Waiting for Sunrise

He picked up the telephone and dialled Tremlett’s extension.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Is Captain Vandenbrook back from Folkestone?’

‘I believe so, sir.’

‘Would you ask him to step into my office.’

Lysander treated himself to a lunch at Max’s oyster bar in Dean Street in Soho. He ordered a dozen oysters and a pint of hock and allowed his thoughts to return pleasingly to Blanche and the night they had spent together. She was tall, almost ungainly under the sheets – sheets that they had spread and tucked in themselves in a kind of frenzy, snatching them from his trunks, delivered by porter that morning – she was all knees and elbows, lean and bony. Her flat wide breasts with tawny nipples. It was obvious she’d had many lovers before him. That way she held his head, his hair gathered in her fists holding him still . . . Where or from whom did that trick come? He had no regrets about spontaneously asking her to take back his ring – though he wondered now, as he emptied oysters down his throat, if he had been too precipitate, over-happy, over-relieved that his old ‘problem’ hadn’t recurred with her. No – it had been as good as with Hettie. Hettie, so different. There was no sense of danger with Blanche, however, it was more a kind of rigour. Refreshing, no-nonsense Agnes Bleathby. It was the end of Hettie, of course. But that was only right as Hettie had let him down shockingly, had betrayed him instantly and without a qualm to save herself despite the fact that she was the mother of their son. Lothar meant little or nothing to Hettie Bull, he realized. Furthermore, he – Lothar’s natural father – clearly played no part in her life unless he could be useful to her in some selfish way – the marriage to Jago Lasry was the perfect example. No, Blanche had always been the girl for him. She had asked him back to her mews house in Knightsbridge for supper – her show was cancelled until the damage to the theatre was repaired. He smiled at the idea of Blanche cooking supper for him on his return from the office – a little forerunner of their domestic bliss? For the first time in many months he felt the warmth of security wash through him. Contentment – how rare that feeling was and it was only right that it should be cherished. He ordered another round of oysters and another pint of hock.

He returned to the Annexe in good spirits. He had a course of action to follow and Munro would have his answer soon, however unwelcome it might be. Vandenbrook was poised and ready. Yet again Tremlett was waiting by his door, agitated this time.

‘Ah, there you are, sir. I was beginning to think you’d gone for the day.’

‘No, Tremlett. What is it?’

‘There’s a man downstairs insisting on seeing you. Claims to be your uncle, sir – a Major Rief.’

‘That’s because he is my uncle. Send him up at once. And bring us a pot of coffee.’

Lysander sat down with a thump, realizing his head was a little blurry from all the hock, but pleased at the prospect of seeing Hamo. He didn’t come up to town often – ‘London terrifies me,’ he always said – so this was an unfamiliar treat.

Tremlett showed Hamo in and Lysander knew at once something was very wrong.

‘What is it, Hamo? Nothing to do with Femi, is it?’ The fighting in West Africa was over, as far as he knew – everything had moved to the East.

Hamo’s face was set.

‘Prepare yourself for the worst possible news, my boy . . .’

‘What’s happened?’

‘Your mother is dead.’

16. Autobiographical Investigations

There is this myth that death by drowning is the best of all deaths amongst the dozens or hundreds available to us human beings – that with drowning your end arrives simultaneously with a moment of pure exhilaration. I will hold on to that idea but the rational side of my brain asks who provided this testimonial? Where’s the evidence?

When I saw my mother’s body in the undertaker’s at Eastbourne she did, however, look serene and untroubled. Paler than usual, a slight bluish tinge to her lips, her eyes closed as if she were dozing. I kissed her cold forehead and felt a pain in my gut as I remembered the last time I’d made that gesture, holding her warm in my arms. ‘I won’t let you be dragged down by this.’

Hamo tells me there is an unopened letter at Claverleigh waiting for me but I don’t need to read it to know that it will be her confession. Hamo, in his kindness, bless him, ventured the theory that it might have been some awful accident – a slip, a fall, unconsciousness. But I told him I was convinced it was suicide and the letter would merely confirm that. Her body had been found at dawn on the shingly beach at Eastbourne, left by the retreating tide – the proverbial man out walking his dog at first light – she was fully clothed, all her jewellery removed and one shoe missing.

I find myself, all of a sudden, remembering something Wolfram Rozman said to me – it seems eons ago, back in that impossible, unimaginable world before the war began, before everybody’s lives changed for ever – when, having been asked what he would have done if the tribunal had found against him, Wolfram had said – blithely, inconsequentially – that he would have taken his own life, of course. I can bring him into my mind’s eye effortlessly – Wolfram standing there in his caramel suit, swaying slightly, tipsy from the celebratory champagne, saying in all seriousness, ‘In this ramshackle empire of ours suicide is a perfectly reasonable course of action.’ Wolfram – was it just bravado, the swagger of a born hussar? No, I recall, it was said smilingly but with absolute rigid logic: once you understand that – you will understand us. It lies very deep in our being. ‘Selbstmord’ – death of the self: it’s an honourable farewell to this world. My mother had made her honourable farewell. Enough.

Hugh and the Faulkner family are deeply shocked. I feel my grief burn in me alongside a colder, calmer anger. My mother is as much an innocent victim of this whole Andromeda affair as are those two men I killed in a sap one June night in no man’s land in northern France. The causal chain reached out to claim them just as it did Anna Faulkner.

My darling Lysander,

I will not allow myself, or my stupidity, to harm you or endanger you in any way. You should understand that what I am about to do seems an entirely reasonable course of action to me. I have a few regrets at leaving this world but they are wholly outweighed by the benefits my imminent non-being will achieve. Think of it that way, my dear – I am no longer here, that’s all. This fact, this state, was going to arrive one day therefore it has always seemed to me that any day is as good as the next. I already feel a sense of relief at having taken the decision. You are now free to move forward with full strength and confidence and with no concerns about your foolish mother. I cannot tell you how upset I was after our last conversation, how you were intent on imperilling yourself, on taking a course of action that was plainly wrong, only to spare me. You were prepared to sacrifice yourself for me and I could not allow that, could not live with that responsibility. What I am about to do is no sacrifice – you must understand that for someone like me it is the most normal of acts in a sane and rational world.

Goodbye, my darling. Keep me alive in your thoughts every day.

Your loving mother.

Images. My mother. My father. How she wept at his funeral, the endless tears. The grim flat in Paddington. Claverleigh. Her beauty. Her singing – her rich mellow voice. That terrible sunlit afternoon in Claverleigh Wood. At meals when she talked the way she would unconsciously tap the tines of her fork on her plate to emphasize the point she was making. That night I saw my father kissing her in the drawing room when they thought I was asleep. The way they laughed when I walked in, outraged. The cameo she wore with the letter ‘H’ carved in the black onyx. How she smoked a cigarette, showing her pale neck as she lifted her chin to blow the smoke away. The confidence with which she walked into a room as if she were going on stage. What else could I have been with those two as my parents? How can I best avenge her?

