, here.’ He turned to Lysander. ‘Hold yourself in readiness, Rief. If we want you right at the heart of things then we need to give you some power.’

Massinger finally spoke. ‘You don’t think we’re treading on M.O. 5’s toes, do you, sir?’

‘This wretched mess all originated out of Geneva,’ the captain said with a trace of impatience in his voice. ‘It was your show – so it’s our show. I’ll square things with Kell. He doesn’t have any men to spare, anyway.’

Lysander didn’t know what they were talking about. He picked at a loose shred of skin on his forefinger.

‘Right, let me get on to it,’ the captain said. ‘We’d better give our rotten apple a codename so we can talk about him.’

‘Any preferences?’ Munro asked.

Lysander thought quickly. ‘How about Andromeda?’ he said, his eyes fixed on Munro. Munro’s face didn’t move.

‘Andromeda it is – so let’s find him, fast,’ the captain said, and rose to his feet. The meeting was over. He crossed the room to Lysander and shook his hand. ‘I saw your father play Macbeth,’ he said. ‘Scared me to bits. Good luck, Rief. Or should I say welcome aboard?’

3. The Annexe on the Embankment

Munro told him to go away and enjoy himself for a few days until he was called for. Once everything had been set up he would be briefed and given precise instructions. So he returned to the White Palace Hotel in Pimlico and tried to keep himself distracted and amused even though he was aware of a steadily increasing undercurrent of uneasiness flowing beneath the surface of his life. Who was this all-powerful captain-figure? What role and sway did he enjoy? To what extent, if at all, could he rely on Munro and Massinger? Could he trust either of them? And why had be been selected, once again, to do his duty as a soldier? Perhaps he’d gain some answers in the coming days, he reflected, but the complete absence of answers – even provisional ones – was troubling.

He went to his tailor, Jobling, and had a small buttonhole fitted for his wound-stripe – an inch-long vertical brass bar worn on the left forearm – sown into the sleeves of his uniform jackets. Jobling was obviously moved when he told him the nature of his injuries. Three of his cutters had joined up and two had already died. ‘Don’t go back there, Mr Rief,’ he said. ‘You’ve done your bloody bit, all right.’ He also adjusted the fit of his jacket – Lysander had lost weight during his convalescence.

He went to see Blanche in The Hour of Danger at the Comedy. Backstage in her dressing room she didn’t allow him to kiss her on the lips. He asked her to supper but she said she couldn’t go as she was ‘seeing someone’. Lysander asked his name but she wouldn’t tell him and they parted coolly, not to say acrimoniously. He sent her flowers the next day to apologize.

He quickly organized a small dinner party in a private room at the Hyde Park Hotel for four of his actor friends with the precise intention of finding out the name of Blanche’s new beau. Everybody knew and, to his alarm, it turned out to be someone he was slightly acquainted with as well – a rather successful playwright that he’d read for called James Ashburnham, a man in his late forties, a widower. A handsome older man with a reputation in the theatre as something of a philanderer, Lysander thought, feeling betrayed, though a moment’s reflection made him realize he had no right to the emotion – he was the one who had broken off their engagement, not Blanche. As Blanche had reminded him, they had decided to remain friends, that was all, consequently her private life was her concern alone.

Of course, being rejected for someone else made him feel hurt and his old feelings for Blanche re-established themselves effortlessly. She was an extremely beautiful, sweet young woman and whatever they had shared together couldn’t be simply tossed aside that easily. What was she doing having an affair with a middle-aged playwright old enough – well, almost – to be her father? He was surprised at how agitated he felt.

On the Friday morning there was a knock at his door and Plumtree, the young chambermaid, told him there was a gentleman to see him in the back parlour. Lysander went downstairs with some trepidation – it was underway, the play was about to start again – orchestra and beginners, please. Fyfe-Miller was waiting for him, smart in a commander’s uniform, with a file of papers under his arm. He locked the door and spread them on the table. He and Munro had analysed the variety of information in the Glockner letter decrypts and were convinced they could only have come from one department in the War Office – the Directorate of Movements. This department was currently housed in an annexe to the War Office on the Embankment in a building near Waterloo Bridge. Lysander was to report there at once to the director, one Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel Osborne-Way, who would ensure that Lysander was provided with his own office and a telephone. He was expected this afternoon – there was no time to waste.

‘Can’t it wait until Monday?’ Lysander asked, plaintively.

‘There’s a war on, Rief, in case you hadn’t noticed,’ Fyfe-Miller said, not smiling for once. ‘What kind of attitude is that? The sooner we find out who this person is, the safer we shall all be.’

At two-thirty that afternoon, Lysander stood across the street from the seven-storey building that housed the Directorate of Movements. He was standing approximately half way between Waterloo Bridge and the Charing Cross Railway Bridge. Cleopatra’s Needle was a few yards away to his left. The phrase ‘searching for a needle in a haystack’ came pessimistically into his head. The Thames was at his back and he could hear the wash of water swirling round the jetties and the moored boats as the tide ebbed. He was smart in his new uniform with his brass wound-bar and with highly polished, buckled leather gaiters encasing his legs from knee to boot. He took his cap off, smoothed his hair and resettled it on his head. He felt strangely nervous but he knew that, above all, he now had to act confident. He lit a cigarette – no hurry. He heard a flap of wings and turned to see a big black crow swoop down and settle on the pavement two yards from him. Big birds, up close, he thought – size of a small hen. Black beak, black eyes, black feathers, black legs. ‘City of kites and crows,’ Shakespeare had said about London, somewhere. He watched as the bird made its hippity-hoppity way towards half a discarded currant bun in the gutter. It pecked away for a while, looking around suspiciously, then a motor car passed too close and it flew off into a plane tree with an irritated squawk.

Lysander realized he could think of three or four symbolic, doom-laden interpretations of this encounter with a London crow but decided to investigate none of them further. He threw his cigarette into the Thames, picked up his attaché case and, watching out for the speeding traffic, made his way across the Embankment to the Annexe’s front door.

Once he’d presented his credentials, Lysander was taken by an orderly up to the fourth floor. They pushed through swing doors into a lobby with two corridors on either side. On the wall were lists of various departments and meaningless acronyms and small arrows indicating which corridor to take – DGMR, Port & Transport Ctte, Railway and Road Engineering, DC (War Office), Ordnance (France), Food Controller (Dover), DART (Mesopotamia), ROD (II), and the like. Lysander and the orderly turned right and walked down a wide linoleum-floored passageway with many doors off it. The sound of typewriters and ringing telephone bells followed them all the way to a door marked ‘Director of Movements’. The orderly knocked and Lysander was admitted.

The Director of Movements, Brevet Lt.-Colonel Osborne-Way (Worcester Regiment) was not at all pleased to see him, so Lysander recognized in about two seconds. His manner was unapologetically brusque and cold. Lysander was not offered a seat, Osborne-Way did not attempt to shake his hand, nor return his salute. Lysander handed him over his magic laissez-passer to the kingdom of the Directorate – a sheet of headed notepaper signed by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff himself, Lieutenant-General Sir James Murray, KCB, that said that ‘the under-named officer, Lieutenant L.U.Rief, is to be afforded every possible assistance and access. He is acting under my personal instructions and is reporting directly to me.’

Osborne-Way read this missive several times as if he couldn’t believe what was actually written down in black and white. He was a short man with a grey toothbrush moustache, and large puffy bags under his eyes. There were seven telephones in a row on his desk and a camp bed with a blanket was set up in the corner of his office.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said, finally. ‘What’s it got to do with the C.I.G.S., himself? Why’s he sending you? Doesn’t he realize how busy we are here?’

As if to illustrate this claim two of the telephones on his desk began to ring simultaneously. He picked up the first and said ‘Yes. Yes . . . repeat, yes. Affirmative.’ Then he picked up the second, listened for a moment and said ‘No,’ and hung up.

‘This is not my idea, sir,’ Lysander said, reasonably. He was affecting a slightly drawling, nasal voice, faintly caddish and bored-sounding, he thought, conscious that this tone would make Osborne-Way like him even less. He didn’t care – he wasn’t entering a popularity contest. ‘I’m just following orders. Some unfinished, supplementary business to Sir Horace Ede’s commission of inquiry on transportation. Matter of some urgency given the up-coming all-nations’ conference.’

‘What do you need from us, then?’ Osborne-Way said, handing the letter back as if it was burning his hand.

‘I’d like a list of all personnel in the Directorate and their distribution of duties. And I’d be grateful if you’d alert everyone in the Directorate to the fact that I am here and have a job to do. At some stage I will want to interview them. The sooner I’m finished the sooner you’ll see the back of me,’ he smiled. ‘Sir.’

‘Very well.’

‘I believe I have an office assigned to me.’

Osborne-Way picked up a telephone and shouted, ‘Tremlett!’ into the mouthpiece.

In about thirty seconds a lance-corporal appeared at the door. He had a black patch over one eye.

‘Tremlett, this is Lieutenant Rief. Take him to Room 205.’ Then to Lysander he said, ‘Tremlett will fetch you any files or documents you need, any person you wish to interview and will provide you with tea and biscuits. Good day.’ He opened a drawer on his desk and began removing papers. The meeting was clearly over. Lysander followed Tremlett back along the wide passageway, taking two right-angled turns as they made for Room 205.

‘Good to have you aboard, sir,’ Tremlett said, turning and giving him a lopsided smile, the portion of his face below the patch not moving. He was a young man in his early twenties, with a London accent. ‘I’m on extension 11. Give me a tinkle whenever you need me. Here we are, sir.’

He opened the door to Room 205. It was a windowless box with a dirty skylight. Here was a table, two wooden chairs and a very old filing cabinet. On the table was a telephone. It was not a room one would want to spend many hours in, Lysander thought.

‘What’s that curious smell?’ he asked.

‘Disinfectant, sir. Colonel Osborne-Way thought we should give the place a good swab-out before you arrived.’

He told Tremlett to bring him Osborne-Way’s list as soon as possible, sat down and lit a cigarette. His eyes were already stinging slightly from the astringency of the disinfectant. The battle lines had been drawn – the Director of Movements had made a pre-emptive strike.

There were twenty-seven members of the Directorate of Movements on the fourth floor of the Annexe, and many clerical and secretarial staff to serve them. Almost all of them were army officers who had been wounded and were unfit for active service. As he looked down the list of names Lysander found himself wondering – which one of you is Andromeda? Which one of you has been sending coded messages to Manfred Glockner in Geneva? Who has access to the astounding detail those letters contained? Where are you, Andromeda? Temporary Captain J.C.T. Baillie (Royal Scots)? Or temporary Major S.A.M.M. Goodforth (Irish Guards)? . . . He leafed through the typed pages, wondering what had made him choose Andromeda as the name of the traitor in the Directorate. Andromeda – a helpless, naked, beautiful young woman chained to the rocks at the ocean’s edge, waiting terrified for the approach of the sea monster Cetus – didn’t exactly conform to the stereotypical image of a man actively and efficiently betraying his country. ‘Cetus’ might have been more apt – but he liked the ring and the idea of looking for an ‘Andromeda’. The paradox was more intriguing.

But he quickly became aware as he contemplated Osborne-Way’s list that it would not be an easy process. He picked a name at random: temporary Captain M.J. McCrimmon (Royal Sussex Regiment). Duties – 1. Despatch of units and drafts to India and Mesopotamia. 2. Inter-colonial moves. 3. Admiralty transport claims and individual passage claims to and from India. He picked another – temporary Major E.C. Lloyd-Russell (Retired. Special Reserve). Duties – 1. Despatch of units and drafts from India to France (Force ‘A’) and Egypt (Force ‘E’). 2. Union of South Africa contingent. Labour corps from South Africa and India to France. 3. Supervision of Stores Service from the USA and Canada to the United Kingdom. Then there was Major L.L. Eardley (Royal Engineers). Duties – 1. Travelling concessions and irregularities. 2. Issue of railway warrants unconnected with embarkation. 3. General questions concerning railways and canals in the United Kingdom.

And so it went on, Lysander beginning to feel a mild nausea as he tried to take all this amount of work – these ‘duties’ – on board. He ordered a pot of tea and some biscuits from Tremlett. He thought of himself as a child on the roof of a vast factory peering down through a skylight at all the machinery and the people inside. Who were they? What were they doing? What was being made? All these strange jobs and responsibilities – ‘Railway Engineering Services. Accounts for work services. Occupation and rent of railway property. Shipping statistics. Labour Corps to France. Re-mounts to France. Long-voyage hospital ships. Despatches of stores to theatres of war other than France. Construction of sidings . . .’ They went on and on. And this was only one department in the War Office. And there were thousands of people working in the War Office. And this was only one country at war. The Directorate of Movements would have its equivalent in France, in Germany, in Russia, in Austria-Hungary . . .

He began to feel dizzy as he sat there trying to conceptualize the massive scale of this industrial bureaucracy in the civilized world, all directed to the common end of providing for its warring armies. What gigantic effort, what millions of man-hours expended, day after day, week after week, month after month. As he tried to come to terms with it, to visualize in some way this prodigious daily struggle, he found himself perversely glad that he had actually been in the front line. Maybe that was why they employed wounded soldiers rather than civil servants or other professional functionaries. These temporary Captains and Majors in the Directorate of Movements at least knew the physical, intimate consequences of the ‘movement of stores’ that they ordered.

Lysander personalized it, grimly. When he had thrown that Mills no.5 bomb into the sap beneath the ruined tomb it was the final moment in the history of travel of that small piece of ordnance – a history that stretched back through space and time like a ghoulish, spreading wake. From ore mined in Canada, shipped to Britain, smelted, moulded, turned, filled and packed in a box, designated as ‘stores to be transported from the United Kingdom to France’. Perhaps new sidings had been built in a rural railway station in northern France to accommodate the train carrying these stores (and what was involved in constructing a siding, he wondered). And from there it would be transferred to a dump or depot by animal transport whose forage was supplied through Rouen and Havre, also. Then soldiers would carry the boxes of bombs up to the line through communication trenches dug by ‘labour from the Union of South Africa’. And then that Mills no. 5 bomb eventually found itself in the kitbag of Lt. Lysander Rief, who threw it into a sap beneath a tomb in no man’s land and a man with a moustache and a fair-haired boy struggled to find it in the dark amongst the tumbled masonry, hoping and praying that some defect in its manufacture, or some malfunction caused by its long journey, would cause it not to detonate . . . No such luck.

