by William Boyd
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. Ly
sander, 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.’