Dr Bensimon saw me two hours ago. I telephoned him as soon as I had returned from Eastbourne.

‘I wish I could say it was an effort fitting you in at such short notice,’ he said. ‘But you’re my only patient today.’

I lay on the couch and told him bluntly and with no preamble that my mother had killed herself.

‘My god. I’m very sorry to hear that,’ he said. Then, after a pause, ‘What do you feel? Do you feel any guilt?’

‘No,’ I said immediately. ‘Somehow I want to feel guilt but I respect her too much for that. Does that make any sense? It was something she thought about and decided to do. In cold logic. And I suppose she had every right.’

‘It’s very Viennese,’ Bensimon said, then apologized. ‘I don’t mean to be flippant. Choosing that option, I mean. You’ve no idea how many of my patients did the same – not spontaneously – but after a great deal of thought. Calm, rational thought. Have you any idea what made her do it?’

‘Yes. I think so. It’s connected with what I’m doing myself . . .’ I thought again. ‘It’s to do with this war and the work I’m doing. She was actually trying to protect me, believe it or not.’

‘Do you want to talk about her?’

‘No, actually, I want to ask you about something – about someone else. Do you remember that first day we met, in Vienna, at your consulting rooms?’

‘The day Miss Bull was so insistent. Yes – not easily forgotten.’

‘There was another Englishman present, from the Embassy – a military attaché – Alwyn Munro.’

‘Yes, Munro. I knew him quite well. We were at university together.’

‘Really? Did he ever ask you anything about me?’

‘I can’t answer that,’ he said, apologetically. ‘Very sorry.’

I turned my head and looked at Bensimon who was sitting behind his desk, his fingers steepled in front of his face.

‘Because you can’t remember?’

‘No. Because he was my patient.’

‘Patient?’ I was astonished at this news. I sat up and swivelled myself around. ‘What was wrong with him?’

‘Obviously I can’t answer that, either. Let’s just say that Captain Munro had serious problems of a personal nature. I can’t go any further than that.’

I sit in 3/12 Trevelyan House with a bottle of whisky and a cheese-and-pickle sandwich I bought from the pub on the corner of Surrey Street. I telephoned Blanche and told her what had happened and she was all sympathy and warm concern, inviting me to come round and stay with her. I said that day would come soon enough but I had to be on my own at the moment. There will be an inquest, of course – so we must wait before we can bury her – my mother, Annaliese. I want tears to flow but all I feel is this heaviness inside me – a leaden weight of resentment, this grinding level of anger that she should have felt she had no more choice than to do what she did. To take her jewels off and walk into the sea until the waters closed over her.

17. A Cup of Tea and a Medicinal Brandy

The next day passed slowly, very slowly, Lysander felt, as if time were responding to his own desultory moods. He kept to himself as much as possible, staying in Room 205 with the door closed and locked. At midday he sent Tremlett out to buy him some pastries from a luncheon-room in the Strand. He ran through the plans he had made for the evening again and again. He was trying to convince himself that this exercise would be significant, possibly revelatory. At the very least he would be wiser – one step closer, perhaps.

In the middle of the afternoon, Tremlett called him on the telephone.

‘The White Palace Hotel on the line, sir.’

‘I don’t stay there any more.’

‘They say your wife has been taken ill.’

‘I’m not married, Tremlett – it’s obviously a mistake.’

‘They’re very insistent. She had a fainting fit, it seems.’

‘All right, put them on.’

He waited, hearing the clicks and buzzes as the connection was made. Then the manager came on the line.

‘Mrs Rief is in a very, ah, agitated state.’

‘There is no “Mrs Rief”, as it happens,’ Lysander said. Then he realized. ‘I’ll speak to her.’

He heard the receiver being held away and footsteps approaching.

‘Hello, Hettie,’ he said.

‘You’ve moved,’ she said accusingly, angrily. ‘I couldn’t think how else to find you.’

‘I’ll be there in ten minutes.’

He took a taxi to Pimlico and found her in the resident’s lounge of The White Palace with a cup of tea and a medicinal brandy. He locked the door so they wouldn’t be interrupted but Hettie took this as an invitation to intimacy and tried to kiss him. He pushed her away gently and she sulkily sat down again on the sofa.

‘I‘ve got three whole days,’ she said. ‘Jago thinks I’m on a sketching holiday on the Isle of Wight. I thought being on an island would convince him more.’

‘I can’t see you, Hettie,’ he said. ‘There’s a flap on – I’m working day and night. That’s why I sent you the telegram.’

She frowned and tucked her knees up underneath her. She pouted and tapped her forefinger on her jawbone – one, two, three – as if counting down, mentally. Then she pointed the finger at him.

‘There’s someone else,’ she said, finally. ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’

‘No . . . Yes.’

‘You’re a swine, Lysander. A bloody fucking swine.’

‘Hettie. You went and got married. We have a child but you didn’t even bother to tell me.’

‘That’s different.’

‘Please explain how.’

‘What have you done to me, Lysander?’

‘Hang on a second. Can I remind you of events in Vienna in 1913? You had me in prison with your damned lies. How dare you?’

‘I was helping you. Well, maybe not at first, but I was later.’

‘What’re you talking about?’

‘Those men persuaded me to drop the rape charge so you could be set bail. Udo was furious, practically threw me out –’

‘What men?’

‘Those two at the embassy. The attachés – I forget their names.’

‘Munro and Fyfe-Miller.’

‘If you say so.’

Lysander began to think fast.

‘You saw Munro and Fyfe-Miller?’ he asked. ‘While I was under arrest?’

‘We had a few meetings. They told me what to do – to change the charge. And they gave me money when I asked for some. After you escaped they were very helpful – offered to take me to Switzerland. But I decided to stay – because of Lothar.’ She looked at him aggressively, as if he were somehow to blame for all the mess. ‘They asked me lots of questions about you. Very curious. And I was very helpful, I can tell you that. Told them all sorts of interesting titbits about Mr Lysander Rief.’

Was she lying again, Lysander wondered. Was this pure bravura? He felt confusion beginning to overwhelm him once more. He reached over and finished off her brandy. First Munro turned out to have been Bensimon’s patient and now there seemed to be some form of collusion between Munro, Fyfe-Miller and Hettie. He tried to see what the connections and consequences might have been but it was all too perplexing. What had really happened in Vienna in 1914? It made him very uneasy.

Hettie leapt up from the sofa and came over to him, sliding on to his lap, putting her arms round his neck and kissing him – little dabbing kisses on his face, pressing her breasts into his arm.

‘I know what you like, Lysander. Think what fun we can have – three whole days. Let’s buy lots to eat and drink and just stay in. We can take all our clothes off . . .’ She reached for his groin.