Lysander found that he was sweating. Stop. That way madness lies. He thought of tips of icebergs or inverted pyramids but then an image came to him from nowhere that seemed to cohere with what he had been imagining more fittingly. A winter bonfire.

He remembered how, on very cold days in winter, when you lit a bonfire the smoke sometimes refused to rise. The slightest breeze would move it flatly across the land, a low enlarging horizontal plume of smoke that hugged the ground and never dispersed into the air as it did with a normal fire on a warmer day. He saw all the monstrous, gargantuan effort of the war as a winter bonfire – yes, but in reverse. As if the drifting, ground-hugging pall of smoke were converging – arrowing in – on one point, to feed the small, angry conflagration of the fire. All those miles of broad, dense, drifting smoke narrowing, focussing on the little crackling flickering flames burning vivid orange amongst the fallen leaves and the dead branches.

Lysander left Room 205 and wandered the corridors of the Directorate, passing other officers and secretarial staff as he went. Nobody paid him any attention, the ringing of the phones and the dry clatter of the typewriter keys a constant aural backdrop. He peered into one room where the door was ajar and saw three officers sitting at their desks all speaking into their telephones. Two women typists faced each other typing, as if duelling, somehow. He walked down the stairs and saw the signs on the other floors –

MOVEMENTS, RAILWAYS AND ROADS

INLAND WATER TRANSPORT (FRANCE)

INSPECTOR-GENERAL (ALL THEATRES)

IRISH RAILWAYS

He stepped out, feeling exhausted and a little overwhelmed, on to the Embankment and took some deep breaths of dirty London air. He stretched, flexed his shoulder muscles, rolled his head around, easing his neck, feeling weak and almost tearful at the magnitude of the task he’d been set. Who the hell was Andromeda? And, when he found him, what would happen then?

4. English Courage

‘You know,’ Hamo said over the noise of the engine, ‘I never feel nervous about anything in life but I feel strangely nervous today.’

They were in the Turner two-seater motoring towards Romney on Sunday morning, heading for Bonham Johnson’s lunch party.

‘I know what you mean,’ Lysander said, leaning towards him and cupping his hand around his mouth. ‘I felt exactly the same the other day when I went into the War Office. First day at school.’ He looked around and saw a signpost flash by – Fairfield, 2 miles. ‘Let’s stop at a pub or a hotel and have a drink first. Dutch courage. Why’s it called Dutch courage? English courage is what we need.’

‘Excellent idea,’ Hamo said. He was wearing a flat leather cap, reversed, and driving goggles. They had the hood of the two-seater down as the day was fine, though breezy. They both wore greatcoats and Lysander had his Trilby tied securely on his head with his scarf.

They found a small pub in Fairfield and ordered whisky sodas at the bar.

Hamo said, ‘I’m just terrified that one of these literary types is going to ask me about Shakespeare or Milton.’

‘No they won’t. You’re the one they want to see and meet. You wrote The Lost Lake. That’s what they’ll want to talk about – not Keats and Wordsworth.’

‘I wish I had your confidence, my boy.’

‘Hamo, you’ve won the Victoria Cross, for god’s sake. They’re just a bunch of idle writers.’

‘Still . . .’

‘No. Do what I do. If I don’t feel confident I act confident.’

‘I’ll try. That’s exactly what your father would have said. D’you know, I think another whisky would help.’

‘Go on, then. Me too.’

Lysander watched his uncle go up to the bar to order another round, feeling a kind of love for him. He looked slim and upright in his dark grey suit, the ceiling light shining off his bald pate like some incipient halo. Hamo’s halo. Nice thought.

Bonham Johnson’s house – Pondshill Place – was large and imposing – a Victorian farm of cut and moulded red brick and tall groups of chimney-stacks. At one end was a wide bow window looking over a terraced garden that fell gently to a reflecting pool surrounded by closely clipped obelisks of box trees. There was a barn and stable block to one side where the guests’ motor cars were to be parked. A farm labourer waved them into the courtyard where there were already a dozen cars in two neat rows.

‘Oh good,’ Hamo said. ‘Looks like a big crowd. I can hide myself.’

The main door to Pondshill Place was opened by a butler, who invited them to ‘go through to the saloon’. This was the drawing room with the big curved bay window and was already occupied by upward of twenty people – all very casually dressed, Lysander noticed, glad that he had decided on a suit of light Harris tweed. He saw some men without ties and women in brightly coloured print dresses. He whispered, ‘Relax!’ to Hamo and they helped themselves to a glass of sherry from a tray held by an extremely pretty young maid, Lysander noticed.

Bonham Johnson was a very stout man with longish thinning hair and a grizzled pointed beard that made him look vaguely Jacobean, Lysander thought. He introduced himself and launched into a fluent and protracted hymn of praise to The Lost Lake of Africa – ‘Extraordinary, unparalleled.’ Even Hamo yielded in the face of this encomium and Lysander happily let Johnson lead him away across the room, hearing him ask, ‘Do you know Joseph Conrad? No? You’ll have a lot in common.’

Lysander headed back to the maid with the sherry and helped himself to another glass.

‘What time is lunch being served?’ he asked, fixing her with his eyes. She was strikingly pretty. What was she doing serving Bonham Johnson’s guests?

‘About one-thirty, sir. Still a few more guests to arrive.’

‘This may seem a strange question. But have you ever thought of –’

‘Lysander?’

He turned round and for a brief second didn’t recognize her. The hair was darker, cut short with a severe straight fringe across the eyebrows. She was wearing a jersey dress with great lozenges of colour blocks – orange, buttercup-yellow, cinnamon. He felt himself shiver, visibly. The shock-effect was palpable, unignorable.

‘Hettie . . .’

‘I’m so glad you could come. I told Bonham that your uncle would be the best way to lure you here.’ She leaned forward and kissed his cheek and he smelled her scent again, for the first time in a year and a half. Now he had tears in his eyes. He closed them.

‘So it was all your doing . . .’

‘Yes. I had to find a way of seeing you. You’re not going to be beastly to me, are you?’ she said.

‘No. No, I’m not.’

‘Are you all right? You’ve gone quite pale.’

‘Is Lothar here?’

‘Of course not. He’s in Austria.’

This was impossible. He felt he was in some kind of emotion-race, feelings and sensations succeeding each other in a frantic, spinning helter-skelter.

‘Can we get out of here?’ he managed to say.

‘No. Jago would be horribly suspicious. In fact he won’t even like me talking to you for very long.’

‘Who’s Jago?’

‘My husband – Jago Lasry.’

Lysander sensed he was meant to react to the name but he had never heard of the man.

Hettie looked at him sardonically.

‘Come on, don’t play those games with me. Jago Lasry, author of Crépuscules. Mmm? Ring a bell? The Quick Blue Fox and other stories. Yes?’

‘I’ve been in the army since the war started – very out of touch.’

She moved closer and he was reminded of how small-made and tiny she was – the top of her head reaching his chest. She lowered her voice.

‘I’m sitting beside you at lunch but we must pretend to be strangers – almost-strangers, anyway. And I’m not called Hettie any more. I’m Venora.’

‘Venora?’

‘A Celtic name. I always hated being called Hettie. It seemed fine in Vienna but it’s all wrong here. Imagine being Hettie Lasry! See you at lunch.’

She walked away and Lysander, still in awful turmoil, mistily watched her ease her way through the crowd of guests to greet one of the tieless young men. A small wiry fellow, in his late twenties, Lysander supposed, with a dark patchy beard, wearing a maroon corduroy suit. Jago Lasry, author of Crépuscules. He saw the man’s head turn to seek him out. So Hettie/Venora had been behind this invitation . . . he wondered what she wanted of him. He drained his sherry glass and went back for a refill.

He heard the rest of Hettie’s story at lunch – in fits and starts, out of sequence, with many a doubling-back and re-explanation, at his insistence. To his shock he discovered she had been living in England since the beginning of the year. She had left Vienna in November 1914 and had crossed into Switzerland, making her roundabout way back home via Italy and Spain.

‘Why didn’t you bring Lothar with you?’

‘He’s much happier in Austria. He’s living in Salzburg with one of Udo’s aunts. Happy as anything.’

‘Have you got a photograph of him?’

‘I have, but . . . not here. Jago doesn’t know about Lothar, as it happens. Let’s keep it between ourselves, if you don’t mind.’

She had met Jago Lasry shortly after her return and they had married in May (‘Love at first glimpse,’ she said), so it transpired, and they were currently living in Cornwall in a cottage owned by Bonham Johnson. Lasry was a protégé of Johnson, who had been very generous with introductions to publishers and editors and the provider of small loans, when required, so Hettie told him. Lysander glanced across the table at Lasry – a skinny, intense man who appeared to eat his food with the same concentration and urgency as he spoke. He suspected Bonham Johnson was more than a little in love with his protégé.

‘I told Jago that you and I had met briefly in Vienna,’ Hettie said. ‘That we were both seeing the same doctor there. Just in case he was suspicious.’

‘Bensimon’s back in London, you know. I heard from him.’

Hettie looked at him in that strange way she had. A bizarre mixture of sudden interest and what seemed like potential threat.

‘Just like the old days, eh?’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’

She looked away and asked the person next to her to pass the salt. Lysander felt her hand on his thigh under the table and her fingers quickly searching for and finding the bulge of his penis. She gripped him hard through the cloth of his trousers, then ran her fingertips up and down. He reached for his wine glass, as if it would give him support – he thought he might swoon or cry out. She took her hand away.

‘I have to see you,’ he said, quietly, a little hoarsely, talking into his plate, trying not to look at her, slicing his lamb into small pieces to keep his mind occupied. ‘I’m staying in London. A small hotel in Pimlico called The White Palace. They’ve a telephone.’

‘I don’t know if I can get up to London. Difficult – but I can try.’

‘Send me a postcard – The White Palace Hotel, Pimlico, London, South West.’

Now she had turned to look at him again and he stared into those slightly-too-wide, pale hazel eyes. He realized that seeing her again here was a watershed. He felt he knew himself once more, understood the kind of person he was, what he needed, what he asked of life.

‘I promise I’ll do my best,’ she said. ‘Listen. You couldn’t lend me some money, by any chance, could you?’

‘Surprisingly nice fellow, that Bonham Johnson,’ Hamo said. ‘Put me completely at my ease. What a fuss I made for nothing – I could tell he was musical at once.’

‘Musical?’

‘One of us.’

‘Ah. Right.’

‘What did you need ten pounds for?’ Hamo asked, stooping to crank the starting handle of the Turner. ‘Lucky I had some cash on me.’

‘I had to lend it to that woman I introduced you to. Vanora Lasry.’

‘Very generous of you,’ Hamo said, clambering on board the now gently shuddering vehicle. ‘To lend all that money to a perfect stranger.’

‘That was her, Hamo,’ Lysander confessed with relief. ‘That was Hettie Bull – the mother of my son.’

‘Good god!’

They pulled away out of the stable block and headed back across flat expanses of the marsh towards the main road to Rye. Lysander leaned close and shouted a brief explanation of what had taken place into Hamo’s ear. As he listened, Hamo’s head shook more regularly in bemusement and sympathy.

‘I’ve got nothing to say to you, dear boy. Not a word of reproach. I know exactly what you’re feeling. La coeur a ses raisons. Oh, yes!’

They motored along at a steady speed, the light fading, and when they caught glimpses of the Channel as the road took them closer to the coast they saw the setting sun burnishing the sea, like hammered silver. Lysander felt both exhilarated and confused. Meeting Hettie again made him achingly conscious once more of the irrefutable nature of his obsession with her. Obsession – or love? Or was it something more unhealthy – a kind of craving, an addiction?

He and Hamo sat up late, talking, drinking whisky – Lysander taking the opportunity to relate Hettie’s story in more detail.

‘Are you going to see her again?’ Hamo asked.

‘Yes. I have to.’

‘Are you sure that’s wise – now she’s married and all that?’

‘Very unwise, I’d have thought. But I can’t see any alternative, Hamo. I’m sort of in thrall to her.’

‘I understand. Oh, yes, I understand.’

Hettie had introduced Lysander to Jago Lasry after lunch was finished and Lysander felt himself being scrutinized, the suspicion and scepticism overt. Hettie linked arms with her husband, trying to emanate uxorious contentment.

‘We both had the same doctor in Vienna,’ Lysander said, searching for something bland and conventional to say to this coiled, angry, small man.

‘Same quack, you mean.’

‘I wouldn’t go that far.’

‘How far would you go, Mr Rief?’

‘Let’s say Dr Bensimon was a great help to me, therapeutically. Made a huge difference.’

‘He just fed Vanora drugs.’

‘Freud himself used Coca. Wrote a book about it.’

They then had a short, fervid discussion about the demerits of Sigmund Freud and Freudianism. Lysander began to feel increasingly out of his depth as Lasry spoke of Carl Jung and the 4th International Psychoanalytical Conference in Munich in 1913, subjects Lysander knew nothing about. He found himself trying to place Lasry’s accent – Midlands, he thought, Nottingham coalfields – but before he could be any more precise Johnson drew Lasry away to meet ‘the editor of the English Review’. Lysander stood there swaying, exhausted.

‘I’d better join him,’ Hettie said. ‘I can see you’ve put him in one of his moods.’

‘Why didn’t you come to me the moment you were back in England?’ Lysander said, suddenly aggrieved and hurt.

‘I thought it was pointless – thought you’d never forgive me for Lothar. And the police. And all the rest.’

Lysander remembered his travails in Vienna at Hettie’s hands, experiencing a sudden vivid recall of his anger and frustration. He wondered why he couldn’t sustain these brief, intense rages that Hettie provoked. What was it about her? How did she undermine them so easily?

‘I forgive you,’ he said, weakly. ‘Come and see me in London. Please. We’ll sort everything out.’

And what did he mean by that? – he thought as he went up the stairs to his bedroom that night, his head numb and muddy with all the whisky he’d drunk and the swarm of emotions that had persecuted him all day. As he undressed he remembered that the hunt for Andromeda was meant to begin in earnest the next morning. In his troubled half-drunkenness he thought that, actually, in a house in Romney in the heart of Romney Marsh he had met the real Andromeda herself once more, in all her importunate beauty.

