Stones of Treason

by Peter Watson

  Edward lay in bed. He had just put down the phone. He looked tired. ‘There’s something I didn’t tell you.’

  She looked at him sharply.

  ‘I didn’t tell anyone. But now Leith knows – they all know.’ He explained about Nancy and the phone conversation Riley and O’Day had overheard.

  When he had finished, Victoria got off the bed, put down her treen animal and went into the bathroom. When she came out, she was wearing her dressing-gown. She picked up her coffee and sat, not on the bed, but on a chair by the dressing-table. ‘I think you owe me more than the few details that you gave Leith.’

  Edward nodded. ‘I was in love with Nancy – at least, I think I was. She certainly had an effect on me that no one else did. But I didn’t realize she had used me until … until this whole business was well under way. By that time I had … mishandled that telephone conversation with Basle and if I’d told Lockwood I’d have been out on my ear and very likely locked up.’

  ‘But you were taking one hell of a risk.’

  ‘See it my way and you’ll see I had no choice. And I thought Nancy’s main role was to observe – through me – how the negotiations were developing.’

  ‘Even so, she could have been followed – she might have led our side to one of the main characters.’

  ‘Yes … yes. But I didn’t know – I couldn’t be sure – she was involved. All I had was circumstantial –’

  ‘Edward!’

  He took a breath. ‘All the evidence I had was circumstantial and – well, I did … we were close once. Or I thought we were.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘All right! All right! What I did was wrong. Foolish.’ He took another breath. ‘No! That’s not fair. I was foolish, maybe. But you don’t turn on your friends, not immediately, not at the first suspicious circumstance. Not at the second, even. If they’re friends they get the benefit of the doubt. It may not be the way politicians behave, or the security services. But I’m not one of them.’

  ‘What did Lockwood say?’

  Edward shrugged. ‘Leith was cool, but not spitting. Maybe he understands. Maybe the Prime Minister understands – more than you seem to.’

  Victoria was silent for a while. She put down the treen horse and sipped her coffee. When she next spoke, her voice was different. ‘If you were in love with her, what was … what were you doing last night and the night before? With me, I mean.’

  Edward pulled the bedclothes up to his chin. ‘I can’t give you a definitive answer. People talk about love at first sight: everyone accepts that can happen in a flash. But what about the opposite – being turned off people just as quickly? Nancy used me, she lied, she deceived, she pretended. When I think about it, I get hot waves of anger and embarrassment. I think of her way of laughing, her habit of cocking her head to one side when she was being sarcastic – a hundred little intimacies that I assumed were intimacies. And I feel betrayed. I feel I’ve lost a race badly, a race I didn’t know I was in. And of course I have lost.’ Edward turned on his side to face Victoria. ‘What do you think happened to my feelings as a result of all that? Do you think love could survive that?’

  ‘Feelings are unpredictable.’

  ‘Well, not mine. Anger is one thing. I suppose you can be angry with someone you love. But you can’t embarrass someone and expect them to love you back. Embarrassment and love, shame and love, can’t coexist.’

  ‘But you’re talking about Nancy and you. Not about us.’

  ‘You asked, Victoria,’ he said gently. Then, ‘Neither you nor I could govern the time when we met. Whenever you meet someone you have a past, an immediate past, as often as not with someone in it. So does the other person. That can’t be helped – it’s normal. Nothing I’ve done with you, Victoria, nothing I’ve said, has been anything other than natural or honest. Yes, I think about Nancy a lot. But when I think about her it’s with embarrassment, anger and shame, not with tenderness. Not any more. A week – ten days – ago, I was in love with her. Now I could kill her – and I mean that. She has destroyed something inside me.’ He smiled at Victoria. ‘It so happens that you seem to be the perfect antidote to Nancy. You are so fresh, intellectually, emotionally, sexually. When I’m with you I hardly think of Nancy.’

  ‘Hardly! Jesus, my aunt was right! Men are a pain.’

  ‘Victoria! We are in Turkey for a reason.’ He added softly. ‘Nancy is part of that reason.’

