These events happen to all of us, don’t they? It’s the ordained way of things. I’m sure you’ve been there. A million things tear through your mind all at once, and there’s usually a face in the middle of them. Grief hits you like an atom bomb.
‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’
‘What then?’
‘His mother’s been killed.’
Time stops.
‘Grace?’
‘Yes.’
It was as if all of the air had been squeezed from my lungs, then pumped in, and then squeezed out again. I felt almost physically sick. Words, facts began to slot together in my head.
‘Not Carlo?’
‘No. Grace.’ He looked confused.
I had a few sips of the brandy. Didn’t taste it. Then I said, ‘Thank God for that,’ and immediately felt like the worst kind of traitor.
Watson said, ‘You look a bit pale, old man. Would you like to get some air? Come back in a min?’
‘Yes. Good idea.’
I walked up and down the dusty road outside his ridiculous wooden cabin. Fiona came out and walked with me, not saying a word. We must have looked odd because she towered over me.
For three years I’d feared I might have shot and killed Grace Baker. I had loved her, but she got mixed up with the Stern Gang in Israel and we’d ended up on opposite sides. Funnily enough it had been quite like Thirdlow’s shooting of Pat. Grace had shot at me, and I returned fire almost without thinking about it. She’d got two shots in at me first, and had winged me. What had Thirdlow said about the scrap at the bridge? Something like, If I have to talk to God about that fight I think you’ll find we were morally ahead. Is that what I was supposed to believe?
Finding out she’d been alive all this time, but was now dead, was like being a child who’d been offered something wonderful, only for it to be snatched back when I reached for it. Don’t get me wrong: I didn’t want her. I just didn’t want her dead. I’d always harboured the hope that I could introduce Carly to his mother one day.
Back inside, I sat in front of Watson again, and was prepared to listen.
‘First of all, are they sure it’s her?’ I asked. ‘Grace can be a bit of a slippery fish.’
‘Yes. They’re sure. Her parents identified her – there’s no mistake. It was Lord Baker who asked the Foreign Office to find and notify you. It’s taken a few days, I’m sorry about that.’
‘How did it happen?’
‘She was in Greece. No one knows what she was doing there. The signal hinted she had kept some pretty rum company in the last few years. She married some sort of gangster in Israel – did you know that?
‘She did it to get a passport, and divorced him a year later.’
‘Anyway, she was shot and robbed in an old open-air theatre she was visiting. It was late evening, and the other tourists had left. They shot her in the back, and ransacked her bag. If it helps, it must have been over very quickly.’
Why do people always say that? I’ve told you it doesn’t bloody help. It can’t. It never will.
‘So how did the authorities know it was Grace?’
‘The killers left her passports. She had three. A valid Israeli one, an expired British one in her own name . . . and a forged British passport in another name. I think that’s why Baker insisted you be told.’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t understand.’
‘The name in the bogus passport was Grace Bassett, and she listed you in it as husband, next of kin, and person to be informed . . . You know the drill. It was a very good forgery.’
I had a couple more sips of the jungle juice, and said, ‘I think I’ll go outside again.’
This time Fiona let me do it alone.
As I paced up and down in the dust I remembered that Warboys’s little courier had said the person who had offered to pay for my murder was a crippled old lady. He was about ten, wasn’t he? Did he look on me as old? What would he have thought of Grace?
When I went back for the third time I told Watson, ‘I’m not sure I can believe it. I thought she was dead a couple of times. She always manages to come back.’
‘Not this time, old boy. Anyway, I thought you might say that, so I pulled a few strings, and had a couple of snaps flown over. The camera never lies.’
‘From the Foreign Office?’
‘No, from the police chief’s office in Athens – much more reliable.’
‘I thought we were persona non grata with the Greeks at the moment, over this Enosis business.’
‘We are, we are . . . it’s just that some of us are still a bit more grata than the rest, believe me. Gregori owed me a favour. You don’t have to look at them if you don’t want to.’
I thought, and had a couple more sips before reaching for them. My glass was miraculously empty, and so was Watson’s bottle. He opened another, and threw the cap away.
The photographs had obviously been taken in daylight, and therefore the next morning. One was of her face; a remorseless close-up. Grace’s elfin features had taken on that marbled immobility of death. Her mouth was a little open – she always did that when she was surprised – and her eyes heavy lidded, but not quite shut. She often looked like that after we had made love. The other photograph was of her body in situ, taken from above. Her arms and legs made her look as if she was running: I had seen a body like that somewhere before, and couldn’t remember where. Although she had been shot in the back, she had twisted over to see the sky as she went. That was Grace all over. I hoped that there had been a million million stars for her. A walking stick lay close to her right hand.
‘Was the walking stick hers?’ I asked Watson.
‘Yes. Her right hip had been smashed up by a pistol bullet years ago. They found it still there when they autopsied her – small-calibre job. Too much information – sorry . . .’
‘No. Go on.’
‘Apparently it must have completely crippled her. The pathologist said she would have walked like an old woman.’ All the words came back together.
I stood up, and walked to the window. I left my back to him.
‘Do they know how it happened?’