Coincidence? What was the Viennese connection in the Andromeda affair, he wondered dozily. If Hettie hadn’t accused him of rape, if he hadn’t called on Munro at the embassy, if he hadn’t artfully engineered his own escape, then his current life would be entirely different. But what was the point of that? The view backward showed you all the twists and turns your life had taken, all the contingencies and chances, the random elements of good luck and bad luck that made up one person’s existence. Still, questions buzzed around his brain all night as he tossed and fidgeted, punched and turned his pillows, opened and closed the windows of his room, waiting for sunrise. He managed to sleep for an hour and was up and dressed at dawn, off to the Winchelsea Inn for a pony and trap to take him into Rye. Monday, 27th September, 1915. The hunt was on.

5. Autobiographical Investigations

I bought a newspaper this morning on my walk to the Annexe. ‘Great offensive at Loos’; ‘Enemy falls back before our secret weapon’; ‘Significant advances across the whole front despite heavy casualties’. The vapid vocabulary of jingoistic military journalism. It had all started this weekend while I was at Winchelsea and at Bonham Johnson’s lunch party as I was sipping sherry, feeling Hettie grip me under the table and arguing about Freud with her obnoxious husband. There are long faces in the Annexe, however. Here in the Directorate we quickly know when the ambulance trains are full. Provision was made for 40,000 wounded men and already it appears inadequate. Not enough heavy artillery, ammunition dumps insufficiently supplied. Our cloud of poison gas seems to have had the most partial effectiveness – reports have come in complaining that it hung in the air over no man’s land or else drifted back into our trenches to blind and confuse our own men waiting to attack. The one thing we can’t supply from the Directorate of Movements is a stiff westerly breeze, alas.

Going through Osborne-Way’s list it’s at once obvious that a significant number of the officers in the Directorate could not possibly have access to all the information in the Glockner letters. However, I’ve decided as a matter of policy and subterfuge to interview everyone – I don’t want to concentrate on any particular group and thereby raise suspicions. Andromeda, whoever he is, mustn’t develop the slightest concern over this supplementary enquiry into Sir Horace Ede’s Commission on Transportation. So, I’ve summoned Tremlett and given him the entire list of interviewees. I begin with one Major H.B. O’Terence, responsible for ‘Travelling claims by land. Visits of relatives to wounded in hospital in France’. He’s going to be a busy man in the coming days and weeks – best to finish with him first.

It has proved to be both a shock and unusually destabilizing to have seen Hettie. All my sex-feelings for her have returned in an instant. Incredible desire. Old images of her naked and what we did with each other. And all my contradictions and confusions about her crowd in as well. Vanora Lasry – I can hardly believe it. And what about Lothar? Your son, your little boy. Again, emotions wax and wane. One second he seems unreal, a product of my imagination, a fantasy – and then, the next, I find myself thinking of this little boy, this baby, living in a suburb of Salzburg with Udo Hoff’s aunt. Does Hettie care? Why wouldn’t she tell her new husband that he has a stepson? I bought Lasry’s book of poems, Crépuscules. Modern nonsense in the main. Free verse is both seductive and dangerous, I can see – it can be a licence to be pretentious and obscure. Lasry often abuses it, in my opinion. I take more care.

SEVENTH CAPRICE IN PIMLICO

The dawn created itself

And turned to see what had been lit.

Rubbish, litter, broken glass and a bit

Of green England, unsmirched, a glance

At something beautiful. Behold the dance:

The girls advance,

The boys decline.

Emerging from the Piccadilly Line

I find the tropic odours of Leicester Square

Beguile and mesmerize.

I roam the streets at midnight. The glare

Of gaslights an artificial sunrise.

‘

Les colombes de ma cousine

Pleurent comme un enfant

.’

I asked Tremlett to do me a favour and to look up the casualty lists of the Manchester Fusiliers – to check whether a Lt. Gorlice-Law or a Sergeant Foley appeared. He came back with the news that Lt. Gorlice-Law had died of wounds on June 27th and a Sgt. Foley was in a hospital in Stoke Newington. ‘He must be blind, sir,’ Tremlett said, pointing to his patch. ‘That’s where they took my peeper out.’ So Gorlice-Law died the day after our raid into no man’s land . . . I feel I have to try and see Foley and find out exactly what happened that night after I crawled away and left them. Feelings of guilt inexorably creep over me. Was it my fault? No, you fool. You were ordered to bomb that sap to create a diversion. After that the gods of war and luck took over and you were as much subject to their fatal whim as any of the thousands of soldiers facing each other on both sides of the line.

6. Unlikely Suspects

Lysander interviewed the officers of the Directorate over the next three days in the cramped and antiseptic quarters of Room 205. All were conducted in the same tone of apologetic tedium and polite routine – he wanted to make no one remotely suspicious or alarmed. He asked for their understanding – he knew he was wasting precious time – and strove to be as amiable as possible, but the men he saw were uniformly wary and resentful – sometimes even contemptuous. Osborne-Way had obviously been at work preparing the ground.

He ended up with a list of six key names, including the Director, Osborne-Way, himself. All these men were capable, theoretically, of reproducing the specific type of information contained in the Glockner letters. Four of them were responsible for ‘Movement and control of war material and stores to France’. One dealt with control of ports, one with railway material – ‘tanks, road metal, timber, slag and coal’. One was a rare civilian in the Directorate who was solely concerned with the compilation of shipping statistics – so every fact ended at his desk. Apart from Osborne-Way (an unlikely suspect, though Lysander refused to rule him out – unlikely suspects were more suspect in his opinion) the two men who most interested him were a Major Mansfield Keogh (Royal Irish Regiment) who was the Assistant Director of Movements – Osborne-Way’s number two – and a Captain Christian Vandenbrook (King’s Royal Rifle Corps) who supervised the ‘despatch to France of ammunition, ordnance, supplies and Royal Engineers’ stores’.

In principle the Directorate of Movements retained no more responsibility once stores were landed at Le Havre, Rouen or Calais; at that moment the Quartermaster General’s department at headquarters in St Omer took over. However, in practice, there were always problems – trains went missing, ammunition found itself in the wrong depots, ships were sunk in the Channel. Significantly, Lysander thought, both Keogh and Vandenbrook had been to France independently on three occasions in 1915 (Osborne-Way had been twice) to liaise with the Director of Railway Transport and his staff and to supervise the construction of marshalling yards and sidings behind the lines. There was ideal opportunity to discover everything the Glockner letters contained.

Keogh was a quiet, earnest, efficient man who seemed consumed by some private sadness. He was civil and prompt with his answers but Lysander felt he regarded him as a mere nothing – a buzzing fly, a crumpled piece of paper, a leaf on the pavement. Keogh looked at him with empty eyes. By contrast, Vandenbrook was the most open and charming of his interviewees. He was a small, lithe, handsome man with perfect, even features and a fair moustache with the ends dashingly turned up. His teeth – he smiled regularly – were almost unnaturally white, Lysander thought. Vandenbrook was the only person he talked to who asked him about himself and who seemed happy to acknowledge that he’d seen him on stage before the war. Lysander knew his past life was common knowledge in the Directorate – he had overheard Osborne-Way refer to him as the ‘bloody actor-chappie’ more than once – but only Vandenbrook made overt and unconcerned reference to his stage career and Lysander liked him for it.

The War Diary of the Directorate had revealed the facts about Keogh’s and Vandenbrook’s trips to France. Tremlett supplied him with the ledger that detailed all the departmental ‘travelling claims by land’. Keogh had responsibility for the port of Dover; Vandenbrook for Folkestone. Both men visited the ports every few days, where the Directorate kept branch offices, and their expenses – train tickets, hotels, taxis, porters, meals and refreshments – were docketed, copied and filed. Lysander decided to investigate Keogh first, then Vandenbrook, then Osborne-Way. Save the biggest beast for last.

Lysander saw Keogh come out of the Annexe and walk through to Charing Cross. He followed at a safe distance though he thought it unlikely he’d be recognized. He was wearing a false moustache, a bowler hat and was carrying a briefcase. He had chosen an old dark suit and made it short in the arms to expose the frayed cardboard cuffs of his shirt, looking, he hoped, like one of the thousands of clerical workers who spilled out of the great ministries of state in Whitehall at the end of the working day and began their routine journey homewards by the various means of public transport – omnibus, tram, and Underground and Tube railway. He followed Keogh on to the Underground at Charing Cross and sat at the far end of the compartment from him as they rattled along the District Line and over the Thames to East Putney. He watched Keogh plod up Upper Richmond Road and then turn off into a street of semi-detached brick villas. Keogh went into number 26. From inside the house Lysander could hear the faint barking of a dog, quickly silenced. He saw that the blinds of every window were drawn down. It was still light – perhaps he was one of the few London households that observed a proper blackout against the Zeppelin raids, but there seemed little point in that if your neighbours were lax. A death in the family? . . .

He spotted a woman pushing a pram up the pavement on the other side of the road and so crossed and came up behind her. Putting on a slight cockney accent he asked if she knew which house Mr and Mrs Keogh lived in.

‘I been knockin’ on the wrong door, missus, it seems.’

‘You want number 26, dear,’ she said. ‘But don’t go asking for Mrs Keogh, though.’

‘Why’s that, then?’

‘Because she died two months ago. Diphtheria. Very sad, terrible shame. Lovely young woman. Beautiful.’

Lysander thanked her and walked away. So, a recent widower – that explained the vacant, indifferent stare. Did that rule him out? Or did the meaningless death of a beautiful young wife provoke feelings of nihilism and rage against the world? He would have to find out more about Major Keogh. In the meantime he would turn his attention to Captain Christian Vandenbrook.

Vandenbrook was rich enough to take a taxi home from work. Lysander sat in the back of a cab at the end of the afternoon outside the Annexe, watched Vandenbrook flag down a passing taxi and followed it to his club in St James’s. Two hours later he emerged, hailed another cab and was driven home to Knightsbridge to a large white stucco house in an elegant sweep of terrace off the Brompton Road. Vandenbrook was doing very well for a captain in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps.

Lysander dismissed his taxi and walked up and down the smart crescent of large houses. Through a window he caught a glimpse of Vandenbrook accepting a cut-crystal tumbler from a silver tray held by a butler. Staff, as well. Twenty minutes later another taxi pulled up and a couple – dressed for dinner – descended and rang the doorbell. Lysander returned to his small hotel in Pimlico, conscious that someone with Vandenbrook’s manifest privileges had no real need to turn traitor. Osborne-Way was next.

At the hotel he found he had a postcard, sent from St Austell, Cornwall. It read, ‘Arriving Friday evening. Have booked room at White Palace, Pimlico. Vanora.’

Tremlett fetched him the ledger of ‘Travelling claims by land’ and stood there waiting for further instructions as Lysander flicked through the pages.

‘Colonel Osborne-Way hasn’t filed any expenses claims.’

‘No, sir. He sends his direct to the War Office. He was on the General Staff – seconded here, like.’

‘Seems odd. Can we get them?’

Tremlett sucked his teeth.

‘We can try but it might take a while. We may need you to go yourself with your magic letter.’

‘Thanks, Tremlett, that’ll be all for the moment.’

He looked through Keogh’s claims and noted the dates he’d been to Dover over the past months; then he turned to Vandenbrook and collated their respective journeys – some days they tallied, some days they didn’t. However, he noticed that Vandenbrook very rarely stayed in Folkestone – his accommodation claims were for hotels in Deal, Hastings, Sandwich, Hythe and once in Rye. Probably keen to get some golf in, Lysander thought, leafing through the dockets, or else wanted to be away from the Directorate organization – sensible man.

There was a knock on his door. Lysander put the bottle of champagne back in the ice-bucket and crossed the room, trying to stay calm, and opened the door. Hettie stood there, smiling, as if this encounter were the most natural and normal in the world.

‘What a funny little hotel you chose,’ she said, stepping in. ‘My room’s minute.’ Lysander closed the door behind her, feeling as if his chest were stuffed with hot, rough wool – an ill, constrained breathlessness stopping him speaking. He sensed a weakness flow through him, as though his knees might buckle and he’d fall to the floor.

‘Aren’t you going to give me a kiss?’ Hettie said, unpinning her hat and throwing it on to a chair. ‘Let’s take our clothes off now – then we can drink our champagne.’

‘Hettie, for heaven’s sake –’

‘Come on, Lysander. Race you.’

They kissed. He felt his lips on hers and then her tongue in his mouth. They undressed and Lysander opened the champagne and poured it. He noticed Hettie had kept her hosiery on and her high-heeled shoes and her jewellery. Jet beads at the neck, a cluster of ivory bracelets.

‘Why are we doing this?’ he asked, faintly. ‘This way.’

‘Because I know you, Lysander. Remember?’ she said, almost scoldingly. ‘Because I know what you like.’ She strode around the room, unselfconsciously, checked that the curtains were properly drawn. ‘It’s exciting, isn’t it? To be naked in a hotel room in Pimlico drinking champagne . . .’ She glanced down at him. ‘My – you seem to agree.’

She came over to him and he touched her breasts and drew her close. Again, oddly, he felt like weeping – as if some form of destiny were being fulfilled, here in this unassuming room; that he was here with Hettie in his arms, once more. This was the problem with her, he acknowledged – or, rather, this was his problem with Hettie – it was like being with no other woman. He had never felt this need, this strongly, with anyone else.

She kissed his chest and he put his arms around her. She hugged her small body against his.

She raised her face and whispered, ‘I’ve missed you.’ Then she took him in her hand and led him compliantly to the bed.

7. The Dene Hotel, Hythe

The Directorate of Movements had opened and maintained branch offices in Dover and Folkestone since the end of 1914, the easier to supervise the loading and despatch of the millions of tons of stores that were sent out to France each week. They were staffed mainly with former port authority officials and clerical workers but, every few days, Keogh and Vandenbrook would make a routine journey to oversee the office work or, more likely, sort out problems.