  For a while, neither of them spoke. Then Edward said, ‘Come and sit next to me on the bed. Please. There’s a lot more technical stuff which Leith told me.’

  Victoria stared back but didn’t move.

  ‘Please … come over here. I’m sorry if I’ve made you angry.’

  Edward threw back the sheet and stood up. He walked around the foot of the bed to where Victoria was sitting and led her back to where she had been lying.

  She said nothing but allowed herself to be manoeuvred by Edward. He got back into bed and put his arm around her.

  ‘Leith thinks I should call Nancy –’

  Victoria tried to roll away from him but he held her tight. ‘Listen! From what Riley and O’Day overheard, it seems that she is suspicious about my really being kicked off the case, so to speak. Leith thinks I should phone her today.’

  ‘Won’t that look suspicious? One day she says she hasn’t heard from you – and you call her the next day?’

  ‘Not necessarily. Don’t forget, she didn’t know the conversation was being overheard.’

  Again, neither of them spoke. Edward still had his arm around Victoria but she sat upright, stiff, unyielding.

  After a while, she said, ‘You could be sailing.’

  He looked at her.

  ‘It would explain why you haven’t been in touch. I used to do quite a bit of sailing at one stage.’ She eyed him. ‘Part of my past you didn’t know about. You could have been sailing around the Western Isles and put ashore after several days at sea. Then you called her straight away.’

  Edward grinned, leaned across and gently kissed her cheek. ‘Brilliant. But the only problem is: what if she wants to call back? As I say, she’s cunning. If I just get her answering machine it’s one thing. But if she’s at home, and we have a conversation, she’ll think up some reason to call me back, to check out that I really am in Scotland.’

  Victoria sat thinking. Edward couldn’t be sure but the stiffness in her body seemed to have lessened. Outside in the street a mule suddenly screamed.

  Edward went to move, to start shaving, then stopped. ‘How about this? Say we make it the Orkneys, not the Western Isles. That would help explain why I sounded so far away on the telephone. I say that I’ve just arrived at Overbister – that’s on Sanday. I say that I’ve been sailing with some Scottish friends who know people on the island and we’re having one night ashore. I leave a number –’

  ‘How can you do that? Do you know anyone up there?’

  ‘I know there’s an RAF base at Sanday, about twenty miles from Overbister. My father stayed there the other week, with friends. I’m sure Leith, or someone at Downing Street, can get them to co-operate. They must have some sort of line that, for a short amount of time, can be used as a decoy: whoever answers the phone pretends to be one of my friends.’

  Now Victoria tapped her temple with her finger. ‘And that person, when Nancy calls, says you’re not in – you’re at the pub or a restaurant or shopping. But then they call here quickly and you call Nancy back straight away. She will have telephoned Scotland and reached you almost immediately. It ought to satisfy her.’

  Edward tightened his grip around Victoria’s frame. ‘That ought to beat Nancy.’ Again he lightly kissed her cheek. But this time his lips sought hers. She resisted to begin with but he would not be put off. With his other hand he loosened the belt of her dressing-gown. He slid his hand inside and stroked the tips of his fingers down the inside of her thigh. He looked at her.

  For a moment, she returned his stare. Then she closed her e
yes and opened her lips.

  Captain Kenneth Lynn stared down from the bridge of HMS Anglesey. He did not like what he saw. He had been enjoying his voyage off Norway, paying courtesy calls on some of the fishing villages along the coast. Compared with the fiords, the Port of London, despite all its recent development, was a wreck.

  Not that it was the architecture that he objected to as he stared down from the bridge. He was suited to the sea because he liked privacy, he liked the detail and the clarity of purpose of a naval captain’s job. All that had gone by the board with this latest assignment. His ship had berthed about an hour ago and he had been told to expect the first items of cargo – ninety-three crates holding the famous, the notorious, Elgin Marbles – before the morning was out. The Marbles hadn’t arrived yet but the protesters and the demonstrators had. How they had found out which dock was being used, he didn’t know. Still, it was hard to hide a frigate. The demonstrators were kept away from the quay but from the height of the bridge Lynn could see them and their banners lining the road that led to the entrance to the dock. To Lynn it appeared as if there were two sets of demonstrators – Greeks on one side, who were in favour of the Marbles being returned, and everybody else on the other side, who were against the return. The police were in between, receiving abuse from both sides.