‘She was found the next morning down near one of the exits by the stage. The police theorize she was trying to get away. She might have made it if she hadn’t been slowed down by her old injuries.’
‘You said they when talking about who killed her . . .’
‘At least two – two different makes of bullet. What with the one in her hip, it must have been like the death of Caesar.’
I slopped my drink around in its glass, and tried to think. I couldn’t. I could just believe that Grace would want me dead; she didn’t leave jobs unfinished. But that meant that I . . .
‘Has anyone told Carlo yet?’
‘No. We rather thought you’d want to do that yourself when you got back. He didn’t ever meet her, did he?’
‘Apart from the moment of birth, no – I don’t think so.’
‘No point in him being at the funeral then. What about you? I could always speed things up, and fly you home in time. It’s going to be a quiet affair, I understand – at the family pile in Cambridgeshire.’ Bedfordshire, I thought, but didn’t correct him.
I remembered Grace there the morning a Lanc had crashed nearby; she’d found the body of a crew member. That was virtually the only time I’d seen her cry. Did I want to go to her funeral, and finish it? It was another thing I had to think about before replying, and then I used almost the same words.
‘No. I don’t think so. I’ll see her later.’
Watson walked over to the door which hid Fiona’s territory.
I heard him say, ‘Sandwiches, please, dear. Cheese, bags of mustard and a bit of cress. And once you’ve brought them, take the rest of the day off. Switch off the phones, and lock the door on us. Charlie and I are going to get drunk.’
I don’t understand how these things work. Grace was murdered at a place called Epidaurus; a huge old Greek theatre. I’d seen
one in Egypt so I knew what they looked like. I hadn’t even heard of it until a week or so before, when Warboys had spoken of it, of course – so I already had a helpful picture in my head when Watson described the scene to me. We call these things coincidences, shrug and turn away. But what they are like are echoes. Echoes from the past or from the future . . . or from both at the same time: it doesn’t matter. They aren’t really anything, except little reminders, perhaps, that life is nothing like we think it is.
We drank all day and I still wasn’t properly drunk when I went to bed. I told Watson Grace’s story, and we talked about Pat, and the people we had known who were no longer around. I put Watson to bed at about eleven, and then just walked around the camp for hours in the dark. Drunk but not drunk. I was challenged twice.
Each time I was challenged I stopped, and my phantom lioness pacing alongside me also stopped, and sat down in the dust. Once I rested my hand on her head. Silky. Warm. Nobody else saw her, so she wasn’t really there of course.
Eventually I looked up, and it was dawn. Someone was standing in front of me. It was Pat’s man who looked like Bud Abbott. He looked how Bud Abbott would have looked if he had been crying. He was the man who had promised to look after me because I was a comrade. I remembered that now. He said, ‘Why don’t I take you back to your hut, Mr Bassett?’
‘Yes, that’s a good idea.’
He didn’t notice the lioness, even though she walked between us, right up to the wooden steps.
I don’t think you need to know any more. Nothing is neat at the end. The things that you do and the people you know . . . they all unravel. All you are left with are the hollow spaces they made inside you.
A month later I kicked along a beach with Carly. The sea was a deep dark blue, with heavy rollers which had come all the way from Brazil or Argentina. A large sailing ship bent its white sails on the horizon. The darkness of the blue made the caps of the long waves gleam and flash sharp in the sun. Steve and her mother had taken Dieter off to visit a Zulu kraal. The Zulu women were beautiful. They were bound to make fun of him, and turn his head. Steve’s father had brought Carly and me out in his car, and was sitting in it at the head of the beach, reading the Cape Times. Carly put his hand in mine. He was small for his age. A pocket battleship, like me. We had talked about Grace for an hour.
‘You’re sure she’s dead? She was pretty adventurous, wasn’t she? Maybe it wasn’t her.’
‘I’m sure, son. She was good at getting into scrapes, and getting out of them. But this time she didn’t get out. I think there were too many men against her. It was her last fight.’
‘That was unfair.’ I felt his hand tighten.
‘Yes. It was unfair.’
‘When I’m older I’m going to find the men responsible, and kill them all.’ He had that vehemence which kids can find from somewhere inside them.
‘Are you?’
‘Yes. I promise.’
I glanced over my shoulder. Our barefoot tracks in the sand bridged the line between wet and dry golden sand. Not another soul. Seabirds. He said, ‘When Dieter goes to college we’ll miss him.’
‘Yes. We will.’
He picked up a piece of seaweed shaped like a lion’s tail, and flicked it at the sand.
‘Just me, you and Miss Stephanie then?’
It wasn’t that bad a prospect.
‘Hang on – I haven’t asked her father yet.’
‘Let’s ask him now. He’s sitting in the car waiting for you to do it . . . I’ll ask him, if you’re scared. He can only say no.’
Epilogue
Last Words . . .
I am an old man, and old men doze in the garden when the sun is high. Yesterday I was disturbed by the sound of an aircraft. No matter what I am doing, I always stir and turn to an aircraft. It was the Twin Otter on its way to landfall at the airstrip on the beach at Barra at low tide. It’s good to know that somewhere in the country real flying is still going on.