Looking through the departmental memoranda on Monday Lysander saw that two cargo vessels had collided in the Channel, one of them sinking with the loss of ‘600 black labour drowned (approx.)’. Osborne-Way had added a note in the margin in his small crabbed schoolboy’s hand, ‘Attn. Capt. VdenB.’ Lysander asked Tremlett where Vandenbrook was and he came back with the information that he had not come into the Annexe that morning but had gone straight to Folkestone to ‘sort out the steaming mess’.

Lysander told Tremlett to have a railway pass made out for him and he caught a train to the coast from Victoria before noon. At Folkestone he negotiated with a taxi-driver who grudgingly agreed to stay with him until midnight for £5 cash. Lysander thought of the soldiers in the trenches earning their eighteen pennies a day for their unique version of the diurnal grind. Still, the mobility might be essential – he had a feeling Vandenbrook wouldn’t be spending the night in Folkestone.

He had the taxi park a little way up the street from the Directorate offices in Marine Parade and settled down to wait. It turned out to be a long one, Vandenbrook not emerging until seven o’clock that evening. A motor car drew up and he climbed in. They headed out of town, going west along the main coast road towards Hythe. Vandenbrook was dropped off at the front door of the Dene Hotel – a neat brick and hung-tile, two-storey building with a garage at the rear and a modern extension, just off the high street on the lower slopes of the hill that led up to Hythe’s principal church, St Leonards. The car drove away, returning to Folkestone. After five minutes, Lysander followed him in.

The reception lobby was a low, beamed area with doors off to a saloon bar and a dining room and a fine curved oak staircase that led to the bedrooms on the first floor. Far more comfortable than the Commercial Hotel, Folkestone, he was sure, and where Directorate staff usually stayed, so Tremlett had informed him. Lysander saw fresh flowers in a bowl on the reception desk and read the posted menu outside the dining room where he noted a simple but classic choice of English dishes – a roast, a saddle of lamb, devilled kidneys, Dover sole. He felt suddenly hungry – no wonder Vandenbrook preferred to find his own lodgings.

He went into the bar and chose a seat where he had a view of the lobby through the glass-paned door. He ordered a whisky and soda and thought he’d wait until Vandenbrook came down for dinner and surprise him. They would have a laugh about it and at least he’d eat a decent meal before he caught the last train back to London.

He sipped his whisky and lit a cigarette, his mind turning inevitably towards Hettie and the night they’d spent together. She could only stay until morning, she had said, as she had to meet Lasry in Brighton, where they were going to look for somewhere to live – Cornwall was beginning to pall, so far away, and Bonham Johnson was urging them to be closer to London. She promised Lysander that she would come back to London for several days as soon as she could think up an excuse that would appease her suspicious husband. Lysander thought he might rent a small service apartment in a mansion block somewhere central where they could safely spend time together – he was growing tired of hotel life, anyway, and god knew how long he’d be stuck in the Directorate of Movements, searching for Andromeda. He wasn’t anticipating his investigation of Osborne-Way with any great pleasure. He’d have to be exceptionally cautious, take real pains not to be –

His mother walked into the hotel.

His first instinct was to rush out into the lobby and surprise her, but something made him shrink back in his seat. She was wearing a fur coat and one of the new, fashionably smaller hats. She spoke to the receptionist and a porter was called and sent away. Luggage? Was she staying the night? The mâitre d’ emerged from the dining room and shook her hand, obsequiously. She must be known here . . . She was led away towards the dining room and out of his line of sight.

Lysander would have liked to put this encounter down as one of life’s many coincidences. Coincidences – the most extraordinary coincidences – happened all the time, he knew, and in a manner that would make the laziest farceur blush. But life’s strange congruences were not applicable here – every suddenly aching bone in his body was telling him that this was no accidental coming-together of the respective orbits of Vandenbrook, Rief and Anna, Lady Faulkner. Then he saw Vandenbrook come down the stairs, cigarette in hand, and turn into the dining room. He knew instantly that he was going to his mother’s table, that this rendezvous had been planned, but decided to wait five minutes before he sought his ‘ocular proof’. He strolled out of the bar and pretended to consult a map of Hythe conveniently hung to one side of the dining-room door. It was ajar and he could see at an angle into the salon. There was a fireplace and a dozen tables, half of them occupied. And there in the corner was his mother, accepting a glass of wine poured by the sommelier, and there across the table from her was Christian Vandenbrook. They toasted each other – they seemed familiar and relaxed – clearly this was not their first introduction. As they talked and consulted the menu, Lysander saw that they were displaying all the timeworn and conventional feints and poor disguises of lovers meeting in a public place and hoping the real nature of their relationship would be invisible.

8. The Colonel’s Daimler

‘I need a motor car, Tremlett,’ Lysander said. ‘I have to do a tour of the south-east. Does the Directorate have transport?’

‘There is Colonel Osborne-Way’s motor, sir. A Daimler. Sits in the garage for weeks at a time.’

‘That’ll do nicely.’

‘I think we’ll have need of your magic letter, however, sir.’

It turned out to be a big, new, maroon-and-black, 1914-model, seven-seater Daimler that had been ordered and paid for straight from the Daimler works in Coventry by the director of a chemical firm in Leipzig. It had been seized by the authorities at the outbreak of war before it could be shipped to Germany, but how it had ended up as Osborne-Way’s personal vehicle was something of a mystery. It was ideal for Lysander’s purposes, however, and Tremlett quickly and enthusiastically volunteered to act as chauffeur. Armed with copies of the relevant claims, the two of them headed off the next day – Lysander reclining grandly in the rear on mustard-yellow kid-leather seats – on a circuit of all the hotels on the Kent and Sussex coast that Christian Vandenbrook chose to frequent.

One night in Ramsgate drew a blank, but Sandwich, Deal and Hythe confirmed the pattern. They were all small, relatively expensive hotels with ardent recommendations from the better guidebooks. The hotel registers revealed that whenever Captain Vandenbrook was booked in so too was Lady Faulkner. She didn’t stay with him in Rye, nor in Hastings, however – perhaps a little too close to home, Lysander thought. All in all, over a period from September 1914 to this latest October encounter, they had spent the night in the same hotel nine times. He would not have been surprised to find similar evidence in London – they were bound to have met there also, she went up to town two or three times a month – but Vandenbrook could hardly present a claim for a night in a London hotel to the Directorate’s accounts department.

An affair of over a year, then, Lysander considered, and one that had begun while Crickmay Faulkner was still very much alive. The thought of his mother with Vandenbrook, carnally, made him uneasy and disturbed – made him instantly think of her differently, as if she had suddenly become someone entirely separate from the woman he knew and loved. But of course she wasn’t old, he told himself, she had other roles in life beyond that of his ‘mother’. She was an extremely attractive mature woman, cultured, vivacious, confident. Vandenbrook himself – sophisticated, charming, handsome, amusing, rich – was exactly the sort of man she would be attracted to. He could see that, understand that, all too clearly. He tried not to condemn her for it.

In Hastings, at the Pelham Hotel, the last hotel on their itinerary, the staff had been particularly helpful and concerned. Vandenbrook had stayed there four times and must have been a heavy tipper, Lysander thought. The young receptionist was full of anxious enquiries.

‘I do hope everything was to Captain Vandenbrook’s satisfaction. We’d be most upset if he was in any way displeased.’

‘Not at all. Routine enquiry.’

‘Has something gone wrong, sir?’

‘Well,’ Lysander improvised, ‘something’s gone missing – we’re just retracing the captain’s movements over the last few weeks and months.’

‘Are you a colleague?’ the receptionist asked. She was young, eighteen or nineteen, and had arranged her hair in a curious low swipe over her forehead that was not particularly flattering, Lysander thought, it made her look a bit simple, though she evidently wasn’t. He suspected she had been subjected to the full Vandenbrook charm on many occasions.

‘Yes, I am. We work together in London.’

‘Please do tell him that his envelopes were all collected as specified. Never more than two days later.’

‘I will, thank you.’

He said goodbye, promised to pass on the affectionate good wishes of the staff of the Pelham Hotel, Hastings, to the captain and tried to walk casually back out to the street. Tremlett was smoking by the Daimler, cap pushed to the back of his head. With his eye patch he looked unusually slovenly. He threw away his cigarette as Lysander strode up to him and readjusted his cap.

‘Back to London, sir?’

‘Back to Hythe.’

‘Thought we were done for the day, sir.’

‘The devil’s work is never done, Tremlett. Quick as you like, please.’

They drove back up the coast to Hythe and returned to the Dene Hotel. Lysander walked into reception, experiencing the curious sensation of his life repeating itself. This was his third visit to the Dene Hotel in forty-eight hours.

‘Good evening, sir. Welcome back.’

‘I was just wondering . . . Did Captain Vandenbrook leave anything – in his room, perhaps?’

‘Oh, you mean the envelope. I should have said this morning. Usually a porter from the station collects it.’

The receptionist reached under his counter and drew out a large buff manila envelope. On the front was written, ‘Capt. C. Vandenbrook – to be collected.’

Lysander thanked the clerk and went into the saloon bar. It was quiet – one old man smoking a pipe in a corner and reading a newspaper. Lysander felt a coldness fall from the nape of his neck over his shoulders and back, as if he were standing in an icy draught. Mysteriously, the wound in his thigh began to ache, suddenly, a kind of burning. He knew what the envelope would contain. He ripped it open with his thumb and began to read.

‘145 thou six inch howitz shells to Béthune. 65 wagons-under-load at Le Mans. Repair of telegraph lines Hazebrouk, Lille, Orchies, Valenciennes. New standard gauge line Gezaincourt-Albert. Gun spur engineer store depots Dernancourt. 12 permanent ambulance trains Third Army Second Army.’

He turned to the next page. It went on and on. He carefully placed the three sheets of paper back into the envelope, folded it longways and slipped it in his jacket pocket. He ordered a large brandy and tried to empty his mind. He concentrated on one fact alone, it was enough – for the moment further speculation was a waste of time. He had found his Andromeda.

9. Autobiographical Investigations

I decided, for the moment, to tell no one and do nothing. Something was violently and differently wrong here – not least the presence of my mother. I had opened the envelope expecting to see the usual columns of figures as in the previous six Glockner letters, but instead saw pages of close-written factual prose – all the raw intelligence that Vandenbrook’s role in the Directorate could provide. Not for the first time in this whole affair I felt myself wantonly adrift – seeing a few details but making no connection – and also consumed with the feeling that invisible strings were being pulled by a person or persons unknown and that I was attached to their ends. I needed time to take this new information in, time to deliberate, and I realized I had to be very careful over what my own future movements and decisions were. Perhaps it was the moment for me to go on the offensive, myself. Certain facts needed to be established before I could return to Munro and Massinger with my astounding discoveries. The first course of action was to confront Vandenbrook and see what explanation he would fabricate about the contents of his envelope. Then there was the urgent need to have a conversation with my mother.

John Bensimon’s beard has turned quite grey since I last saw him in Vienna. He’s put on some weight also, yet there’s something strangely diminished about him, I feel, though on reflection it was perhaps the fact that it was England where we eventually met again that was responsible. To be a psychoanalyst practising in Vienna, with your smart consulting rooms just a few blocks away from Dr Freud’s, was a more dramatic and self-enhancing state of affairs than showing your patient into a converted bedroom at the back of a terraced house in Highgate.

Bensimon seemed genuinely pleased to see me, I sensed – perhaps I came trailing clouds of his former glory – and he shook my hand warmly, even though I had knocked on his front door unannounced at the end of the afternoon. He introduced me to his wife, Rachel – a demure, timid woman – and his twin daughters, Agatha and Elizabeth, before he showed me up to his study with a view through the windows of the sooty backs of terraced houses and the long thin gardens that trailed scruffily from them, containing the usual assortment of various-sized, dilapidated sheds that haunt the cluttered ends of these city plots, with their blistered tar-paper roofs, broken windows and creosoted weatherboarding, washing lines and brimming rainwater barrels.

He still had his desk, his turned-away couch and armchair and, I was glad to see, the silver African bas-relief from Wasagasse.

‘Not quite the same,’ he said, as if reading my thoughts. ‘But we must try to do the best with what we have.’

‘How’s business?’ I asked.

‘Slow, let’s say,’ he conceded with a rueful smile. ‘People in England haven’t yet realized how much they need us. It’s not at all like Vienna.’ He offered me the couch or the armchair. ‘Is this a social visit, or can I help you professionally?’

I told him that I wanted to reinstate our old relationship – perhaps a weekly consultation, I said, going to the armchair. I sat down and focussed on the familiar fantastic beasts and monsters, for a moment enjoying the illusion that I was still in 1913 and nothing had happened to me since. In a very real sense, the disturbing thought came to me, I had changed enormously, irrevocably – I was a different person.

‘Is it the old problem?’ he asked. ‘I still have all your files.’

‘No, that seems well and truly solved, happily,’ I said. ‘My new problem is that I can’t sleep at night. Or, rather, that I don’t want to sleep at night because I always seem to dream the same dream.’

I told him my dream – the recurring jumbled experience of my night in no man’s land that always culminated with my bombing of the sap and the image of the two torchlit faces looking up at me – the man with the moustache and the fair-haired boy.

‘What happens next?’ he asked.

‘I wake up. Usually my face is wet with tears, though I don’t recall weeping in the dream. I’m taking chloral hydrate – it’s the only thing that makes me sleep the night through.’

‘How long have you been taking that?’

‘Some months – since Switzerland,’ I said without thinking.

‘Oh, you’ve been to Switzerland. How interesting. Were you there long?’

‘A matter of days.’

‘Right.’ Discreet silence. ‘Well, we’d better take you off the chloral – its long-term consequences can be rather drastic.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You can become over-dependent on it. Its effects can be disturbing. You can – how shall I put it? – you begin to lose your grip on reality.’

‘Whatever reality is . . . Sometimes I want nothing more than to lose my grip on reality. I just want to get to sleep at night.’

‘That’s what everyone says. And then . . .’

‘Well – perhaps we could try hypnosis once more.’

‘Actually, I think this is a perfect opportunity for Parallelism. But let’s take you off the chloral first.’

He wrote me out a prescription for another ‘somnifacient’ and told me that his fee in England was two guineas an hour. We made an appointment for the following week. Cheap at the price, I thought, suddenly hugely relieved that I’d come to see him. I believed that Dr Bensimon could cure me of anything. Well, almost anything.

