by Jessica Mann
*
I won’t let him hurt Rosamund or go with the Russian, Tamara thought. She aimed the rifle, squinting along its sights.
*
One more heave, boys, were the words that came into Aidan Britton’s mind. Just let me get there. The old man must be dead by now. Again he cursed the decency of his colleagues that had inhibited them from deposing the dying Prime Minister and appointing him in time. But there was still time.
‘Clear the way,’ he said curtly to his own men. ‘Bring the car. Telephone to have the helicopter ready to take off.’
*
The farmers from the high alp were driving their cattle down the road, bells swinging on heavy leather collars from their bony blond necks. Trailers were heaped with agricultural and household equipment, one with a Brobdignagian cauldron, another with the cheese that had been made in it. Coming up from the village towards them, ahead of the singing schoolchildren and their teacher, came a Volkswagen minibus. The driver eased his machine into a space beside the embassy car, and five gentlemen stepped out with stately calm, unhurried and dignified. They were followed by Placidus Reichenbach. His eye fell on Rosamund, and he said softly, ‘My weapons are those of democracy.’
More loudly, he said to Aidan Britton, ‘I present the members of The Council of St Jean. We greet the new owner of the chalet, Miss Sholto.’ One of his companions was wearing a shiny blue suit, with a gilt chain of office pinned to its shoulders. Another still had on his apron, blood-stained from his work as a butcher. He was straight from the chopping block. One wore a mechanic’s overalls, two the collarless shirts and braced trousers of the working farmer. None looked heroic or even altruistic, but Tamara Hoyland, who alone understood the role Placidus Reichenbach had brought them to play, thought emotionally that they represented the will of the people.
But to be useful, the peoples’ will must be informed. The members of the council of St Jean surrounded the damsel whose distress they had been summoned to relieve. Placidus embraced her; the mayor shook her hand. And Aidan Britton, ignored by the democrats, ignored his totalitarian rescuers. It might be good for Communism to have Britton as a famous defector; but it would not be good for Britton.
Unhindered by right or left, private or public opponents, Aidan Britton got quickly into his car and ordered his driver to go. The huge machine roared out of the drive, followed by the Moskvitch car.
Tamara was the only watcher who understood what was happening, and she found her aim blocked by the representatives of democracy. She would have fired; she wished to fire; but could not.
Out on the twisting road the procession of villagers was climbing to meet their relations. Their front ranks had reached the viewpoint whence, two weeks before, Phoebe Britton had fallen.
The driver pulled at the wheel. The car was longer than the width of the road, and designed for motorways, not mountain tracks, but the driver was able to correct his skid and would have wriggled past by a hairsbreadth, had the bonnet of the pursuing Moskvitch not touched it a glancing blow. The Russian would have had the skill to avoid it, and to drive round the approaching villagers, but he was not at the wheel, and his barked directions confused Gerald Greenfield, who was trained to obey orders but incapable of following these.
Before the eyes of the schoolchildren, silenced in the traditional song Ursula Reichenbach had spent the summer term teaching them, before the eyes of the old women and old men, who had mourned at the funeral of Sholto’s daughter, the car containing her husband, and the car in which his accomplices in treachery followed him, skidded, swerved, lurched, and plunged over the side of the mountain, ending in a joint holocaust not far from the spot where Phoebe Britton’s body had landed.
*
Tamara Hoyland lowered her weapon, her hands trembling. Her eyes were on the scene below, and she hardly realised that Placidus Reichenbach had returned her his gun unloaded. She descended to join her lover, her friend, and all the other watchers, above this reeking funeral pyre. She took the envelope from her pocket, and tore it, and the letters it contained, into very small pieces, which she scattered in the rising smoke. They floated and fluttered, catching the up-drafts from the furnace of heat, but slowly, eventually, all the fragments dropped towards the flame.
*
At Britton’s funeral there was no coffin; only a small casket containing unspeakable shreds of his remains. Nor were there gun carriages, or mourning royalty. But representatives of the Crown, of Church and State, were present, and a eulogy was preached by the man who had performed the same service in Sholto’s memory, years before. Sholto’s surviving daughter did not attend.
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