‘No, Hettie. Please.’ He stood up, slipping easily out from under her – she was so small, so light. ‘I’m engaged to be married. It’s over. You should never have come. I explicitly told you not to come. You’ve only yourself to blame.’

‘You’re a bastard,’ she said, tears in her eyes. ‘A fucking mean bastard man.’ She carried on swearing at him, the volume increasing, as he put on his greatcoat and picked up his cap. He left the room without looking round. He didn’t mind the abuse but the last thing she screamed at him was, ‘– And you’ll never see Lothar in your life!’

The New London Theatre of Varieties, just off Cambridge Circus, was indeed new to Lysander. He would never have acted there as it was mainly a variety and vaudeville hall, although one that specialized in ‘ballets, French Plays and Society Pieces’. In the theatre guide he’d consulted – he wasn’t interested in the programme but the facilities – he had read that ‘the tourist will find that the audience forms part of the entertainment’. This was a code, he knew, for ‘prostitutes frequent the lobby bars’. The New London was an obsolescent type of Victorian theatre where the public could drink at the theatre bars without having to pay for the show. It was originally a way of supplementing the night’s takings but the system inevitably brought other trade with it. Lysander remembered some old actors of his acquaintance reminiscing fondly about the prices and the quality of the streetwalkers available – the higher up you went in the theatre – from the stalls to the bars at the dress circle, upper circle, amphitheatre – the cheaper the girls. A better class of gentlemen also came to these public theatre bars because it provided perfect camouflage – there was plenty of time to scrutinize and select while ostensibly doing something entirely innocent: going to the theatre – how very cultural and educative.

The show had begun by the time Lysander slipped into his seat. A ‘ballet’ of French maids and a hairdresser as far as he could tell.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said to Vandenbrook and turned slightly to gain a better angle on him. He was in a suit, his hair was oiled flat with a middle parting and he had combed down the uptilted ends of his moustache. He already looked entirely different from the usual person he presented to the world – weaker-looking and much less attractive.

‘Got the spectacles?’

Vandenbrook fished in his pocket and put them on.

‘Ideal. Keep wearing them.’

They were clear-lensed, plain glass with wire rims, borrowed from a theatrical props agency in Drury Lane. As the ballet continued Lysander ran through the plan once more, making sure Vandenbrook understood exactly what to do. There was no need to whisper or even lower his voice as the auditorium was loud with a sustained growl of conversation and the to-ing and fro-ing of people leaving their seats and going to the bars and drinks counters that ringed the stalls. Many of them, Lysander noticed, were uniformed soldiers and sailors. Almost everyone seemed to be smoking so he offered Vandenbrook a cigarette and they both lit up as the ballet ended and the comedy sketch began.

When the curtain came down the Master of Ceremonies reminded them that the top of the bill in the second half of the evening’s entertainment was the ‘celebrated West End actor’ Mr Trelawny Melhuish, who would be reciting the soliloquies of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Lysander and Vandenbrook filed out into the aisles and headed for the stalls’ lobby bar. To be or not to be, Lysander thought.

‘We’ll split up here,’ he said, as they reached the curtained doorway that led to the lobby.

The stalls’ lobby was a wide, curving, low-ceilinged corridor, dimly lit with flickering gas sconces and very crowded with people who had come in off the street and those who were now pouring out of the auditorium. Lysander edged his way towards the central bar opposite the stairs leading up from the entrance. Standing some way back, a silent trio, in civilian clothes as he’d specified in the telegrams he’d sent to them, were Munro, Fyfe-Miller and Massinger. He glanced back to make sure that Vandenbrook was nowhere near him but couldn’t spot him in the throng. Good.

He approached the three men, circling round behind them. They all looked ill at ease, uncomfortable in this bibulous, flushed, shouting crowd. Even better, Lysander thought.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said, suddenly appearing in front of them. ‘Thanks for coming.’

‘What’re we doing here, Rief? What kind of tomfoolery is this?’ Massinger snarled at him.

‘I had to make sure I wasn’t followed,’ he said. ‘I don’t trust anyone at the Directorate.’

‘What’s going on?’ Munro said, his eyes flicking around the faces of the crowd. ‘What’s your game, Rief? What was so damn urgent to bring us all here?’

‘I’ve found Andromeda,’ Lysander said, immediately gaining their full attention.

‘Oh, yes?’ Fyfe-Miller said with undue scepticism, Lysander thought. Over Fyfe-Miller’s left shoulder Lysander could see Vandenbrook circling closer. The disguise was excellent, Lysander thought – Vandenbrook looked like a timid accounts clerk out on the town looking for sin.

‘Yes,’ Lysander said. He had to draw this out a little, give Vandenbrook as much time as possible. ‘It’s someone quite high up.’

‘It’s not Osborne-Way – don’t waste our time.’

‘It’s his number two,’ Lysander said. ‘Mansfield Keogh.’

The three looked at each other. They clearly knew who Keogh was.

‘Mansfield Keogh,’ Massinger said. ‘Good god almighty.’

‘Yes, Keogh,’ Lysander said, half aware of Vandenbrook moving around their group. ‘Everything fits. The trips to France tally. Only he had all the information in the Glockner letters.’

‘But why would he do it?’ Munro said, sounding unconvinced.

‘Why does anyone?’ Lysander said, looking at all three of them pointedly. ‘There are three reasons why someone betrays their country – revenge, money,’ he paused. ‘And blackmail.’

‘Nonsense,’ Massinger said. Munro and Fyfe-Miller kept quiet.

‘Think about it,’ Lysander said.

‘How do any of those categories fit Keogh?’ Fyfe-Miller said, frowning.

‘His wife died recently, very young – maybe it’s driven him a bit insane,’ Lysander said. ‘But I don’t know, in the end. I was just gathering evidence, not looking for motives.’

‘Well, we can ask him when we arrest him,’ Munro said with a thin smile. ‘Tomorrow – or maybe tonight.’

Everyone fell silent contemplating the reality of the situation.

‘So – Keogh is Andromeda,’ Massinger said, almost to himself.

‘Well done, Rief,’ Munro said. ‘You took your time but you got there in the end. I’ll be in touch. Keep going to work in the Annexe as usual.’

‘Yes, good hunting, Rief,’ Fyfe-Miller added, allowing himself a wide smile. ‘We thought you’d be the man to winkle him out. Bravo.’

A bell began to clang, announcing the second portion of the evening’s entertainment. The crowd began to drift back into the auditorium and for the first time Lysander became aware of the painted women standing around.

‘I’ll leave you chaps here,’ he said with a smile. ‘I’m going to watch the rest of the show. Best to go out one by one.’ He turned and walked away, glad to see no sign of Vandenbrook.