Talking of which, I told him as I left that I had seen Hettie Bull again and his face darkened.

‘It’s none of my business, but I’d have nothing to do with that young woman, Mr Rief,’ he said. ‘She’s very dangerous, very unstable.’

This evening I was leaving the Annexe when I heard a shout, ‘Rief! I say! Over here!’ I looked round to see a man standing on the other side of the Embankment, leaning on the river wall. I crossed the roadway and saw that it was Jack Fyfe-Miller – but dressed as a stevedore in a flat cap with a scarf at his throat, moleskin trousers and heavy boots. We shook hands and I looked him over, professionally.

‘Almost convincing,’ I said. ‘But you need some dirt under your nails – rubbed into your cuticles. You’ve got the hands of a curate.’

‘The expert speaks.’

‘Black boot polish,’ I advised. ‘Lasts all day.’

‘Where’re you headed?’ he asked, staring at me with his usual strange intensity.

‘Walking back to my hotel.’

‘Ah, hotel life. Lucky for some.’

‘There’s nothing special about it. A small hotel in Pimlico – very average.’

‘Have you got a girl, Rief?’

‘What? No, not really. I used to be engaged to be married, once upon a time . . .’

‘When I find my girl I’ll get married – but she has to be spot-on right for me. Hard, that.’

I was inclined to agree, but said nothing as we walked along in silence for a while, Fyfe-Miller doubtless preoccupied with thoughts of his spot-on girl. From time to time he kicked at the fallen leaves on the pavement with his hobnails like a sulky adolescent, scuffing the stone and sending sparks flying. We walked under the railway bridge that led to Charing Cross and up ahead I saw the grand château-esque rooftops of Whitehall Court. I wondered if that was where he had come from, and perhaps the sight of the building and memories of our last meeting there stirred him as he suddenly became animated again and stopped me.

‘Any sign of Andromeda? Any news?’ he asked abruptly.

‘Ah, no. But I think I’m getting close.’

‘Getting close, eh?’ he smiled. ‘Hard on Andromeda’s trail.’

Not for the first time I wondered if Fyfe-Miller were entirely sane.

‘It’s a question of narrowing the investigation down,’ I said, playing for time. ‘Analysing exactly who had access to that particular information.’

‘Don’t take too long, Rief, or your precious Andromeda may fly the coop.’ At which point he took his hat off, gave me a mocking theatrical bow and then turned back the way we had come, shouting at me, over his shoulder, ‘Boot polish under the fingernails, I’ll remember that!’

I wandered back to The White Palace thinking about what he had said. It was a fair point, actually – I couldn’t take my own sweet time – Vandenbrook could easily grow suspicious. Was this some kind of a warning I’d been given? Had Munro and Massinger ordered Fyfe-Miller to turn up the pressure on me? . . . I bought the Evening News and read that Blanche Blondel had opened at the Lyceum the previous night in The Conscience of the King to triumphant acclaim. Blanche – perhaps I’d pop in a note at the stage door . . . Fyfe-Miller had inadvertently reminded me of her and I thought it might be a good moment to see her again.

10. The History of Unintended Consequences

Lysander did some quick research on Christian Vandenbrook’s life and background. Vandenbrook had been caught up in the mass retreat from Mons in the first hectic weeks of the war and had been knocked unconscious by an artillery explosion that left him in a coma for three days. He suffered thereafter from periodic bleeding from the ears and his sense of balance left him for some months. He was declared unfit for active service and joined the General Staff in London. Lysander wondered how this agreeable move had come about, then he discovered that Vandenbrook’s father-in-law was Brigadier-General Walter McIvor, the Earl of Ballatar, hero of the Battle of Waitara River in the Maori Wars in New Zealand. Vandenbrook was married to the earl’s younger child, his daughter, Lady Emmeline, and they had two daughters themselves, Amabel and Cecilia. A very well-connected man, then, married into wealth and prestige. That explained how he achieved the grand house in Knightsbridge and the other quietly munificent trappings of his life on a captain’s pay. But did it explain why he should choose to betray his country? Or why he was having an affair with Anna, now the dowager Lady Faulkner? Obviously the sooner he confronted Vandenbrook the sooner answers to these questions might ensue.

But he felt a kind of inertia seize him as he wondered what the outcome of these next actions and investigations would be – and felt the near-irresistible urge to procrastinate. He knew that the moment he laid out his evidence in front of Vandenbrook everything would change – not just for Vandenbrook but for himself, also. And, perhaps, for his mother. But all history is the history of unintended consequences, he said to himself – there’s nothing you can do about it.

At the end of the day Lysander strolled along the Directorate’s corridors towards Vandenbrook’s office, feeling more than somewhat nervous and on edge. Vandenbrook was dictating a letter to his secretary and waved him to a chair. There was a green plant in a worked brass pot in one corner, a Persian rug on the floor, and on the wall, hung a nineteenth-century portrait of a whiskered dragoon with his hand on the pommel of his mighty sabre.

‘– Whereupon,’ Vandenbrook was saying, ‘we would be most grateful for your prompt and detailed responses. I have the honour to remain, obedient servant, etcetera, etcetera. Thank you, Miss Whitgift.’ His secretary left.

‘Applying leather boot to lazy arse,’ he said to Lysander with a wink. ‘What can I do for you, Rief?’

‘I wonder if we might have a discreet word, in private.’

‘“Discreet”? “Private”? Don’t like the sound of that, oh, no,’ he said with a chuckle, taking his overcoat off the back of the door. ‘I’m heading home – why don’t you come with me? That way we can have a proper drink and still be “private”.’

They took a taxi back to Knightsbridge, Vandenbrook explaining that his wife and daughters had gone to the country – ‘to Inverswaven,’ he said, as an aside, as if Lysander should know where and of what he was talking. Lysander nodded and safely said, ‘Lovely time of year.’ He was feeling surprisingly tense but was acting very calm, and he thanked his profession once again for the trained ability to feign this sort of ease and confidence even when he was suffering from its opposite. He offered Vandenbrook a cigarette, lit his and his own with a flourish, flicked the match out of the window and kept up – in a loud, sure voice – a banal flow of conversation about London, the weather, the traffic, the last Zeppelin raid, how the blackout was a risible farce – ‘What’s the point of painting the tops of street lights black? It’s the pool of light they cast that you see from up in the air. Farcical. Risible.’ Vandenbrook picked up the mood and the two of them bantered their way west across London. Vandenbrook asked him what he recommended at the theatre. Lysander said he simply had to see Blanche Blondel in The Conscience of the King. Vandenbrook said he would pay good money to hear Blanche Blondel read an infantry training manual – and so the two of them chatted on until they found themselves in Knightsbridge in no time at all.

Vandenbrook’s butler served them both brandy and sodas and they settled down in the large drawing room on the first floor. It was a little over-furnished, Lysander thought, a grand piano taking up rather too much of one corner of the room and thereby making the rest of the furniture seem jammed together. There were many vases filled with flowers, he saw, as if someone were seriously ill upstairs, and heavy gilt-framed paintings on the walls of Highland scenes in various seasons – perhaps painted around Inverswaven, he surmised.

‘I think you’d better have your discreet word with me,’ Vandenbrook said, not smiling for once. ‘The suspense is affecting my liver.’

‘Of course,’ Lysander said, standing and taking the envelope out of his inside pocket, unfolding it and handing it to Vandenbrook. ‘This was yours – “Capt. C. Vandenbrook – To be collected.”’

He could see his shock, suddenly visibly present. His lips pursed, the tendons on his neck flexed, his Adam’s apple bobbing above the knot of his tie.

‘There are some sheets of paper inside,’ Lysander added.

Vandebrook drew the pages half out, glanced at them and shoved them back in again. His eyes turned, to fix themselves on the painting above the fireplace – a stag on some moorland hill, mists swirling.

‘Where did you get this?’ he asked, his voice suddenly a little shrill.

‘Where you left it – the Dene Hotel, Hythe.’

Vandenbrook hung his head and began to sob – a low keening sound, like an animal’s pain. Then he began to shake and rock back and forward. Lysander saw his tears fall on to the manila envelope on his lap, staining it. Then Vandenbrook toppled off his chair, slowly, and fell face forward, pressing his brow into the pile of the carpet, making a grinding, moaning noise as if some deep agonizing internal ache were forcing the sound from between his clenched teeth.

Lysander was shocked, himself. He hadn’t seen a man collapse so abjectly and so suddenly ever before. It was as if Vandenbrook had become instantly dehumanized, changing into a form of atavistic suffering unit that precluded any reasoning, any sentience.

Lysander helped him to his feet – now absurdly conscious of their situation, two uniformed English officers in a Knightsbridge drawing room, one a spy-hunter and the other the sobbing spy he had hunted and caught – and yet every instinct in him was concerned and humane. Vandenbrook was a man in extremis, gasping and snuffling, hardly able to stand.

Lysander sat him down and found some crystal decanters in an unlocked tantalus on a table beside the grand piano and poured him an inch-deep draught of some amber fluid. Vandenbrook took a gulp, coughed loudly and seemed to compose himself, his breathing more measured, his sobbing ceased. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve and stood up, taking some paces towards the fireplace and back. It struck Lysander that, should Vandenbrook attack him, he had no defensive weapon to hand – but Vandenbrook seemed docile, cowed: no threat at all.

He sat down again, smoothed his jacket, smoothed his hair and cleared his throat.

‘What’re you going to do?’ he asked, his voice still quavery and frightened.

‘I have to give you up. I’m very sorry.’

‘That’s why you appeared at the Directorate, didn’t you? To find me.’

‘To find whoever was passing information to the enemy.’

Vandenbrook started to sob quietly again.

‘I knew this would happen,’ he said. ‘I knew someone like you would come one day.’ He looked Lysander full in the face. ‘I’m not a traitor.’

‘We’ll let the courts decide –’

‘I’m being blackmailed.’

He asked Lysander to follow him and they went up half a flight of stairs to a small mezzanine room off a landing. This was his ‘study’, Vandenbrook explained – some bookshelves, a small oak partners’ desk with many narrow drawers and a green-shaded reading lamp. In a corner was a large jeweller’s safe, the size of a tea-chest. Vandenbrook crouched by it and turned its combination. He opened the door, reached in and removed an envelope, handing it to Lysander. The address said simply, ‘Captain Vandenbrook, Knightsbridge’.

‘It’s always put through the letterbox,’ Vandenbrook explained, ‘in the middle of the night.’

Lysander lifted the flap and drew out a photograph and two pages of grubby, typewritten paper. The photograph was of a young girl – ten or eleven, he thought, staring blankly at the camera. Her hair was thick and greasy and the cotton blouse she wore seemed too big for her. Around her neck, incongruously, was a single rope of fine pearls.

‘I have a problem,’ Vandenbrook said, weakly. ‘A personal failing, a vice. I visit prostitutes.’

‘You’re saying this girl is a prostitute?’

‘Yes. So is her mother.’

‘How old is the girl?’

‘I’m not sure. Nine. Eleven . . .’

Lysander looked at Vandenbrook as he stood by his big safe, hunched, swaying, looking at the floor.

‘Good god,’ Lysander said flatly. ‘This girl is younger than your daughters.’

‘It’s not something I take any pride in,’ Vandenbrook said, his voice regaining some of its old arrogance. ‘It’s a terrible weakness in me. I confess – fully.’ He opened a cigarette box on his desk, took out and lit a cigarette.

‘Have you ever been to the East End of our great city?’ Vandenbrook asked. ‘Down by Bow and Shoreditch, those sort of places. Well, if you’ve got a little bit of spare cash you can get anything you want. Little boys and little girls, dwarfs and giants, freaks of nature, animals. Anything you can imagine.’

‘Tell me about the blackmail.’

‘I used to visit this girl – with her mother’s compliance – once a month or so,’ he said. ‘I became fond of her. She was unusually unconcerned by what I asked her to . . .’ He stopped himself. ‘Anyway, out of affection for her I gave her a pearl necklace. That was my mistake. It was in a box, there was the jeweller’s name, it was traced back to me. Her mother, a conniving, evil person – she wrote the deposition – now knew my name and who I was.’ He sat down on the edge of the desk, suddenly looking exhausted. ‘About a year ago, the end of last year, 1914, this envelope arrived with precise instructions. I was to pass on all the information I was party to at the Directorate. Everything I knew – movement of stores, munitions, construction of railway branch lines, and so on. If I didn’t comply then this photograph and the girl’s testimony would be sent to the Secretary of State for War, my commanding officer, my wife and my father-in-law.’ He gave a weak smile. ‘I assume you know who my father-in-law is.’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘Then you’ll understand. A little. So I wrote down what I could find out and, as directed by the instructions, left the envelope to be collected by a person unknown in a particular hotel.’

‘The same hotel?’

‘Various hotels on the south coast. No doubt you’ve visited them all.’

Lysander looked at the girl’s blank face and read a few lines of the deposition. ‘The captin use to come and akse me to sit on his nee . . . He took my close off and then he told me to opin my legs as wide as I could . . . Then he woud wash me with a flannel and warm water and tell me to . . .’

Vanderbrook looked at him as he scanned the page, his eyes dead, the dashing uptilted blond moustache like a bad prop, the affectation of a different man altogether.

‘Did you try to find this woman and her daughter?’

‘Yes, of course. I hired a private detective agency. But they were long gone from their usual haunts. They obviously sold me on. To someone. Who may have sold me on again. Many men are trapped in this way. You wouldn’t believe it. There’s a whole trade in this blackmail, passed along, from one person to another –’

‘Many?’

‘We’re all capable of anything,’ he said. ‘Given the means and the opportunity.’

‘The pervert’s quick and easy excuse,’ Lysander replied, coldly. ‘Since time immemorial.’

‘I don’t excuse myself, Rief, as it happens. I hate myself, I loathe my . . . my sexual inclinations . . .’ he said with real feeling. ‘Just spare me your sanctimonious moral judgement.’

‘Continue with your story.’

‘Whenever a copy of this photograph and the witness statement arrived it was a sign that I should supply more information. I was also told which hotel I should leave it at. Another one came two weeks ago. The Dene Hotel, Hythe – the one you have.’

‘How do you encode it?’

‘What’re you talking about?’

‘Your previous letters were all in code. This one wasn’t.’

