by Jessica Mann
Nearly every house was in the style traditional in that valley, tall and narrow, with names and dates marked in poker-work on their wooden walls. The geraniums were still in flower, but winter stores were filling up the undercrofts, with piles of logs stacked against walls, and strings of onions and herbs dangling from beams. Outside the sports shop, skis were already on display. Flowers were carved on the age blackened wood of some chalets, and even the new houses, palest pine, were in the same style, with each storey overhanging the one below.
Chalet Edelweiss was in a side alley turning off opposite the largest hotel. St Jean was evidently both a winter and a summer resort, and many of the houses advertised rooms: Apartements libres, zimmern frei. Tamara knocked at the door of the Reichenbach’s house. It seemed to be a kind of farm; perhaps all householders here were also smallholders. Beside the house was an open sided barn full of hay, and two cows were grazing in the neighbouring field.
No reply. Tamara returned to the car and backed it into the hotel forecourt. While she waited at the reception desk, she read the list of forthcoming local referenda in a printed news-sheet: democracy in action. She took a room, and had her case, and Rosamund’s, carried up to it. The room was small, but pristine and well-equipped, and provided a telephone that could be used for direct dialling.
Tamara found the number of the water engineers at the mountain top, and asked for Placidus Reichenbach. Her French and her German were both good enough to overcome language barriers, but no verbal agility would move the adamant telephonist, who insisted that on no account whatsoever could the engineers take calls when they were on duty, and that Placidus Reichenbach was not available.
The directory listed the number of the Chalet Britton, and Tamara found herself speaking to an Englishman whose voice was at once bland and suspicious.
Not the Prime Minister, she thought; they’d know the voice; what establishment figure … ‘This is the Lord Chancellor’s private secretary speaking,’ she said. ‘His Lordship would like to know when you expect the Minister?’
They would think he was getting ready to swear the man in. Or would that be the Archbishop of Canterbury? No matter, for the man was answering politely.
‘He’s due to arrive here within the next few hours. Can I get him to call back?’
‘If you would. The Lord Chancellor’s department, private office.’ She rang off to save the trouble of inventing a telephone number. So Britton was on his way, even though the Prime Minister was on his last prayer. That must be confirmation that Rosamund was at the Chalet. Why else would he leave the vital centres of power at this moment?
Tamara went to lean out of her window. Would Rosamund be comforted by those spectacular mountains now? What were those men doing to her?
The room was above the terrace, but Tamara was hidden from the tables by the overhang of the upper floor. Glasses chinked and male voices rumbled below. For a moment she took no notice; but suddenly, like a binocular picture swimming into view, she was not listening to foreign gabble, but hearing conversation: two men, talking in Russian. Tamara had been educated to speak French and German but had learnt Russian at her grandmother’s knee; at home they could all speak it, except her father. Tamara understood more than she could say, and quite enough to follow what was being said below.
‘A disaster, just at this moment. Why was I not warned of this before?’
The second man was not a native Russian speaker, though he was fluent. ‘We thought we could deal with it. Such a minor matter.’
‘And you see what happens. You are both unwise. I should have been told.’
‘It will be all right, I am sure.’
‘It should never have been allowed to reach this stage.’
‘Of course, all need not be lost,’ the non-native Russian said. ‘If our friend has to defect, the propaganda effect of that would be stupendous.’
‘Propaganda is of a different order of usefulness to the position he has worked towards and nearly achieved. I should be sorry to think that our investment since 1956 was wasted on propaganda.’
The two men pushed their chairs back, and strolled down through the flower beds to the stream. Tamara watched them closely; she would know them again.
She went downstairs and paid for her telephone calls; then she crossed over to the Reichenbachs’ house, went up the five steps to the front door and knocked again. She waited, examining the window boxes, and the curtains that bellied from the open windows. The balcony was furnished as an extension of the living room, with a table and chairs, and a bird cage.