  Lynn disapproved of the Royal Navy being used for this sort of business. It was demeaning. The navy’s good name should be saved for cleaner causes. Still, orders were orders and HMS Anglesey was now ready to receive its cargo. He prayed that the crates would arrive soon. It would take all day and most of the next day to load them. He had orders to leave as soon as possible and that suited him: while the cargo was on board and the ship was in dock, it was a perfect target for demonstrators. The sooner he put to sea the better. As he watched, he heard a shout go up from the demonstrators. He saw a policeman on horseback suddenly do a sort of jig as his horse took a few paces to one side. Then he saw what the commotion was about: the first of the blue lorries with the Marbles was coming into view. Two white police Rovers led the way. Behind them, he counted five lorries, then two more white Rovers. It wasn’t all of the Marbles, just the first batch. He saw banners being slapped against the sides of the lorries as they went slowly past the demonstrators. A line of police, three deep, prevented the demonstrators from getting close to the gates.

  Like all his naval colleagues, Kenneth Lynn regarded himself as a firm and loyal supporter of law and order. His sympathies were instinctively with the police, whatever the issue. In this case, however, he was trying not to devote too much thought to the issue and had forbidden discussion of the Marbles at mess times: it could be unsettling in a community as small as the Anglesey’s. He wasn’t sure where he stood on the issue himself. He watched now as the dock gates were pushed closed as the fifth of the lorries came inside. There was more shouting from the demonstrators but maybe they would disperse now that there was nothing to see. Lynn watched the lorries disappear into the customs shed and found himself thinking back nearly two hundred years to the time when the Marbles had left Greece. What sort of customs shed would they have had then? Were they brought to Britain by naval ship – and did they all fit into one vessel? How did they pack the Marbles and how long did the journey take? He stepped inside and picked up the ship’s phone. He rang down to his bosun.

  ‘Yessir!’ cried the bosun on the second ring.

  ‘Prepare to receive cargo,’ said Lynn. ‘The Marbles have arrived.’

  From the front page of the lunchtime edition of the London Evening Standard:

  MURDER AT THE MET!

  Copycat demo leads to killing of guard

  REUTERS/AP: NEW YORK: A security guard was killed earlier today when three men broke into the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan and made off with eight valuable Hindu religious objects. The guard, Mr Spiridon Panottis, interrupted the three burglars and was hit over the head, possibly with a gun. Mr Panottis suffered a brain haemorrhage and was dead on arrival at Lennox Hill Hospital.

  A second guard, Mr Chessy Mlodzanski, was also attacked. He was admitted to Lennox Hill suffering a fracture of the skull but regained consciousness and was able to tell police that his three assailants were all Indians. They were armed, he said, and forced him at gunpoint to hand over his keys to the museum display cases on the second floor.

  A note left by the burglars in the empty display cases links the theft in a bizarre way to the issue of the Elgin Marbles in Britain. Police released the text of the note, which reads: ‘The religious objects we have liberated today belong in India. They were stolen from our country just as the Parthenon Marbles were stolen from Greece by Lord Elgin. Now the Marbles are going back where they belong – and so are our beautiful Indian sculptures.’ The note was signed: ‘Hindu Heritage’.

  A spokesperson for the mayor’s office in New York described the crime as an outrage. ‘This is an unusual motive for theft. I hope it is not going to be a new trend. It just shows that the fate of the so-called Elgin Marbles is a matter of great interest right across the world.’

  Mordaunt stared out at the gardens of Buckingham Palace, but he didn’t really see the summer rain bouncing off the surface of the pond. He was oblivious to the photographs of his friends and relations all around him. He was even oblivious, for the moment, to Leith, who since Saturday had been sharing his office. With O’Day, Victoria Tatton and Edward Andover all abroad, it had made sense to move the operational headquarters into the equerry’s office.