‘What code? I just write down the facts and figures and leave them at the hotel.’

Lysander looked at him, feeling a new panic. Somehow he knew at once Vandenbrook wasn’t lying. But then he checked himself. The man did nothing but lie, it was his raison d’être. However, he thought on, furiously investigating the ramifications of this news – if Vandenbrook didn’t transform the data into code then who did? If Vandenbrook was lying, then why did he not encode the last letter? There must be another Andromeda – or else Vandenbrook was playing another game with him. He began to feel his brain cloud.

‘What should I do, Rief?’

‘Do nothing – go to work, act as normal,’ Lysander said, thinking – this would buy him some time. He needed more time now, definitely, the complications were multiplying rapidly.

‘What’s going to happen to me?’ Vandenbrook asked.

‘You should hang as a traitor, if there’s any justice – but perhaps you can save yourself.’

‘Anything,’ he said fiercely. ‘I’m a victim, Rief. I didn’t want to do this but if my . . . my peccadillo was to become known . . . I just couldn’t face that, you see. The shame, the dishonour. You’ve got to help me. You’ve got to find out who’s doing this to me.’

Lysander folded up the deposition and the photograph and slipped them inside his jacket pocket.

‘You can’t take that,’ Vandenbrook said, outraged.

‘Don’t be stupid. I can do anything I like as far as you’re concerned.’

‘Sorry. Sorry. Yes, of course.’

‘Go to work as usual. Try to act normally, unaffectedly. I’ll contact you when I need you.’

11. The Sensation That Nothing Had Changed

It was strange being in the Green Drawing Room again, Lysander thought, walking around, letting his fingertips graze the polished surfaces of the side tables, picking up a piece of sheet music and laying it on a window seat. Again, he felt this sensation that nothing had changed and indulged it, letting it linger in him. He was still an adolescent, the century was new, they had just moved to Claverleigh and in a minute or two he would see his mother come into the room, younger, pretty, frozen in time, years back. But he knew how fast the world was spinning, faster than ever. Time was on the move in this modern world, fast as a thoroughbred racehorse, galloping onwards, regardless of this war – this war was just a consequence of that acceleration – and everything was changing as a result, not just in the world around him but in human consciousness, also. Something old was going, and going fast, disappearing, and something different, something new, was inevitably taking its place. That was the concept he should keep in mind, however much it disturbed him and however he found he wanted to resist it. Perhaps he should bring it up with Bensimon – this new obsession he had with change and his resistance to it – and see if he could make any sense of his confusion.

His mother swept through the door and kissed him three times on both cheeks in the continental manner. She was wearing a pistachio-green teagown and her hair was different, swept up on both sides and held in a loose bun at the back of her head, soft and informal.

‘I like your hair like that,’ he said.

‘I like that you notice these things, my darling son.’

She went to the wall and turned the bell handle.

‘I need tea,’ she said. ‘Strong tea. English fuel.’

He had one of those revelations and understood at once why a man would be irresistibly drawn to her – the casual, ultra-confident beauty coupled with her vivacity. He could understand why a Christian Vandenbrook would be ensnared.

Tea was served by a maid and they sat down. She stared at him over the top of her held teacup, her big eyes looking at him, watchfully.

‘Do you know, I haven’t seen you for ages,’ she said. ‘How are you? Fully recovered? I must say I do like you in your uniform.’ She pointed. ‘What’re these?’

‘Gaiters. Mother – I have to ask you a few rather pointed questions.’

‘Me? “Pointed”? My goodness. On you go.’

He paused, feeling on the brink again, as if he were about to initiate a causal chain that could lead anywhere.

‘Do you know an officer called Captain Christian Vandenbrook?’

‘Yes. Very well. I deal with him all the time about Fund business.’

The Fund, Lysander thought, of course. The Claverleigh Hall War Fund. He relaxed ever so slightly – perhaps there was nothing in it after all.

‘Did you see him at the Dene Hotel in Hythe three nights ago?’

‘Yes. We had an appointment for dinner. Lysander, what’s all this –’

‘Forgive me for being so blunt and horribly obtuse and impolite but . . .’ he paused, feeling sick. ‘But – are you having an affair with Captain Vandenbrook?’

She laughed at that, genuinely, but her laughter died quickly.

‘Of course not. How dare you suggest such a thing.’

He saw the real anger in her eyes and so closed his as he pressed on.

‘You stayed in the same hotel as Captain Vandenbrook nine times in the past year.’

He heard her stand and he opened his eyes. She was looking out on the park through the high, many-paned window. It was drizzling, the light was fading – silvery, tarnished.

‘Are you spying on me?’

‘I’m spying on him. I was following him and I saw him meet you.’

‘Why on earth are you spying on Captain Vandenbrook?’

‘Because he’s a traitor. Because he’s been sending military secrets to Germany.’

This shocked her, he saw. She swivelled and stared at him alarmed.

‘Captain Vandenbrook – I don’t believe it . . . Are you sure?’

‘I have the evidence to hang him.’

‘I can’t . . . How . . .’ Her voice trailed off and then she said, incredulously, ‘All we talk about is blankets, ambulances, pots of honey, village fêtes and nurses – how to spend the money I raise. I can’t believe it.’

‘Do you know that every time he meets you he leaves an envelope at the hotel to be collected?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘He’s never asked you to deliver one of these envelopes?’

‘Never. Honestly. Look, I met him because the War Office appointed him as the officer to liaise with the Fund when I started everything up. He was incredibly helpful.’

‘He’s a charming man.’

‘He’s even been here. Two – no, three times. We’ve had meetings here. Crickmay met him. He dined with us.’

‘Here? He never mentioned it to me.’

‘Why would he? I never mentioned you to him. I assume he hasn’t the faintest idea that you’re my son. That the man with the evidence to hang him is my son,’ she added, a little bitterly. ‘Or even that I have a son. For heaven’s sake – all we talked about was the Fund.’

Lysander supposed that if you are an attractive woman in your very early fifties you don’t advertise the fact that you have a son who is almost thirty. And it was true – nothing in Vandenbrook’s demeanour, no sly implication or hint, had ever given away that he knew his mother was Lady Faulkner.

‘Do you think I might have a drink?’ he asked.

‘Excellent idea,’ she said and rang the bell for the footman who duly brought them a tray with two glasses, a bottle of brandy and a soda siphon. Lysander made their drinks and gave his mother hers. He took big gulps of his. Despite all the denials and the plausible explanations he had a very bad feeling about this connection with Vandenbrook. It was not a coincidence, he knew – there would be consequences. Fucking consequences, again.

‘May I smoke?’

‘I’ll join you,’ she said. Lysander took out his cigarette case, lighting his mother’s cigarette and then his own.

‘Why are you spying on Vandenbrook?’ she asked. ‘I mean, why you in particular.’ She stubbed her cigarette out – she was never much of a smoker. ‘You’re a soldier, aren’t you?’

‘I’m attached to this department in the War Office. We’re trying to find this traitor. He’s causing terrible damage.’

‘Well, you’ve found him, haven’t you?’

‘Vandenbrook is only handing over information because he’s being blackmailed, it seems. So he claims.’

‘Blackmailed for what?’

‘It’s very . . . unpleasant. Very shaming.’ Lysander wondered how much to tell her. ‘He’d be ruined, totally, if it ever came out what he’d done – marriage, career, family. He’d go to prison.’

‘Goodness.’ He saw that the vagueness of his reply was more disturbing than anything explicit. She looked at him again. ‘So who’s blackmailing him?’

‘That’s the problem – it looks very much as if you are.’

12. Autobiographical Investigations

Perhaps I spoke too unthinkingly, too bluntly. She seemed very shaken all of a sudden – not incredulous, any more – as if the shocking but irrefutable logic of the set-up had struck her just as it had struck me. I made her another brandy and soda and told her to go over everything again for me, once more. It started with the first meeting with Vandenbrook at the War Office in September 1914 and subsequent regular contact followed as the Claverleigh Hall War Fund began to generate significant amounts of money. He first came to Claverleigh in early 1915 shortly after his transfer to the Directorate of Movements.

‘Why didn’t he pass on the War Fund to someone else? The work in the Directorate is frantic.’

‘He asked if he could stay on board if he could,’ she said. ‘He was very impressed by what we were doing, he said, and very concerned that any hand-over to someone else would be detrimental. So I agreed without hesitation. I was very happy – we got on very well – he was extremely efficient. In fact I think I even suggested we meet when he came to Folkestone on business – just to make it easier for him. The first hotel I stayed in was at Sandwich. I offered to motor over.’

‘Did you meet him in London?’

‘Yes. Half a dozen times – when I went up to town.’ She paused. ‘I won’t deny I enjoyed our meetings . . . Crickmay wasn’t well and for me these nights away were, you know, a little escape. Of course, he’s an attractive, amusing man, Captain Vandenbrook. And I think we both enjoyed the . . . The mild flirtation. The mildest. But nothing happened. Never. Not even after Crickmay died.’

‘I completely understand,’ I said. ‘I believe you. I’m just trying to see things from his point of view.’

‘It’s because I’m Austrian, of course,’ she said, flatly, almost sullenly. ‘I’ve just realized – that’s the key. That’s why they’ll suspect me. Instantly.’ He felt the depression seize her, almost physically, as her shoulders seemed to bow. ‘When they connect me with him . . . The Austrian woman.’

‘I’m half Austrian too, remember,’ I said, worriedly. ‘Everything’s too neat, too pat . . .’

‘What’re you going to do?’

‘Nothing yet – I have to dig a little more.’

‘What about me?’

‘Carry on as if nothing has happened.’

She stood up, new anxiety written on her face. She seemed as troubled as I’d ever seen her.

‘Have you told anyone about Vandenbrook and what you discovered?’

‘No. Not yet. I don’t want the rest of them blundering in. I have to be very careful what I say.’

She went over to the window again – it was now quite dark and I could hear the nail-tap of steady rain on the glass.

‘You’re making things worse for yourself by not telling anyone,’ she said, quietly and steadily. ‘Aren’t you?’

‘It’s complicated. Very. I don’t want you involved in this mess,’ I said. ‘That’s why I need a bit more time.’

She turned and held out her arms as if she wanted to be embraced so I went to her and she hugged herself to me.

‘I won’t let you be dragged down by this,’ she said softly. ‘I won’t.’

‘Mother – please – don’t be so dramatic. Nobody’s going to be “dragged down”. You’ve done nothing – so don’t even think about it. Whoever’s blackmailing Vandenbrook has been very clever. Very. But I’ll find a way, don’t worry. He can be outsmarted.’

‘I hope so.’ She squeezed my shoulders. I enjoyed having her in my arms. We hadn’t held each other like this since my father had died. I kissed her forehead.

‘Don’t worry. I’ll get him.’

I hoped I sounded confident because I wasn’t, particularly. I knew that as soon as I told the Vandenbrook story to Munro and Massinger then everything would emerge rapidly and damagingly – the Fund, the meetings, the hotels, the dinners. To my alarm, as I began to think through this sequence of events, I thought I could see a way in which even I could be implicated. Which reminded me.

‘I’d better go,’ I said, releasing her. ‘I just need one thing. You remember I gave you that libretto, the one with the illustration on the cover of the girl. Andromeda und Perseus.’

‘Oh, yes,’ she said, with something of her old wry cynicism returning. ‘How could I forget? The mother of my grandchild with no clothes on.’ She moved to the door. ‘It’s in my office.’ She paused. ‘What’s the news of the little boy?’

‘Lothar? He’s well, so I’m told – living with a family in Salzburg.’

‘Lothar in Salzburg . . . What about his mother?’

‘I believe she’s back in England,’ I said evasively.

She gave me a knowing look and went to fetch the libretto. I glanced at my wristwatch – I was still in good time to catch the last train to London from Lewes. But when my mother came back in I could see at once she was unusually flustered.

‘What is it?’ I said. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘It’s the strangest thing. Your libretto – it’s missing.’

Sitting in the Lewes–London train. Brain-race, thought-surge. Her office is a study on the top floor where she does her charity administration. Two desks for secretaries, a couple of white wooden bookshelves with a few books and a mass of files slid into them. She said she was convinced this was where she’d put the libretto. We searched – nothing. Books go missing, I said, it wasn’t important. It was a book I gave to her almost eighteen months ago, after all. Anything could have happened to it.

As I write this, a man sitting opposite me is reading a novel and, from time to time, picking his nose, examining what he has mined from his nasal cavities and popping the sweetmeat into his mouth. Amazing the secrets we reveal about ourselves when we think we’re not being observed. Amazing the secrets we can reveal when we know we are.

Back in my room at The White Palace I find a small bundle of post is awaiting me. One envelope contains a list from a letting agency of four furnished mansion flats, available for short lease, in the Strand and Charing Cross area. I’m excited by the prospect of having my own place, again – and of Hettie being able to stay with me there, incognito and unembarrassed. Another telegram, to my surprise, is from Massinger. He suggests a rendezvous in a Mayfair tearoom at four o’clock tomorrow. The Skeffington Tearooms in Mount Street.

Later. I’ve spent the last hour drinking whisky from my hip-flask and writing down lists of names in various configurations and placements, joining them with dotted lines and double-headed arrows, placing some in parentheses and underlining others three times. At the end of this fruitless exercise I still find myself wondering why Massinger could possibly want to talk to me.

13. 3/12 Trevelyan House, Surrey Street

Lysander chose the second of the four furnished flats he was shown by the breathless, corpulent man from the letting agency. It was on the third floor of a mansion block in Surrey Street, off the Strand, called Trevelyan House: one bedroom, a small sitting room, a modern bathroom and a kitchen – though the kitchen was no more than a cupboard with a sink and an electric two-ring heater and a bleak view of the white ceramic bricks of the central air-well. In truth, any of the flats would have served his rudimentary purpose perfectly well but there was something newer about the curtains, the carpets and the furniture in number 3/12 that was immediately appealing – no greasy edge to the drapery, no flattened worn patch before the fire or cigarette burns on the mantelpiece. All he needed now, he felt, was something bright and primary coloured – a painting, a couple of new lampshades, cushions for the sofa – to make it more personal, to make it his rather than everybody’s.