What was it Rosamund had said. Placidus Reichenbach’s wife was a teacher? A nurse? What could she do, what could either of them do, even if they were here? Tamara knew well enough the respect Swiss authority had for its rate-paying foreign residents. A junior engineer would never persuade anyone important that the honoured visitor, the next British Prime Minister, had been instrumental in abducting Rosamund Sholto and now held her prisoner in his chalet.
What could Placidus Reichenbach do to help Rosamund this time?
Tamara sat down on one of the basket chairs, and considered her position. Allies: none, unless Ian was even now on his way here with the Minister, and she, unlikely prospect, had a chance to detach and over-persuade him. Anyway, he was probably still in England, bullying innocent outsiders like Thea Crawford.
Placidus Reichenbach: well disposed no doubt, but probably neither powerful nor influential; nor would he be a fighter. Tamara had spent a summer in the family of a Swiss archaeologist some years before, and felt that ingrained into his and his countrymen’s being was a shrinking from aggression; they would defend themselves to the death, but neutrality was in their bones. What was needed now was a bit of fight.
With what weapons, then? Tamara’s Swiss friend, Rolf Mollenz, had gone away for two weeks while she was in his house, to do his annual stint of National Service. He pretended to be amused, sardonic, rueful at the prospect, but Litzi Mollenz said that he was very proud of himself. It was the duty of every man to be part of the country’s defences. Rolf showed Tamara his uniform and demonstrated his drill; he produced his rifle, which was permanently in his charge, for if invasion came, there would be no time to distribute arms. Rolf was disgusted at Tamara’s nasty turn of thought when she asked whether it was safe to have the gun in the house. ‘We are very strict about gun licences at home,’ she said, remembering visits by local bobbies when her father’s firearms certificate came up for renewal. But Rolf assured her that no Swiss would dream of stealing such a weapon. It never crossed anybody’s mind that such a thing could occur. It was the unbreachable taboo. He made it all sound very virtuous and uncomplicated, as though the problems of organised crime and illicit firearms were alien to the Swiss environment, and as though a person who could even ask whether a military weapon was safe in a Swiss citizen’s house was, somehow, outside the pale.
On the other side of the lane was a blank wall, presumably of the hotel’s garage. Tamara moved along the balcony to the open window and jumped herself up and in. She found herself in a dark, tidy sitting room, with embroidered doilies and anti macassars and some painted china behind glass display doors: It was very similar to the Mollenz family living room.
Rolf Mollenz kept his equipment in a cupboard in his bedroom. So, Tamara found, did Placidus Reichenbach. Rolf Mollenz kept the key in his wife’s dressing table, and when Tamara found a key in Ursula Reichenbach’s, she wondered whether a military manual for reservists advised it.
Inside the cupboard, under a pile of herb-scented linen, was the gun in its canvas case. Of course, the rifle was far superior to the one with which Tamara had learnt target shooting, and, even more so, to the old shotgun she used when out rabbiting with her brothers. This was a weapon of great sophistication, but a fool, incapable of thought, could kill with it.
Tamara refolded the sheets; in all this clean tidiness she felt that her own intrusion was precisely as shocking, no less but no more, as that of any
other vermin: a thief, a mouse, a cockroach, all equally deplorable. Unlike other scavengers she did intend to return her plunder. Meanwhile, she wrapped the gun case in a tartan rug and went downstairs again, out via the balcony, and back across the road to her car. With the slightest luck, Placidus Reichenbach would not discover the loss of his gun; with much more luck, she would never need to fire it.
Rosamund; her mind no longer tautly concentrated on breaking and entering, on equipping herself to deal with the unimaginable next few hours, Tamara’s thoughts turned to repetitively traversing the path from which she could see no exit. It was like a Moebius strip, for however she tried to move laterally or otherwise, she returned to the same spot: Rosamund was almost certainly a prisoner in the Chalet Britton. Already, or soon, Britton and his men would have heard from her to whom she had passed the package given to her in the bank. Rosamund was in danger, but so, by now, was Tamara.
On the other hand, Tamara was free and armed. She felt not afraid but determined, more aggressive than submissive.