  Mordaunt was preoccupied with the news, which was all bad. What with the demonstrations at the British Museum and the docks, the morning newspaper reports of Archbishop Lysiptos’s fiery sermon, and now the dreadful news of the murder in New York, the situation appeared to be deteriorating badly. Getting out of hand. Lockwood appeared to have lost his touch drastically. Now that there had been this killing … with that note linking it to the Marbles … if the royal role in all this ever got out … Mordaunt found himself sweating despite the wintry summer.

  His own loyalties were not to the Prime Minister of course but to Her Majesty. So far both she and Mordaunt had been prepared to let Lockwood make the running, give the lead. Now, with Lockwood’s plan in tatters, Mordaunt found that he had begun to think how the Prime Minister could be … not overruled exactly but … well, perhaps he, Mordaunt, should take a more active role … think up a fall-back which would protect Her Majesty. He didn’t know what to do – not yet. Indeed, it had only just become clear in his own mind that this was a role he could – he should – take on. But … now that he had made the adjustment, now that he had made that advance, the answers oughtn’t to be long in coming.

  ‘Phone!’ hissed Leith.

  But the equerry had seen it and he snatched at the receiver. He spoke firmly. ‘Mordaunt.’

  ‘Write this down.’

  ‘What? … No –’

  ‘Write this down!’

  Mordaunt was amazed. There was to be no public payphone ritual today. ‘Yes,’ he breathed. ‘I’m ready.’

  ‘Gilbert Tignet, Thierry et Tignet SA, 56 Rue Grenoble, Lausanne. Mail the Queen’s letter today. Don’t have it delivered by hand; post it properly. If you make any attempt to trace it, or attach any bugging device, you won’t hear from me again.’ The line went dead.

  Mordaunt looked at Leith. He too was scribbling down the address. ‘Well?’

  Leith finished writing before replying. ‘We’ll check the address, of course. ‘But Monsieur Tignet will be a fiduciary. In case you are not aware of these creatures, Sir Francis, a fiduciary is a peculiarly Swiss institution: a lawyer who guarantees his clients’ anonymity –’

  ‘But surely, in the circumstances, he would help –’

  ‘Almost certainly he doesn’t know where or who his instructions come from. He’ll have been paid cash for his services, which are simply to take receipt of the letter. He’ll be called at some point – they’ll use a code, no doubt – and asked if the letter has arrived. Then, muc
h later, he’ll be told to mail it on. I’ve dealt with these fiduciaries before and they take their role very seriously. No amount of coercion or persuasion on our part will have any effect.’

  Mordaunt was unimpressed. That seems a bit –’

  ‘Phone!’

  This time the equerry had missed the flashing. He turned in his seat. ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s Ogilvy. At the British Museum. I’m looking for Andover.’

  ‘Andover’s away. May I help? Has something happened?’

  ‘Hmm. In a way. I must see Lockwood. I was hoping Andover could swing it.’

  Mordaunt frowned. ‘I’m not sure I could arrange that. You know how busy the Prime Minister is. Is it anything I can help you with?’

  ‘Not really. This thing is getting out of hand. I seem to be the only academic involved in all this besides Andover. That’s why I wanted to speak to him – he might understand. Unlike him, my role is public – and I can’t take all the stick. There’s a row of placards outside my office right now, saying things like “Lockwood’s stooge”, “What are you giving away next?” and “Free offer: 93 marbles”.’

  ‘And … what? You want the police to get rid of them? Inspector Leith is here –’

  ‘No. No! That’s not it, not at all. I’ve had enough, Mordaunt. I want to see the Prime Minister so I can resign.’

  ‘Nancy, it’s Edward. I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch but … well, things got rather complicated regarding that matter … that matter I wasn’t supposed to talk about. The long and the short of it is that I’m in Scotland. Part holiday, part exile, part punishment. I’ve been sailing, trying to blow all the nastiness away. I’m with Neil and Ian Cashel and we’ve just put into Overbister on Sanday. Sorry to miss you but if you still want a chat you can try me on … the number here is Brae …’ Edward gave the code and number.

  Leith had jumped at the idea Edward had worked out with Victoria and set it up within two hours.