He signed the lease, paid a month’s deposit and was given two sets of keys. He had his linen and his household goods from Chandos Place in store and would hire a porter to bring them around to Trevelyan House right away. He could walk to the Annexe from here in under ten minutes, he reckoned – another unlooked-for bonus in his and Hettie’s ‘love nest’. He felt the old excitement mount in him at the prospect of seeing her again – at the prospect of being naked in a bed with her again – and noted how the promise of unlimited sensual pleasure blotted out all rational, cautious advice that he might equally have given himself. Hettie – Vanora – was a married woman, now; moreover, her new husband was a jealous and angry man. Hoff and Lasry: two men with fiery, irrational tempers, quick to take the slightest offence – what drew Hettie to these types? Also, the current complications of Lysander’s own life should have dictated against the introduction of new circumstances that would add to them. ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,’ he said to himself, as if that old adage took care of all sensible matters. He had a new home and, perhaps more importantly, only he knew its address.

The Skeffington Tearooms in Mount Street were unabashed about their striving for gentility, Lysander saw as he approached. Elaborately worked lace curtains screened the tea-drinkers from the curious gaze of passers-by; the name of the establishment was written in black glass in a very flourished white copperplate, tightly coiled curlicues ending in gilt flowerlets or four-leafed clovers. A serving maid in a tiny bonnet and a long white pinny was sweeping the pavement outside. It didn’t seem a Massinger type of place at all.

Inside was a single large long room lit by crystal chandeliers and lined on three walls by semi-circular maroon velour Chesterfield booths. Two rows of highly polished tables with neat doilies and a centrally placed flower arrangement filled the rest of the area. The hushed tinkle of silverware on crockery and a low murmur of discreet conversation greeted him. It was like entering a library, Lysander felt, with a library’s implicit prohibitions against unnecessary noise – quiet footsteps, please, coughs and sneezes to be muffled, no laughter at all.

An unsmiling woman with a pince-nez checked that Massinger’s name had been entered in the ledger and a summoned waitress led him across the room to a booth in the far corner. Massinger sat there, smoking, wearing a morning suit, of all things, and reading a newspaper. He looked up to see Lysander and did not smile, merely holding up the newspaper and pointing to a headline. ‘English County Cricket to be abandoned in 1916.’

‘Terrible business, what?’ Massinger said. ‘Where does that leave us? Shocking.’

Lysander agreed, sat down and ordered a pot of coffee – he didn’t feel like tea; tea was not a drink to share with someone like Massinger.

‘What do you want to see me about?’ he asked as Massinger crushed his cigarette dead – with conspicuous force – in the ashtray, smoke snorting from his nostrils.

‘I don’t want to see you, Rief,’ he said, looking up. He gestured. ‘She does.’

Florence Duchesne stepped up to the table, as if she had suddenly materialized.

Lysander felt a lurch of instinctive alarm judder through him and had the immediate conviction that she was about to pull a revolver from her handbag and shoot him again. He stared at her – it was Florence Duchesne but a different woman from the one he’d last seen on the steamer on Lac Léman. The black weeds and the veil were gone. She had powder and lip rouge on her face and was wearing a magenta ‘town suit’ with a cut-away jacket and a hobble skirt and a little fichu at the neck of her silk blouse. She had a velvet Tam o’ Shanter set on a slant on her head in a darker purple than the suit. It was as if Madame Duchesne’s fashionable twin sister had walked in, not the melancholy widow who lived with the postmaster of Geneva.

She slipped into the booth beside him and, despite himself, Lysander flinched.

‘I had to see you, Monsieur Rief,’ she said in French, ‘to explain and, of course, to apologize.’

Lysander looked at her, then Massinger, then back at her again, quite disorientated, unable to think what he could possibly say. Massinger stood up at this juncture and distracted them.

‘I’ll leave you two to talk. I’ll see you later, Madame. Goodbye, Rief.’

Lysander watched him stride across the room to collect his top hat – he looked like a superior shop assistant, he thought. He turned back to Florence Duchesne.

‘This is very, very strange for me,’ he said, slowly. ‘To be sitting here with someone who’s shot me three times. Very strange . . . You were trying to kill me, I suppose.’

‘Oh, yes. But you must understand that I was convinced you were working with Glockner. I was convinced you had killed Glockner also. And when you lied to me about the cipher-text – it seemed the final clue. And Massinger had ordered me not to take any risks – said you were possibly a traitor, even. Was I meant to let you step ashore at Evian and vanish? No. Especially with all the suspicions I had – it was my duty.’

‘No, no. You were absolutely in the right.’ The irony in his voice made it unusually harsh, like Massinger’s throaty rasp. He recalled Massinger’s schoolboy French blunder. She bowed her head.

‘And yet . . .’ She left the rest unspoken.

‘I wonder if they serve alcohol in a place like this?’ he asked, rhetorically. ‘Probably not, far too plebeian. I need a powerful drink, Madame. I’m sure you understand.’

‘We can go to a hotel, if you like. I do want to talk to you about something important.’

They paid and left. At the door to the tearoom she collected a dyed black musquash coat with a single button at the hip. Lysander held it open for her as she slipped her arms into the sleeves and smelled the strong pungent scent she wore. He thought back to their supper on the terrace of the Brasserie des Bastions in Geneva and how he’d noticed it then – thinking it an anomaly – but now he realized it was a trace of the real woman. A little clue. He glanced at her as they walked along the road in silence, heading for the Connaught Hotel.

They found a seat in the public lounge and Lysander ordered a large whisky and soda for himself and a Dubonnet for her. The drink calmed him and he felt his jumpiness subside. It was always amazing how one so quickly accustomed oneself to the strangest circumstances, he thought – here I am having a drink with a woman who tried to assassinate me. He looked across the table at her and registered his absence of anger, of outrage. All he saw was a very attractive woman in fashionable clothes.

‘What’re you doing in London?’ he asked.

‘Massinger has brought me out of Geneva. It was becoming too dangerous for me.’

She explained. Her contact in the German consulate – ‘the man with the embarrassing letters’ – had been arrested and deported to Germany. It would only be a matter of time before he gave her name up. ‘So Massinger pulled me out, very fast.’

‘I assume you’re not a widow.’

‘No. But it’s a most effective disguise, I assure you. I’ve not been married, in fact.’

‘What about your brother?’

‘Yes, he’s really my brother – and he’s the postmaster in Geneva.’ She smiled at him. ‘Not everything is a lie.’

The smile disarmed him and he found himself unreflectingly taking in her looks – her strong curved nose, her clear blue eyes, the shadowed hollow at her throat between her collar-bones. He could forgive her, he supposed. In fact it was very easy – how absurd.

‘How are you?’ she asked. ‘I mean, after the shooting.’

‘I have seven scars to remember you by,’ he said, showing her the stigma in his left palm. ‘And my leg stiffens up sometimes,’ he tapped his left thigh. ‘But otherwise I’m pretty well. Amazingly.’

‘Lucky I’m a bad shot,’ she said, smiling ruefully. ‘I can only say sorry, again. Imagine that I’m saying sorry to you all the time. Sorry, sorry, sorry.’

Lysander shrugged. ‘It’s over. I’m alive. You’re here in London.’ He raised his glass. ‘I’m not being facetious – despite everything, I’m very pleased to see you.’

She seemed to relax finally – expiation had occurred.

‘And you remembered I liked Dubonnet,’ she said.

They looked at each other candidly.

‘You like Dubonnet and you don’t drink champagne.’

‘And you used to be a famous actor.’

‘An actor, certainly . . . You said you wanted to tell me something.’

She looked more serious now.

‘My contact at the consulate told me an interesting detail – I obliged him to tell me an interesting detail – before he was arrested and taken away. They were paying funds to the person who sent the letters to Glockner. A lot of money, transferred through Switzerland.’

‘I imagined money was the reason. Was there a name?’

‘No.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘This is all he said. But the money they sent was a lot. Already over two thousand pounds. It seems a lot for one man. I thought – maybe there is a cell. Maybe there are two, or three . . .’

Lysander wasn’t surprised to have this confirmed but he feigned some perplexity – frowning, tapping his fingers.

‘Have you told this to anyone else?’

‘Not yet. I wanted to tell you first.’

‘Not Massinger?’

‘I think with Glockner dead he feels the matter is closed.’

‘Could you keep this to yourself for a while? It would help me.’

‘Of course.’ She smiled at him again. ‘Very happy to oblige, as they say.’

He sat back and crossed his legs.

‘Are you going to stay in London now?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Massinger wants to put me into Luxembourg – to count troop trains. He wants me to become the special friend of a lonely old station master.’

‘La veuve Duchesne, once more.’

‘It’s very effective – instant respect. People keep their distance. No one wants to trouble you in your terrible grief.’

‘Why do you do it?’

‘Why do you?’ She didn’t bother to let him reply. ‘Massinger pays me very well,’ she said, simply. ‘I appreciate money because at one stage in my life I was without it. Completely. And life was not easy . . .’ She put her glass down and turned it this way and that on its coaster. They were silent for a moment.

‘How do you find Massinger?’ she asked, still looking down.

‘Difficult. He’s a difficult personality.’

Now she looked him in the eye.

‘I find it difficult to trust him entirely. He changes his mind – a lot.’

Was this a subtle warning, Lysander wondered. He decided to remain neutral.

‘Massinger’s worried about his job, his role. They want to shut down Geneva and Switzerland – concentrate on Holland.’

‘I’m going to Luxembourg via Holland. I have to meet a man called Munro.’

‘Munro runs Holland – I think. There’s some rivalry, inevitably.’

‘I could have gone to Luxembourg from Switzerland very easily. Do you think that’s significant?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, honestly. He reflected that they shouldn’t actually be talking to each other like this but he felt her constant doubts and suspicions were exactly like his. You thought you had possession of key facts, of certainties, but they disappeared and were facts and certainties no more.

‘I’m just like you,’ he said. ‘Following instructions. Trying to think ahead. Be aware of potential problems. Trying not to slip up.’ He smiled. ‘Anyway, I wish you luck. I’d better go.’ He rose to his feet and she did the same. She took a card out of her bag and handed it to him.

‘I expect to be in London a few more days,’ she said. ‘It would be nice to see you again. I remember our dinner in Geneva – un moment agréable.’

He looked at her card – a card supplied by the hotel she was staying at, Bailey’s Hotel, Gloucester Road. There was a telephone number.

‘I’ll telephone you,’ he said, not really knowing why – or even if – he should try to see Florence Duchesne one more time. But somehow he didn’t want this to seem like a final parting so he held out this prospect, at least, that they would meet again.

At the front door, outside on the pavement, they made their farewells. She was going to explore, she said, this was her first visit to London. They shook hands and Lysander felt the extra pressure as her squeeze on his fingers tightened and she looked him directly in the eye again. Was that a warning – was he to be careful? Or was it a covert reminder that she expected to be telephoned and would like to see him again? Lysander watched her walk away, the cut of her musquash coat making it sway to and fro, and he speculated about different short-term futures, courses of action, of how he had once imagined Florence Duchesne tipsy on champagne, naked, laughing . . . it didn’t seem such a fantasy any more. He hailed a passing cab and asked to be taken to the Annexe.

He knew he would have to work late that night. Tremlett, with the aid of the magic letter from C.I.G.S., had managed to secure all of Osborne-Way’s claims for travel and expenses that he had submitted to the War Office. The proviso for their release was that they could only be out of the building for one night.

Tremlett dumped the heavy ledger on his desk.

‘Is Captain Vandenbrook in his office?’ Lysander asked.

‘Captain Vandenbrook is in Folkestone, sir. Back tomorrow morning.’

That was good, he thought – Vandenbrook carrying on as normal. ‘Right,’ he said to Tremlett. ‘Bring me the War Diary and the travelling-claims-by-land dockets.’

He spent the next two hours going through Osborne-Way’s claims and collating them with Vandenbrook’s movements but there was no visible overlap. In fact Osborne-Way had been in France on at least two occasions when Lysander was sure that Glockner’s letters had been left at hotels in Sandwich and Deal. One thing was clear, however – Osborne-Way had enjoyed himself in France. Nights in expensive restaurants in Amiens; a weekend in Paris at the Hôtel Meurice – on what business? – everything charged to the War Office and the British taxpayer. Frustrated, Lysander wondered if he could score some petty revenge and have Osborne-Way’s extravagance brought to the attention of someone senior to him, a quiet word that might have the effect of –

He became aware of loud voices and hurrying feet in the corridor outside Room 205.

Tremlett knocked on the door and peered in. His eye patch was slightly askew.

‘We’re going up top, sir. Zeppelin coming over!’

Lysander unhooked his greatcoat from the back of the door and followed him out and up the stairs to the roof of the Annexe. Half a dozen people were gathered on the flat area by the lift housing staring westwards where the long lucent fingers of searchlights stiffly searched through the night sky, looking for the dirigible. There was the distant popping of anti-aircraft fire and every now and then a shrapnel star-shell burst high above them.

Lysander looked out over the night city, some seven storeys up from street level. To his eyes it could have been peacetime – motor cars and omnibuses, headlights gleaming, shop fronts lit beneath their awnings, ribbons of streetlamps casting their pearly glow. Here and there were areas of approximate darkness but it was almost inviting, he imagined, to the captain of this airship somewhere overhead. Where shall I drop my bombs? Here? Or there? And, as if his thoughts had been read, the first searchlight found the Zeppelin and then another two joined it. Lysander’s first thought was, my god, so huge – gigantic – and serenely beautiful. It was very high and moving forward steadily – how fast, he couldn’t tell. The increasing noise from the artillery fire blocked out the sound of its engines as it seemed to float unaided above them, driven on by night winds rather than its motors.

Another gun, nearer, began to fire – Pop! Pop! Pop!

‘That’s the gun in Green Park,’ Tremlett said in his ear, then shouted out into the darkness, ‘Give ’em hell, lads!’

More cheers came up from the others on the roof as Lysander looked up at the Zeppelin, awestruck, he had to admit, at the vast lethal beauty of the giant silvery flying machine caught in the crossbeams of three searchlights, now almost overhead, it seemed.

‘It’s eight thousand feet up,’ Tremlett said. ‘At least.’

‘Where are our planes? Why can’t we shoot it down?’

‘Do you know how long it takes one of our planes to climb to eight thousand feet, sir?’