After all, how many men could be ranged against her? Not more than five or six. How would they recognise her? If her hair was covered, and she was not in the identifiable car, they wouldn’t. And what, short of outright murder, could they do?
What, come to that, short of outright murder, could Tamara do? To begin with, she could act uninhibited by Rosamund and Phoebe Sholto’s lifelong father-worship. Sholto was a name to revere, even for those who had not been born in his lifetime, but he was not a god. To blaspheme him would not call down thunderbolts. Nor would he have wished to keep his name untarnished at his country’s expense; of that much, Tamara’s reading of modern history convinced her.
She locked the boot of the hired car, in which the rifle lay, and walked with the document case along the village street to a shop with paints, papers and easels in the window. They had, as she had hoped, a photocopying machine. Tamara made half a dozen copies of all the pieces of paper, and of a note scribbled by her, asking her family, in the event of her death, to distribute the information to the national press. She then sent off envelopes, addressed to herself, and marked not to be forwarded, care of her parents, her sister Alexandra, each of her brothers, and her boss. She wondered whether she would really be in a position to retrieve and destroy them.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Ian Barnes had gone to his office in an unprecedented state of anxiety and indecision. Thea Crawford had shown him Tamara’s message, and spoken frankly about Rosamund and her reasons for distrusting Aidan Britton. He was furious with Tamara, while acknowledging his fury at himself, for he realised that her judgement had been sounder than his, and her reactions, if intuitive and impulsive, more worthy. He was a cautious man himself, with the virtues of his defects, slow to anger, persistent and loyal. In private and social life Tamara’s spontaneity was charming, and her decisiveness enviable. He had never seen her in action professionally, but presumed that she was able and energetic, for archaeology was a competitive profession. It had never occurred to him that Tamara would extend her attentions to his work, and when she did, they seemed not admirable but unforgiveable.
Ian had been brought up on one of the small islands off the fierce coast of Britain, where seamen and farmers were slow and sure, or quick and dead. Tamara was the descendant, on one side, of a Russian aristocratic family which had survived by having the quickness of wit to escape while the going was good; her father’s ancestors had clawed their way upwards through the generations of the Industrial Revolution and what was built on it, and by seizing their opportunities they had become rich. Her family had taught her not to wait, but to take.
Both were self-reliant, but Ian needed authority’s push; Tamara was her own self-starter.
But in accepting authority, Ian realised that he had been induced to spend several days pursuing what seemed indeed to be an unjustified aim. He was about to march into his boss’s office and demand an explanation, when Mr Black sent for him.
‘You’re not a fool, boy; you’ll be in a chair like this only too soon yourself.’ Mr Black spoke with the gentle assurance of a tutor; they might have been discussing Ian’s essay on the fall of dead empires. ‘You were put on the job because you’d met the subject while you were on attachment to the Minister. The paramount requirement of discretion meant that you had to work without the usual facilities. You know as well as I do the risk of some underpaid operative tipping off the press on the side.’
The slang came unsuitably from Mr Black’s withdrawn dignity. He looked more like an aesthete, perhaps an art historian or literary critic, than what he was; though none of his staff knew it, he wrote sensitive verse, which was published above an assumed name in The Times Literary Supplement and The Listener.
‘How could one man be expected to find one needle in that haystack?’ Ian demanded.
Mr Black sighed. ‘My dear fellow, you were not expected to find her. When you sit where I sit, you will discover soon enough that ostensible obedience to a politician’s command can be a cover for passive obstruction.’
‘Do you mean that you didn’t want me to find Rosamund Sholto?’
‘Of course.’ The older man shrugged. ‘Had there been reason to fear her in reality …’
‘Are you saying that you didn’t believe the Minister? You don’t think she’s working for terrorists? You don’t believe the IRA code messages?’
‘Sholto’s daughter? Let us say that, even if she were a moral supporter, she was not thought to represent a material threat. As for the code messages: who better to know in what form they would plausibly be delivered than one who is usually at the receiving end of them?’