‘Evening, my lord,’ one of the doxies said to him, smiling. ‘Doin’ anything after?’

He glanced back to see Massinger leaving. Fyfe-Miller and Munro were talking urgently, their heads close together. I’ll give it twenty-four hours, Lysander thought, pleased with the way everything had run – something would happen.

Vandenbrook was in his seat already, smoking, waiting for the curtain to go up.

Lysander joined him and handed him a pint of lager beer. He had one for himself.

‘Well done,’ he said. ‘Do you like this stuff? I developed quite a taste for it in Vienna.’

‘Thanks.’ He seemed a bit subdued and sipped at the froth at the top of the glass.

‘Well?’

‘I didn’t recognize any of them. Except that fellow with the step-collar. He looked familiar somehow.’

‘Massinger?’

‘I think I may have seen him before. In my War Office days. Is he an army man?’

‘Yes. So – conceivably he might know who you were.’

‘Possibly – he seemed familiar.’

Lysander thought – it was hardly evidence. The orchestra in the pit began to play a military march and the curtain rose to reveal a chorus of girls in khaki corsets and bloomers carrying wooden rifles. Cheers, whoops and whistles went up from the audience. This was what they wanted to see – not Mr Trelawny Melhuish reciting soliloquies.

‘So Massinger could be Andromeda,’ Lysander said.

‘Andromeda? What’s that?’

‘That’s the codename we gave you. When the search began.’

‘Oh, right.’ Vandenbrook looked a little uncomfortable at the thought he had been identified by a code word, Lysander supposed. ‘Why Andromeda?’

‘It was my choice, actually. Taken from a German opera. Andromeda und Perseus by Gottlieb Toller.’

‘Oh, yes. It’s a bit saucy that one, isn’t it?’

‘Never saw it,’ Lysander said, his eye suddenly caught by a tall, leggy dancer who reminded him of Blanche. He put a sixpence in the slot that freed the catch on the opera glasses fixed to the back of the seat in front of him and raised them to his eyes for a closer look. Might as well enjoy the show, he thought.

18. No Eureka Moment

Lysander couldn’t sleep so sometime between three and four in the morning he went through to his kitchen and made himself a draught of chloral hydrate. Bensimon’s somnifacient didn’t work at all and he was beginning to suspect it was a placebo. He put half a teaspoon of the crystalline powder in a glass of water, stirred it vigorously and drank it down. Not much left in the packet he saw – he was rather racing through it. Bad sign.

As he waited for the familiar effects of the drug to start, he ran over the events of his elaborately planned encounter at the New London Theatre of Varieties. In a way he was disappointed – there had been no Eureka moment, no detonation of understanding and clarity – but something had been said this night, something inadvertently given away that he hadn’t quite grasped. Yet. Perhaps it would come to him. More and more he was convinced that Vienna held the key – those last months before the war began . . . He felt the chloral begin to work – the room swayed, he sensed his balance going. Time for bed and sleep at last. He walked carefully back through to his bedroom, a hand on the wall to steady himself. God, this stuff was strong – he flung himself on the bed feeling consciousness blissfully slipping away. Vienna. That was it. So it must be . . .

‘You all right, sir?’ Tremlett said. ‘Look a bit under the weather.’

‘I’m perfectly fine, thank you, Tremlett. Got a lot on my mind.’

‘Going to have a bit more on your mind, I’m afraid, sir. Colonel wants to see you.’

Lysander smoked a quick cigarette, checked his uniform thoroughly so that Osborne-Way wouldn’t have the satisfaction of claiming he was ‘improperly dressed’, and walked briskly down the passageway to the Director of Movements’ office.

Osborne-Way’s secretary could not meet his eyes as she showed him in. Lysander saluted and removed his cap, stood at ease. Osborne-Way sat behind his desk looking at him and did not offer a chair.

‘Captain Keogh was arrested at his house this morning at six o’clock. He’s being held at New Scotland Yard.’

Lysander said nothing.

‘No answer, Rief?’

‘You didn’t ask me a question, sir. You made a statement. I assumed a question would be following.’

‘People like you make me wonder why we’re fighting this war, Rief. You make me sick to my stomach.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that, sir.’

‘How some actor-popinjay like you wound up as an officer is a disgrace to the British Army.’

‘I’m just trying to do my bit, sir. Like you.’ He pointed to his wounded-in-action bar on his sleeve. ‘I’ve done my time in the front line and have the scars to prove it.’ He enjoyed the fleeting look of discomfort that crossed Osborne-Way’s face – the lifelong staff officer in his cushy billet with his all-expenses-paid weekends in Paris.

‘Mansfield Keogh is one of the finest men I know. You’re not fit to tie his bootlaces.’

‘If you say so, sir.’

‘What evidence have you got against him? What’s your grubby little enquiry dug up?’

‘I’m not at liberty to tell you, sir.’

‘Well, I’m damned well ordering you to tell me! You filth! You scum of the earth!’

Lysander waited a second or two before replying – accentuating the drawl in his voice, ever so slightly.

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to talk to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff about that, Colonel.’

‘Get out of here!’

Lysander put his cap back on, saluted and left.

Back in Room 205 he found a telegram waiting.

ANDROMEDA. SPANIARDS INN.

7

AM TOMORROW.

Not even twenty-four hours, Lysander thought, impressed. So, something had happened last night after all. He had just enough time to make sure everything was prepared.

19. Waiting for Sunrise

Lysander had the taxi drop him at the top of Heath Street, in Hampstead, by the pond and the flagstaff, deciding he’d rather approach the Spaniards Inn on foot. It was 5.30 in the morning and still dark night, as the French would say. He was wearing a black overcoat and scarf with a black Trilby. It was cold and his breath was condensing thickly in front of him as he began the half-mile walk from the flagstaff to the inn along Spaniards Road, along the top of the heath. He could see very little – the streetlamps were very widely spaced on Spaniards Road – but he knew that all London lay to his south and he could hear the noise of the wind in the great oaks of Caen Wood on his right hand side – the creak and rub of huge branches like the masts and cross trees of a sailing ship at sea – timber under strain. The wind was growing, fierce and gusty, and he jammed his hat more firmly on his head, telling himself as he marched along that the key element at the moment was calmness – stay calm at all costs, whatever happened. Everything was planned, everything was in place.

Soon he stood by the little toll-house where the road narrowed opposite the Spaniards Inn and he smoked a cigarette, waiting for sunrise. Sunrise and clarity, he thought – at last, at last. In the final minutes of darkness he felt more secure, oddly, his back against the wall looking across the road at an inn – there was a light now on in a dormer window – where Charles Dickens himself had enjoyed a drink or two. In his pocket he had a torch and a small hip flask with some rum and water in it. A little tribute to his soldiering life – the tot of rum before the morning stand-to in the trenches – a life that he was about to abandon for ever, he hoped.