‘No. Not the faintest.’

‘About forty minutes. He’ll be long gone. Or else he’ll drop ballast and jump up another thousand feet. Easy as pie.’

‘How do you know all this, Tremlett?’

‘My little brother’s in the Royal Flying Corps. Stationed at Hainault. He’s always – WOAH! FUCK ME! –’

The first bomb had exploded. Not far from the Embankment – a sudden violent wash of flame, then the shock wave and the flat crack of the explosion.

‘That’s the Strand,’ Tremlett yelled. ‘Fuckin’ hell!’

Then there was a short series of explosions – Blat! Blat! Blat! – as bombs fell swiftly one after the other, Tremlett bellowing his commentary.

‘They’re going for the theatres! Fuckin’ Ada! That’s Drury Lane! That’s Aldwych!’

Lysander felt a bolus of vomit rise in his throat. Blanche was in a play at the Lyceum. Jesus Christ. Wellington Street, corner of Aldwych. He held his watch up – it would be just about the interval now. He looked up to see the Zeppelin turn slowly, heading northwards, up towards Lincoln’s Inn. There were more thumps as bombs fell, out of sight.

‘Big fire there!’ Tremlett yelled. ‘Look, they got the Lyceum!’

Lysander turned and raced through the roof access door and pelted down the stairway. He burst out on to the Embankment – the noise of police bells and fire engines, whistles, shouts, all coming down from the Strand and, in the distance, the sound of even more bombs dropping. He ran up Carting Lane past the Hotel Cecil to the Strand. Here he could see the flames, tall as the buildings, a bright unnatural orange lighting the façades on Aldwych and Wellington Street. Gas, he thought, a gas main’s gone up. People were rushing along the Strand towards the source of the fire. He pushed his way through them and sprinted up the slope of Exeter Street. There was a thick dust cloud here and all the street lights had been blown out. He turned the corner to see glass and bricks scattered on the road and the first fuming crater. The earth itself seemed to be burning at its centre and fringes. Three bodies lay huddled at the side of the road, like tramps sleeping. The fire was blazing garishly at the end of the street and he ran towards it. He could see it was at the side of the Lyceum itself, the gas main billowing flames forty feet high. Bells, shouts, screams. A woman in a sequinned gown stumbled out of the darkness past him, whimpering, the frayed stump of her right arm twitching at her shoulder. A man in an evening suit lay on his back, both arms thrown wide, not a mark visible on him.

Half a gable-end had come down here and the way forward was blocked by a wall of tumbled bricks six feet high. He could hear women screaming and the shouts of police in Wellington Street bellowing, ‘Keep back! Keep back!’ He scrabbled up the brickwork and slipped, bashing his elbow. He tried again on the north side of Exeter Street where he could at least gain some purchase from the opposite façades. Glass shone here, glittering shards of orange-diamond jewels – every window in the street blasted out. He was thinking of the Lyceum, where the dressing rooms were – his father had played there all the time in the eighties. Maybe it hadn’t been the interval – Blanche would have been safer on stage – but he hadn’t seen the wretched play yet so he had no idea where she would have been.

He hauled his way up the sliding brick wall. At the top the gas flare made his shadow monstrously huge on the building front, flickering and undulating. The crater was immense, ten feet deep. More bodies and bits of bodies were scattered about it – the pub at the corner, The Bell, was ablaze. People went to the pub from the Lyceum at the interval – the bomb had caught it at its fullest. Beyond the blaze he could see the police forming a cordon to keep the appalled but curious onlookers away from the soaring flames of the venting gas main.

He heard bricks falling to the road, a sharp egg-cracking sound, and looked up just in time to see a window embrasure topple outwards and drag down the half wall beneath it. He flung himself out of the way and fell awkwardly down the slope to the pavement, winded. Lights were flashing in front of his eyes as he struggled to regain his breath. He hauled himself to his knees and saw a figure a few yards away across the street, standing still in the shadows, apparently looking straight at him.

‘Give us a hand, will you?’ Lysander shouted, wheezily.

The figure didn’t move. A man with a hat and the collar of his coat folded up – impossible to see anything more with the street lights gone. The man was standing at the right angle of Exeter Street where it turned down to the Strand, where he’d seen the first dead bodies.

Lysander rose to his feet shakily, perturbed, and the figure stayed where it was, apparently staring directly at him. What was going on? Why was he just staring, doing nothing? The gas main flared again and for a moment more light was cast – the figure raised his hand to shield his face.

‘I see you!’ Lysander yelled – not seeing him but wanting to provoke him, somehow. ‘I know who you are! I see you!’

The figure immediately turned and ran around the corner – disappeared.

There was no point in chasing, Lysander thought, and anyway, he had to find Blanche. He climbed up and slithered down the other side of the brick pile and ran up to the stage door of the Lyceum. A policeman was sheltering inside.

‘The actors! I’ve a friend –’

‘Can’t come in here, sir. Everyone’s gathered down on the Strand.’

Lysander realized there was no way through by Wellington Street so he had to go back the way he’d come. He picked his way cautiously up the brick wall and saw now that there were policemen and ambulances collecting the bodies. Safe. He ran past them and down to the Strand heading for Aldwych. There was a big surging crowd here. The Strand Theatre opposite had emptied and the streets were full of well-dressed theatre-goers milling about, smoking and chatting excitedly – bow ties, feathers, silk, jewels. He looked around him. Where were the actors?

‘Lysander! I don’t believe it!’

It was Blanche, a mug of coffee in one hand, a cigarette in the other. Someone’s overcoat was thrown around her shoulders like a cape.

He felt weak finding her like this, unmanned suddenly. He went towards her and kissed her cheek, tasting greasepaint. In the rippling light from the gas main she looked almost grotesque in her white Regency wig – a painted loon with dark, arched eyebrows, a beauty spot and red lips.

‘Were you caught in the blast?’

He looked down at himself. He was covered in brick dust, the left knee of his trousers was ripped and flapping, he had no hat, a knuckle was dripping blood.

‘No. I was working and saw the bombs and so came looking for you. I was worried . . .’

‘Ah, my Lysander . . .’

They hugged each other, held each other close. Her whole body was shaking violently, trembling.

‘You can’t go home in that state,’ he said, softly, taking her hands. ‘Come to my flat and tidy up. Have a proper drink. It’s two minutes away.’

14. Autobiographical Investigations

Blanche has gone. It’s nine in the morning. She sent to the Lyceum for her clothes. The newspapers say seventeen people died in the raid – the ‘Great Raid on Theatreland’. Bizarrely, I owe everything to the pilot of that Zeppelin – my first night in 3/12 Trevelyan House was spent with Blanche. Blanche. Blanche naked with her wide low-slung breasts, her jutting hips, long slim thighs like a boy, her white powdered face, the beauty spot, lipstick kissed away. How she slipped her fingers in my hair, gripping, and held my face above hers, eye to unblinking eye, as I climaxed. Deliverance. Relief. Watching her cross the room naked to find my cigarettes, standing there, pale odalisque, lighting one, then lighting one for me.

Question: who was that man in the shadows watching me?

Only now do I sense the after-shock, feel my nerves set on edge. The Zeppelin, the bombs, the dead bodies, the screams. Seeing Blanche again, being with her, made me push everything else to the back of my mind, including that strange meeting in Exeter Street – part of the madness and horror of the night. Was somebody trying to frighten me? A warning? Vandenbrook was in Folkestone, in theory – but I can’t believe that he’d ever try anything so self-destructive, so against his best interests. I’m his only hope.

I sit here and re-run the seconds’ glimpse I had of him sprinting away. Why do I think of Jack Fyfe-Miller? What makes me think that? No – surely mistaken identity. But, this much is clear, someone was waiting outside the Annexe, saw me dash out and followed me as I ran towards the bombs . . .

Last night as we lay in each other’s arms we spoke.

ME: I still have the ring – our ring . . .

BLANCHE: What are you trying to say, my darling?

ME: That, you know, maybe we should never have broken off our engagement. I suppose.

BLANCHE: Am I meant to read that as a re-proposal of sorts?

ME: Yes. Please say yes. I’m a complete fool. I’ve missed you, my love – I’ve been living in a daze, a coma.

Then we kissed. Then I went and took the ring from the card pocket inside my jacket.

ME: I’ve been carrying it with me. Good luck charm.

BLANCHE: Have you needed a lot of luck, since we split up?

ME: You’ve no idea. I’ll tell you all about it one day. Oh. Perhaps I should ask. What about Ashburnham?

BLANCHE: Ashburnham is a nonentity. I’ve banished him from my presence.

ME: I’m delighted to hear it. I just had to ask.

BLANCHE [putting ring on]: Look, it still fits. Good omen.

ME: You won’t mind being Mrs Lysander Rief? No more Miss Blanche Blondel?

BLANCHE: It’s better than my real name. I was born [Yorkshire accent] Agnes Bleathby.

ME [Yorkshire accent]: Thee learn summat new every day, Agnes, flower. Happen.

BLANCHE: We’re all acting, aren’t we? Almost all the time – each and every one of us.

ME: But not now. I’m not.

BLANCHE: Me neither. [Kissing renewed fiancé] Still, it’s just as well that some of us can make a living from it. Come here, you.

I’ve drafted out a telegram – I’ll call in at a telegraph office on the way to the Annexe. Everything’s changed now.

DEAR VANORA SAD NEWS STOP YOUR AUNT INDISPOSED SUGGEST POSTPONE LONDON TRIP STOP ANDROMEDA.

At a halfpenny a word that’s probably the wisest seven pennies I’ve ever spent.

15. A Dozen Oysters and a Pint of Hock

Lysander timed his walk to the Annexe from Trevelyan House and discovered that, at a brisk pace, it took him slightly more than five minutes. He felt briefly pleased at the economies of time and money such proximity to his place of work would supply, but then abruptly reminded himself that his days in the Annexe must, surely, be nearly over. Matters were coming to a head, and fast – still, he had one more trick left to play.

As he sauntered up the Embankment, past Cleopatra’s Needle, about to cross the roadway to the Annexe, he saw Munro coming towards him. Too many impromptu meetings, he thought – first Fyfe-Miller, now Munro. Anxiety must be building in Whitehall Court.

‘Well, what a coincidence.’

‘Cynicism doesn’t suit your open, friendly nature, Rief. Shall we have a coffee before your daily grind begins?’

There was a coffee stall under Charing Cross Railway Bridge. Munro ordered two mugs and Lysander lit a cigarette.

‘Quite a raid last night,’ Munro said.

‘Why can’t we shoot down something that big? That’s what I don’t understand. It’s vast. Sitting up there in the sky, lit up.’

‘There’s only one anti-aircraft gun in London with a range of ten thousand feet. And it’s French.’

‘Couldn’t we borrow a few more from them? The Zeppelins will be back, don’t you think?’

‘Let others worry about that, Rief. We’ve got enough on our plate. Actually, I will try one of your “gaspers”, thank you.’

Lysander gave him one and he lit it, then spent a minute picking shreds of tobacco off his tongue. He wasn’t really a practised smoker, Munro, it was more of an affectation than a pleasure.

‘How are you getting on?’ he asked eventually.

‘Slow but steady –’

‘– Wins the race, eh? Don’t go too slow. Any suspects?’

‘A few. Better not single anyone out, just yet – in case I’m wrong.’

He saw Munro’s jaw muscles tighten.

‘Don’t expect us to tolerate your due caution for ever, Lysander. You’re there to do a job, not sit on your arse sharpening pencils. So do it.’

He was suddenly very angry for some reason, Lysander saw, noting the patronizing use of his Christian name.

‘I’m not asking for your tolerance,’ he said, trying to seem calm. ‘I’ve got to make this enquiry look as boring and routine as possible. You wouldn’t thank me if I scared someone off or presented you with the wrong person all for the sake of gaining a day or two.’

Munro seemed visibly to regain his usual mood of thinly disguised condescension as he thought about this.

‘Yes . . . Well . . . I understand you sent for Osborne-Way’s claims from the War Office.’

‘Yes, I did.’ Lysander concealed his surprise. How did Munro know this? An answer came to him at once – Tremlett, of course. Munro’s eyes and ears in the Directorate of Movements. Eye and ears, rather. He would keep Tremlett’s divided loyalties very much in mind from now on. ‘Osborne-Way potentially knows everything that was in the Glockner letters, he’s –’

‘You had no right.’

‘I had every right.’

‘Andromeda’s not Osborne-Way.’

‘We can’t be complacent; we can’t risk easy assumptions.’

He could see Munro’s anger returning – why was he so on edge and quick-tempered? He decided to change the subject.

‘I saw Florence Duchesne the other day.’

‘I know.’

‘Is she still in London?’

‘She’s left I’m afraid.’

‘Oh. Right. I was rather hoping to see her again.’ Lysander felt a brief but acute sadness at this news – maybe something had been lost there. For some reason he thought of her as his only true ally – they seemed to understand each other; they were both functionaries following orders from a source neither of them knew or could identify. Their strings were being pulled – that’s what linked them . . . He looked at Munro, puffing at his cigarette like a girl. He decided that attack was the best means of defence, now.

‘Are you telling me everything, Munro? Sometimes I find myself wondering – what’s really going on here?’

‘Just find Andromeda – and fast.’ He threw some coins on the counter, gave him a hard smile and walked away.

Lysander went back to the Annexe with a plan forming in his head, slowly taking shape. If Munro wanted action, then he would give him action.

Tremlett was waiting for him outside Room 205 and seemed unusually chirpy – ‘Nice cuppa tea, sir? Warm the old cockles?’ – but Lysander looked at him suspiciously now, wondering what Tremlett might have gleaned from their trip to the south-coast hotels. On reflection it seemed unlikely that he’d make the connection with Vandenbrook; Lysander had never told him what he was doing, making Tremlett wait outside each time. But he was no fool. Would he have passed on the details of their journey to Munro, in any event? Probably – even if he couldn’t explain it. Was that what was making Munro and Fyfe-Miller so jumpy? Did they have a sense that he was ahead of them, was unearthing facts that they had no inkling of? . . . The unanswered questions piled up and yet again Lysander felt himself sinking in a quagmire of uncertainties. He opened a drawer in his desk and took out a booklet of pre-paid telegraph forms. He’d give them something that would make them think again.