‘So it was all a set-up? She was allowed to get away at Harwich while muggins here went on believing he was doing his duty, all alone.’
‘Of course, there is the Minister’s private … work force.’
‘I see,’ Ian said grimly. ‘It sounds like simple professional jealousy. I want none of it.’
‘You do not see,’ Mr Black replied. ‘And it would be more accurate to call it political jealousy. I am jealous for the political freedom of our country.’
Ian Barnes was both intelligent and educated; he had been born with intuition and taught to think. Now, aware of Dick Black’s eye upon him, he worked out the wider implications of their conversation. At last he muttered, ‘There must be legal methods.’
The mental jump had been matched by Mr Black. ‘Of preventing Britton from becoming Prime Minister, and from then subverting the traditional democracy of the United Kingdom? Those who long for leaders are sheep and in him they will find a ruthless shepherd, once he has the supreme power.’
Ian said, ‘Do we know for certain that he’s done any worse than surround himself with thuggish sycophants and been the object of mass hero-worship?’
‘Had there been anything concrete and provable we should hardly have waited until this final moment. It is only in this present affair that his guard has slipped. He has ordered the murder of Steven Courtney; of a retired solicitor called Hardman; and, I believe, of his own wife.’
‘But –’
‘On the very day she died, she wrote to two men in England, Courtney and Greenfield, that she would be seeing them soon; hardly the action of a suicidal woman.’
‘Accident –’
‘She had been a climber all her life. Do you believe it? As for her sister, her escape is attributable to a miracle, or to remarkable resourcefulness. How she avoided being found by the news media after the Sholto House explosion …’
‘Was that arranged by Britton?’
‘He wanted her face on every front page and television screen in the country.’
‘It would all be rather easier, if I am to make a useful contribution, if I knew something of the object of the exercise,’ Ian said, giving way.
‘The exercise is to drive Britton from public life. Nothing more subversive or illegal than that. Since Miss Sholto’s object seems to be identical, your ta
sk will be to reinforce her. She has a weapon which is evidently sufficiently powerful for Britton to fear it; I have forged a little extra offering.’ He handed Ian a paper, which was to be introduced to whatever package Rosamund Sholto eventually received from Phoebe Britton’s legacy. It was a typed document, with the signature in ink, Steven Courtney, formerly Stefan Czernin. It consisted of a confession that he had been permitted by the authorities to leave Hungary in 1956, on condition that he agreed subsequently to act as an intermediary between Aidan Britton and the Russian government. The lives of his parents and younger sisters were hostage for his obedience.
Mr Black answered the expression on Ian’s face. ‘It would be hard to discredit or deny,’ he said gently. ‘And it won’t hurt anyone; the man is dead, after all. Backed by the papers already in existence, whatever they are, I think Britton will give in gracefully.’
‘How do you know they aren’t to the same effect?’
‘I think we can be certain that they refer to a private crime or sin. Had Britton’s actions threatened their country, Sholto’s daughters would not have bought their private peace at that price.’
Ian was not going to be bulldozed into again starting on something he would be ashamed to finish. But Mr Black said gently, ‘It is as important that you should support this object, as understand it.’
It was curious to precede a dangerous mission with a philosophical seminar, but wise, no doubt. For at the end of it neither man was in much doubt as to Ian’s commitment to success. ‘A thankless task with no decorations at the end of it,’ Mr Black warned. ‘But bring it off and the freedom of your own future life, and of your country’s, will be reward enough. Britton must fall back so far from public life, that he never has any prospect of jumping further forward. He and his gang must be driven from power for good.’
Chapter Twenty-Six
The bus was full of tourists, many of them clutching the guide book which advised the trip up the mountain to see the dam, ‘a miracle of modern Swiss engineering’. Tamara was inconspicuous among them. She had allowed the girl in the clothes store to sell her a bobble hat, as well as the new climbing boots, scarlet socks to fold down over them, Lindt chocolate and a pictorial relief map showing recommended walks around St Jean. She carried her archaeological equipment, the collapsible tripod, the level, the canvas case containing the Sopwith staff.