He shone his torch at his watch – 5.55 – an hour to go. He sensed the faintest lightening – tree trunks in the thick wood behind him beginning to emerge and solidify in the thinning darkness and, looking upwards through the branches with their remaining autumn leaves, he thought he could make out the sky above, the faintest lemony-grey, the packed clouds bustling by on the stiff westerly breeze.

He took a nip of rum, enjoying its sweetness, its warm burn in his throat and chest. A horse and dray clip-clopped by, a coal merchant. Then a telegraph boy buzzing past on a motorbike. The day beginning. He hadn’t even tried to sleep last night – no chloral – but instead had written up a long account of his investigation into the Andromeda affair, its history, his suppositions and his conclusion. It had kept him occupied and made sure his mind was alert even though he was fully aware that the document he was producing was a contingency – a contingency in case he didn’t survive the next few hours.

He decided not to follow that line of thought – everything was geared to triumphant, vindicatory success – he had no intention of risking his life if he could help it. It was definitely lightening now. He stepped away from the toll-house and moved a few yards into the wood. The sun’s rays would be spearing over Alexandra Palace through the hurrying clouds, slowly illuminating the villages of Hornsey and Highgate, Finchley and Barnet to the east. Now he could actually see the heave and sway of the branches above his head, feel the gusts of wind tugging capriciously at the ends of his scarf. The inn was revealed to him, opposite, its white stucco façade glowing eerily; lights were on in many of the windows and he could hear a clanging sound from the yard behind. He moved a little way further back into the trees. Whoever was coming should think that he or she had arrived early and first – he didn’t want to be spotted.

He smoked another cigarette and sipped at his rum. He could read his watch now without the aid of his torch – twenty minutes to go. For a moment he had another attack of doubt – what if he was wrong? – and he ran through his deductions again, obsessively. It seemed entirely conclusive to him – his only regret being that he had not had the time or the opportunity to try his theory out on anyone. The rationale and the judgement had to stand on its own terms, its inherent credibility self-sufficient.

A motor taxi puttered up the hill from Highgate and continued on its way. There was a little more traffic on Spaniards Road – a man wheeling a barrow, a dog-cart with two boys driving – but it was ideally quiet. He had a sudden urge to urinate, quickly unbuttoned his fly and did so. Trench-life again, he thought – a tot of rum and a piss before you went over the top. Think of the big attacks – tens of thousands of soldiers suddenly emptying their bladders. He smiled at the image this conjured up and –

A taxi pulled into the yard beside the inn.

Inside he saw a man in a Homburg lean forward and pay the driver.

Christian Vandenbrook stepped out and the taxi drove away.

Lysander shouted furiously from the shelter of the trees.

‘Vandenbrook! What the hell are you doing here? Get away!’

Vandenbrook hurried across the road. He was wearing a long tweed coat that almost reached his ankles.

‘I sent you the telegram!’ he shouted, peering into the wood, still not seeing where Lysander was. ‘Rief? I know who Andromeda is! Where are you?’ He saw Lysander and ran up to him, panting. ‘It came to me after the theatre – I just had to confirm a few things before I told you.’ He stepped behind a tree and looked down Spaniards Road where it sloped towards Highgate. ‘Someone’s following me, I’m sure. Let’s get away from here.’

‘All right, all right, calm down,’ Lysander said and they headed down a beaten earth path that led deeper into Caen Wood. Vandenbrook seemed unusually tense and watchful. At one point he pulled Lysander off the pathway and they waited behind a tree. Nothing. No one.

‘What’s happening?’ Lysander asked.

‘I’m sure I was followed. There was a man outside my house this morning. I’m sure he got into a motor and followed my taxi.’

‘Why would anyone follow you? – You’re imagining things. So – tell me what you know.’

They were deep in the wood by now. In the grey, pearly dawn light Lysander saw that the trees around them – beech, ash and oak – were ancient and tall. Stands of holly grew at their feet and the undergrowth on either side of the pathway was dense. They could have been in virgin forest – it was hard to believe they were in a borough of north London. The wind was growing stronger and the trees above their heads whistled and groaned as the branches bent and yielded. Lysander gathered in the flying ends of his scarf and tucked them in his coat.

‘D’you want a nip of this?’ he held out his hip flask. ‘It’s rum.’

Vandenbrook took a couple of large gulps and handed it back.

‘Tell me,’ Lysander said. ‘So, who’s Andromeda?’

‘It’s not a he – it’s a she. That’s what was confusing you.’

‘And? –’

‘The person who’s blackmailing me is a woman – a woman called Anna Faulkner. Don’t be confused by the name. She’s Austrian. The enemy.’

‘She’s dead. She killed herself.’

‘I know but –’ Vandenbrook stopped, looking suddenly shocked. ‘How do you know this?’

‘Because she is – she was – my mother.’

Vandenbrook stared at him and Lysander saw his expression change from excited near-panic to something colder, icier. All pretence gone. Two men in a wild wood at dawn with a gale blowing about their heads.

Vandenbrook reached into the pocket of his coat and drew out a revolver. He pointed it at Lysander’s face.

‘You’re under arrest,’ Vandenbrook said.

‘Under arrest? Are you mad?’

‘You and your mother – you were in it together – two Austrian spies. You were both blackmailing me.’

Lysander didn’t mean to laugh but one burst out of him all the same.

‘I have to hand it to you, Vandenbrook – you’re exceptional. You’re the best actor I’ve ever seen. Better than any of us. Best ever. You missed your vocation.’

Vandenbrook allowed himself a small smile.

‘Well, we’re all actors, aren’t we?’ he said. ‘Most of our waking lives, anyway. You, me, your mother, Munro and the others. Some are good, some are average. But nobody really knows what’s real, what’s true. Impossible to tell for sure.’

‘Why did you do it, Vandenbrook? Money? Are you stony broke? Did you want to get back at your father-in-law? Do you hate him that much? Or was it just to feel important, significant?’

‘You know why,’ Vandenbrook said, evenly, unprovoked. ‘Because I was being blackmailed – blackmailed by that bitch Andromeda –’

A fiercer gust of wind whipped Lysander’s hat off and, an instant later, Vandenbrook’s head seemed to explode in a pink mist of blood, his body thrown violently down to the ground by an invisible force.

Lysander closed his eyes, counted to three and opened them. Vandenbrook still lay there, the left half of his skull gone, matted hair, brains bulging, spilling, blood flowing thickly, like oil. Lysander picked up his hat, put it on and backed off so he couldn’t see. He turned to find Hamo striding through the trees, shouldering his Martini-Henri.

‘You all right?’ Hamo asked.

‘Sort of.’

‘I would have plugged him earlier – soon as he drew his gun – but I was waiting for your signal. What took you so long?’

Lysander wasn’t really concentrating. He was looking at Vandenbrook. From this angle all he could see was a small red hole under his right ear.

‘Sorry, Hamo, what were you saying?’

‘Why did you wait so long to take your hat off?’

‘I was trying to squeeze some more information from him, I suppose. Get a few more answers.’

‘Risky thing to do when a man is pointing a gun at your nose. Strike first, Lysander, and hard. That’s my motto. That’s why I used a dum-dum. One-shot kill required, no messing about.’

Hamo went to check on the body and examine the effects of his expanding bullet. Lysander took a notebook from his pocket and tore a sheet from it.

‘So this is the man responsible for your mother’s death,’ Hamo said, looking down on Vandenbrook.

‘Yes. And he managed to kill her without so much as laying a finger on her. He was going to use her – and me – as his ticket to freedom.’

‘Then may he rot in hell for several eternities,’ Hamo said. ‘A good morning’s work, I say.’

Lysander scribbled a word on the sheet of paper and unclipped a safety pin from behind his lapel. He stooped and pinned the note to Vandenbrook’s chest. It read, ‘ANDROMEDA’.

‘I assume you know what you’re doing,’ Hamo said.

‘Oh, yes.’

Lysander prised the revolver from Vandenbrook’s fingers and walked a few yards away before firing one shot into the ground. Then he fitted the gun back into Vandenbrook’s hand, pushing the forefinger through the trigger guard.

‘That little pop-gun couldn’t do that damage,’ Hamo said, almost sounding offended.

‘They won’t care. Andromeda killed himself – that’s all they need and want. We won’t hear another word about it. Where’s your motor?’

‘Round the corner on Hampstead Lane. I think he thought he was being followed – had the taxi take all sorts of turnings and doublings-back. Didn’t want to risk him spotting me.’

Lysander put his arm around his uncle’s shoulders and squeezed. He had tears in his eyes.

‘That was absolutely the right thing to do, Hamo. I can’t thank you enough.’

‘I told you to call on me, my boy. Any time.’

‘I know, now we have our secret.’

‘Silent as the grave.’

They walked away from Vandenbrook’s body, through the wood towards Hampstead Lane, as a weak sun managed to spear through a gap in the rushing clouds and, for a few seconds, the light was burnished, a pale gold.

20. Autobiographical Investigations

My mother’s grave is in the north corner of St Botolph’s graveyard, Claverleigh’s parish church. It is a bare and rather cold patch but away from the vast spreading yews that line the path to the porch and that make the place look dark and grim. I wanted some light to shine on her. Hugh Faulkner has planted two flowering cherries on either side of the headstone. I’ll come again in the spring when they’re in blossom and think about her in more tranquil times. Her headstone reads,

ANNA LADY FAULKNER

1864–1915

Widow of Crickmay 5th Baron Faulkner

1838–1915

Formerly wife of

Halifax Rief

1840–1899

Mother of

Lysander Rief

‘For ever remembered, for ever loved’

So our complicated personal history is edited down to these stark facts and these few words and numbers.

I never went back to the Annexe – I kept nothing in Room 205 – and was glad to be rid of the place with its persistent, lingering odour of antisepsis. I did return to The White Palace Hotel in Pimlico to collect my unforwarded mail and provide the management with my new address. I had grown strangely fond of flat 3/12 Trevelyan House and I gave up the lease on Chandos Place when the news reached me of poor Greville Varley’s death in Kut-al-Amara, Mesopotamia, from dysentery. Amongst my mail – mainly circulars and commercial solicitations (the bane of any serving officer’s postal life) – was a letter from Hettie:

Lysander, darling,

Can you forgive me? I was so horrible to you because I was so upset. However, I should never have said the things I did (particularly about Lothar – photograph enclosed). I feel ashamed and I rely on your tolerant and understanding nature. I have decided to divorce Jago and go to the United States. I want to live in a peaceful, neutral country – I’m sick of this ghastly, endless war. A friend of mine runs an ‘artists’ colony’ in New Mexico, wherever that may be, so I am going to join him and become a teacher.

I have to tell you that Jago is not taking this at all well and, perversely, thinks you are to blame. Apparently he has been going up to London and following you. When you saw him the night of the Zeppelin raid he panicked and confessed all to me.

I know we will always be friends and I wish you every bit of good luck for your forthcoming marriage (lucky girl!).

All my best love, Hettie (never more Vanora)

PS. If you could possibly find your way to send £50

to me care of the GPO in Liverpool I’d be undyingly grateful. I set sail for ‘Americay’ in two weeks.

LINES WRITTEN

UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF CHLORAL HYDRATE

The heat, that summer in Vienna, was immense.

It slammed down out of a white sky, heavy as glass.

I do not hope

I do not hope to see

I do not hope nor see

Why were those bands playing in the Prater?

No one told me what was going on.

She was

schön

.

She was

sympatisch

.

We couldn’t be left alone

At the Hôtel du Sport et Riche.

I do not see hope

Hope does not see me

Blackblackblackblackwhiteblackblackblack

We turned on our backs in the flax

We strove in the shadows of the apple grove

We found bliss beneath the trellis of clematis

Roll me over, lay me down and do it again.

It’s black, alack – I can’t see a thing.

Tara-loo, Madame, tara-lee, tara-loo-di-do

I dream of a woman.

Blanche and I have set a date for our wedding in the spring – May 1916. Hamo is to be my best man. Blanche and I spend many nights together but I find I still need chloral hydrate to sleep. I visit Dr Bensimon in Highgate once a week and we talk through the story of the last two years. Parallelism is working, slowly – I’m beginning to live with a version of events in which the man with the moustache and the fair-haired boy scramble out of the sap before my bombs explode. They’re both lightly wounded but both regain the German lines. The more I concentrate on this story and manufacture its precise details the more its plausibility beguiles me. Perhaps one night I’ll sleep peacefully, unaided by my chemicals.

I wrote to Sergeant Foley at the Stoke Newington Hospital for the Blind but have received no reply to date. Perhaps it might be better if I don’t learn any more facts about that night – it’s been hard enough dislodging the ones that are haunting me – but I feel I need to see Foley and explain something of what was really going on.

I have an audition tomorrow – my old life returning. A revival of Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw.

I sit here looking at Hettie’s photograph of Lothar that she sent me. A studio portrait of a little glum boy – close to tears, it seems – dressed to all intents and purposes as a girl in some embroidered pseudo-peasant smock. Long, dark curly hair. Does he look anything like me? One minute I think – yes, he does. And the next I think – no, not at all. Is he really, truly mine, in fact? Hettie betrayed Udo Hoff with me – might she not have been betraying me with somebody else? Can I ever be certain?

And on this note I think back, as I often do, to that October dawn on Hampstead Heath as I was waiting for sunrise, waiting for Vandenbrook to arrive. I knew it would be him and I hoped that sunrise that day would bring understanding and clarity with it – or at least clearer vision. And I thought I had it as I pinned ‘Andromeda’ to Vandenbrook’s coat. Everything solved, explained. But as the day wore on other questions nagged at me, troubled me and set me thinking again, until by dusk all was confusion once more. Maybe this is what life is like – we try to see clearly but what we see is never clear and is never going to be. The more we strive the murkier it becomes. All we are left with are approximations, nuances, multitudes of plausible explanations. Take your pick.

I feel, after what I have gone through, that I understand a little of our modern world now, as it exists today. And perhaps I’ve been offered a glimpse into its future. I was provided with the chance to see the mighty industrial technologies of the twentieth-century war machine both at its massive, bureaucratic source and at its narrow, vulnerable human target. And yet, for all the privileged insight and precious knowledge that I gleaned, I felt that the more I seemed to know, then the more clarity and certainty dimmed and faded away. As we advance into the future the paradox will become clearer – clear and black, blackly clear. The more we know the less we know. Funnily enough, I can live with that idea quite happily. If this is our modern world I feel a very modern man.

I met Munro at noon by the north-east lion at the foot of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. It was a grey, cold day of intermittent rain and drizzle and we were both wearing rubberized trenchcoats, like a couple of tourists. A heavy shower had passed through ten minutes before and the paving stones were glossy and lacquered, the wet smoky façades of the surrounding buildings – the Royal College of Physicians, the National Gallery, St Martin’s – almost a velvety black. The brief sun was trying vainly to break through the thick grey clouds, managing only to illumine some breeze-blown interstices, and this, coupled with the gloomy effect of the heavy purpley mass of more rain coming up the Thames estuary, cast a curious gold-leaden light on the scene, making the vistas down Pall Mall, Whitehall and Northumberland Avenue seem lit by arc-lights, artificial and strange, as if the city blocks could be struck like stage scenery and re-assembled elsewhere. I felt uncomfortable and edgy, troubled by the weather and the curious light, almost as if I were in a theatre, acting.

MUNRO: Why are we meeting like this, Rief? All very melodramatic.

LYSANDER: Indulge me. I like public spaces at the moment.

MUNRO: We found ‘Andromeda’, of course, up on the heath, with your note on him. The police called us . . . Everything tidied up nicely. We’re grateful, I must say.

LYSANDER: He was very clever, Vandenbrook. Very.

MUNRO: Not clever enough. You caught him and dealt with him. I read your deposition – very thorough.

LYSANDER: Good. He was never being blackmailed, you see. That was the first of his clever ideas. He had everything prepared in case he was ever found out. There was no ten-year old girl, no genuine statement, no pearls. It gave him an excuse – and it might have saved him the hangman if he hadn’t shot himself.

MUNRO: Yes . . . How did you know it was him – in the end?

LYSANDER: I admit – I’d been completely convinced by his blackmail story. Then he gave himself away – just a little slip up. Even I didn’t notice it when he said it – it was something I remembered a few hours later as I was trying to get to sleep.

MUNRO: You’re going to tell me what it was, I’m sure.

LYSANDER: That night we all met at the theatre, Vandenbrook made a reference to the cover of

Andromeda und Perseus

.

MUNRO: Glockner’s source-text –

LYSANDER: Exactly. I mentioned it – the opera – and he said he had heard it was a ‘saucy’ opera. How could he know? He’d never seen it. But he had seen the libretto with its provocative cover because he’d stolen it from my mother’s office and used it as the master-text for the Glockner code.

MUNRO [thinking]: Yes . . . What was that meeting in the variety theatre all about?

LYSANDER: I wanted Vandenbrook to look you over – you, Fyfe-Miller and Massinger. See if he could identify you. I still believed he was being blackmailed at that stage.

MUNRO: Are you saying you suspected one of us?

LYSANDER: I’m afraid so. It seemed the obvious conclusion at the time. I was convinced it was one of you three – that one of you was the real Andromeda. Until he made his slip-up.

MUNRO: I don’t understand –

LYSANDER: When I was in Vienna I knew this Austrian army officer who had been accused of stealing from the officers’ mess. I’m sure now that he was guilty but there were eleven other suspects. So he hid behind a screen of other suspects and manipulated them very adroitly – just like Vandenbrook. And he got away with it. When there are many suspects the inclination is to suspect anyone and everybody – which means you probably never find the real suspect. It’s a very clever ruse. But I had this strong feeling that the whole business was connected to Vienna in some way. You had been in Vienna, Fyfe-Miller as well – and so had Massinger, apparently.

MUNRO: Yes, Massinger came to Vienna. And you were in Vienna, also.

LYSANDER: So I was. And Hettie Bull. And Dr John Bensimon. The only person who hadn’t been there was Vandenbrook. And that’s what gave him away. He hadn’t been there, yet he knew about

Andromeda und Perseus

. And, most importantly, what was on the cover of the Viennese libretto. Glockner’s Dresden libretto had no ‘saucy’ cover. Just plain black lettering on white. A tiny, fatal, error. But I was the only person who knew that. The only one.

Munro looked thoughtful, stroking his neat moustache with his middle finger in his habitual gesture. I sensed that he was desperate to find something wrong with my reasoning, some flaw in the logic – almost as a matter of intellectual pride and self-esteem, as if he was annoyed by the case I had built and wanted to bring it down, somehow.

MUNRO: All of the Glockner letters were posted in London.

LYSANDER: Yes.

MUNRO: So you’re saying Vandenbrook took them to a south-coast hotel. Left them there. Then had them picked up the next day by a railway porter and brought back to him in London. He then encoded them and sent them on to Geneva.

LYSANDER: It was part of his cover. He was unbelievably thorough. Everything was thought through. Everything had to fit his essential blackmail story – that there was another person controlling him. Another Andromeda, if you like. A more important one.

MUNRO: He certainly took pains.

LYSANDER: And they nearly paid off for him. By the way, how did you know the Glockner letters had London postmarks?

MUNRO: You told me.

LYSANDER: Did I? I don’t remember.

MUNRO: Then it must have been Madame Duchesne.

LYSANDER: Must have been . . .

MUNRO: How can you be sure that Vandenbrook was Andromeda?

LYSANDER: How can you be sure about anything? It’s my best guess. My most considered deduction. My most cogitated interpretation. Vandenbrook was very shrewd – and an exceptional actor, incidentally, far superior to me. I wish I had half his talent. And he had established an invisible layer of power above him that made him look like a victim, a dupe, a pawn. Don’t look at me, I’m small fry, he was saying – the real control lies elsewhere. I believed it for a while but it was a total fabrication.

MUNRO: Then why did he try to deliver the last letter?

LYSANDER: That was the beginning of the ruse. He saw I had come into the Directorate and he knew exactly what I was looking for – and that I might very well narrow the suspects down to him – so he put his escape plan into operation. Of course he encoded the Glockner letters himself. He had the master-text. But he had to cover himself in case I found him out. And of course I might never have come upon the last letter, but he couldn’t risk it.

MUNRO: Isn’t that a bit too subtle? Over-subtle? Even for Vandenbrook?

LYSANDER: This is your world, Munro, not mine. I think ‘too subtle’ or ‘over-subtle’ are its defining features, don’t you? The triple-bluff? The quadruple-bluff? The third-guess? The tenth-guess? Normal currency in my limited experience. Why don’t you ask an expert like Madame Duchesne? Ask yourself, come to that.

Munro frowned. He looked like a man who was still not convinced by the argument.

LYSANDER: You don’t look convinced.

MUNRO: Well, next summer’s offensives will give us a final answer, I suppose, as to whether the leak is staunched or not.

LYSANDER: I suggest you go and spend a few days in the Directorate of Movements and its associated departments. It’s all there. Mountains upon mountains of hard fact – so easy to read. It’s too big, Munro. The war machine is too gigantic and gigantically obvious – you can’t hide anything when it’s on that massive scale and when you’re as close as I was. Anyone could have been Andromeda – it just happened to be Vandenbrook.

Munro looked at me, quizzically, as if I were some fractious and rascally schoolboy who was forever disrupting his classroom.

LYSANDER: Think of our armies as cities. There’s a British city, and a French city and a German city and a Russian city. And then there’s the Austrian city, the Italian and the Turkish. They need everything a city needs – fuel, transportation, power supply, food, water, sanitation, administration, hospitals, a police force, law courts, undertakers and graveyards. And so on. Think how much these cities need on a daily basis, how much they consume, on an hourly basis. There’s a population of millions in these cities and they have to be kept running at all costs.

MUNRO: I see what you mean. Yes . . .

LYSANDER: And then there’s the final, unique ingredient.

MUNRO: What’s that?

LYSANDER: Weaponry. Of every imaginable type. These cities are trying to destroy each other.

MUNRO: Yes . . . It does make you think . . .

He was silent for a while and kicked out a foot at a pigeon that was pecking too close to his brilliant shoes. The bird flapped away a few feet.

MUNRO: Why did you kill Vandenbrook?

LYSANDER: I didn’t. He killed himself. When I confronted him with the evidence about the libretto. He drew a gun and shot himself. Search his house – you’ll find the vital clue. The

Andromeda und Perseus

libretto is the key to all this.

MUNRO: We can’t search his house. It wouldn’t do. Grieving widow, little weeping girls who’ve lost their father. Distinguished officer who took his own life, injured in battle, suffering from the awful pressures and stress of modern warfare . . . No, no. And his father-in-law would have something to say about us sending men in and tearing the place apart.

LYSANDER: Then you’ll have to take my word for it, won’t you?

Silence. We looked at each other, giving nothing away.

MUNRO: I was sorry to hear about your mother.

LYSANDER: Yes. It’s a real tragedy. She just couldn’t cope, I suppose. But it was something she wanted to do. I respect that.

MUNRO: Of course . . . Of course . . . What about you, Rief? What do you want to do now?

LYSANDER: I want my honourable discharge. No more army for me. My war’s finished.

MUNRO: I think we can arrange that. It’s the least you deserve.

We shook hands, said a simple goodbye and walked away from each other, Munro heading back down Northumberland Avenue to Whitehall Court and me strolling up the Strand to Surrey Street and 3/12 Trevelyan House. I didn’t look back and I assume Munro didn’t, either. It was over.

21. Shadows

It is a dark, foggy, drizzly night in London, near the end of 1915. The fog, pearly and smoky, seems to curl and hang – as if from a million snuffed candles – around the city blocks like something almost growing and sinuously weedy, blanketing and vast, seeking out doorways and stairways, alleyways and side streets, the levels of the roofs quite invisible. The streetlamps drop a struggling moist yellow cone of luminescence that seems to wane as soon as the light hits the shining pavement in its small hazed circle, as if the effort of piercing the engulfing murky darkness and falling there were all it could manage.

You are standing shivering in the angle of two walls in Archer Street, peering out, trying to discern the late-night world go by, your attention half-caught by the small crowd of enthusiastic theatre-goers waiting with their programmes for an autograph as the cast of Man and Superman leaves the stage door after the show. Exhalations of rapture, an impromptu smatter of applause. Eventually the people drift away as the actors come through, sign, chat briefly and leave.

The light is switched off but you see that the door opens one last time and a man appears with a raincoat and a hat in his hand. He looks up at the opaque night sky, checking on the dismal weather, and you will probably recognize him as Mr Lysander Rief, who is playing the part of John Tanner, the leading role in Man and Superman, by Mr George Bernard Shaw. Lysander Rief looks tired – he looks like a man who is not sleeping well. So why is he quitting the theatre so discreetly, the very last to leave? He puts his hat on and sets off and – vaguely curious – you decide to follow him, left into Wardour Street and then quickly right into Old Compton Street. You keep your distance as you watch him make his way home through the thickening condensations of the night. He pauses frequently to look around him and, as he goes, he takes an odd swerving course along the street, crossing and re-crossing the roadway, as if keen to avoid the bleary yellow circles cast by the streetlamps. You give up after a minute – you’ve better things to do – and you leave Mr Lysander Rief to make his erratic way home, wherever that may be, as best he can. Good luck to him – he’s evidently a man who prefers the fringes and the edges of the city streets, its blurry peripheries – where it’s hard to make things out clearly, hard to tell exactly what is what, and who is whom – Mr Lysander Rief looks like someone who is far more at ease occupying the cold security of the dark; a man happier with the dubious comfort of the shadows.

A Note on the Author

William Boyd is the author of ten novels, including

A Good Man in Africa

, winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Award;

An Ice-Cream War

, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize;

Brazzaville Beach

, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize;

Any Human Heart

, winner of the Prix Jean Monnet and adapted into a BAFTA-winning Channel

4

drama;

Restless

, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year, the

Yorkshire Post

Novel of the Year and a Richard & Judy selection, and most recently the bestselling

Ordinary Thunderstorms

.

By the Same Author

A Good Man in Africa

On the Yankee Station

An Ice-Cream War

Stars and Bars

School Ties

The New Confessions

Brazzaville Beach

The Blue Afternoon

The Destiny of Nathalie ‘X’

Armadillo

Nat Tate: An American Artist

Any Human Heart

Fascination

Bamboo

Restless

Ordinary Thunderstorms

First published in Great Britain 2012

This electronic edition published in January 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright © 2012 by William Boyd

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved

You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise

make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means

(including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying,

printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the

publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication

may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney

50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781408828458

www.bloomsbury.com/williamboyd

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