The lioness was sitting on her haunches beneath the old copper beech tree. Autumn again: my life never seems to get further than autumn. The leaves on the tree are starting to curl, and crisp to that thick gingery brown which smells of woodsmoke.
Grace was sitting alongside the lioness with her arm looped around its shoulders, and she wore that same old mocking smile which said she’d won after all. Even though she’s been gone for thirty years or more she can still reach right inside my chest and give my heart a squeeze. I see her around more often than I see the others. Sometimes she walks right up and touches me, and her touch feels as real as that of a living person. She always looks the same – just as she was in 1947. She must have been thirty or thirty-one then. Like my other ghosts she speaks occasionally – or I hear her voice inside my head, which is the same thing. Last week she came up behind me when I was sitting on this very bench, lightly touched my scalp and observed that I was balding. She sounded amused, light hearted – but I know her well enough to know she still holds a grudge. Maybe we can sort it out when we meet for good.
Anyway, the lioness lifted herself onto her four legs, stretched the way cats do, and stalked off into the shrubbery. Grace pulled up one knee and hugged it, and we sat there smiling at each other, watching each other until dusk. Maybe twenty feet between us. When the old lady switched on the lights in the kitchen I knew it was time to go in.
The Watsons came to stay last week, and one night he and I sat drinking in the study until the small hours, talking about Pat Tobin. We killed a bottle of ’Morangie from the distillery at the bottom of the hill. That was when I realized that he didn’t actually know what had happened to Pat – Collins had peddled him the official line, and Watson had chosen not to question it. He cried when I told him. That’s another thing that old men do. He proposed that the four of us go back to Cyprus in the spring, and visit Pat in his grave in the Wayne’s Keep cemetery. I said yes, but I didn’t mean it. I didn’t tell him that I’d been back alone a few years ago, and that Pat’s grave is no longer marked.
Neither Carly nor Dieter has married yet. Was that my fault, I sometimes ask myself? Dieter sends us postcards from ports around the world. The old lady has a world map on a cork board in the kitchen and she tracks his progress with coloured pins. I never did get round to telling Carly that I had a leading part in how Grace died. Every time I tried the conversation seemed to drift away from me, and eventually I gave up. He comes up to stay whenever he gets leave, and plays golf at the Royal Dornoch. I consider that my biggest failure of his upbringing. Often we take my small pistol and shoot targets behind the house: I’m not ashamed of the fact that it was one of my sons who finally taught me to shoot straight.
Carly has proofread each of the volumes of my memoir – he corrects the manuscripts before you get a look at them. He’s in the house now, having sat up all night with the book you’ve just read, and in a few minutes will walk from the porch carrying our gun, and a box of bullets. Half an hour on the targets before we go in to supper. There is just a little darkness in Carly; when the ghosts crowd round, and Carly has a pistol in his hand, it is almost as if he knows them as well as I do.
I wanted
The Last Post
Although our misadventure in Cyprus from the mid nineteen fifties onwards wasn’t the last time an incompetent British government sent conscript soldiers to other lands with guns in their hands, it was one of our last attempts to apply serious military pressure to the politics of the Mediterranean and the near Middle East for colonial purposes . . . mind you, the Aden crisis was only just around the corner, and then there was Oman.
As with the previous Charlie Bassett novels, it has been National Service veterans who were actually there who have given me the background material for the story, and generously allowed me to see ten weeks in Cyprus during the Emergency through their eyes: they put the frame around my picture. But don’t blame them if you have spotted a mistake or two, or an inaccuracy – that will have been my fault. It was one of them who told m
e that two young soldiers had taken a week’s leave during a lull in the EOKA insurgency, and had hiked from one side of the island to the other, staying with hospitable Greek Cypriot families along the way. It puts an entirely different meaning on that delightful invitation – ‘take a hike’. Either they were lucky, or it can’t always have been all love and bullets over there.
I borrowed the Foreign Office mandarin, Carlton Browne, from Terry Thomas, who gave us so many wildly comic creations in the Fifties and Sixties. He is among the most underrated of British comic actors – I still have his films as DVDs, and drag them out to cheer me up when I’m blue. I don’t know why he professionally outlasted his contemporaries like Norman Wisdom and Ronald Shiner, but between them they taught us to laugh again – and, as importantly, to laugh at ourselves. We owe them a large debt: I’m sure the small classic cinemas will rediscover them one day, and start to run film festivals based on their uniquely British comedies.
There was a real Inspector Robert Fabian – ‘Fabian of the Yard’. He was a master thief taker of the 1940s who became famous for the successful investigation of high profile murders. After he retired he pumped up his pension with frequent contributions to the national newspapers: if a quotation was needed to round off a juicy murder report then Fabian was your man . . . and, you might have guessed it, one of the earliest successful Police dramas on TV was ‘Fabian of the Yard’, in which he was portrayed by the wonderful Indian-born Scots actor, Bruce Seton – actually Major Sir Bruce Lovat Seton of Abercorn. Bruce made his first film in 1935, and was still facing the cameras in 1961. Charlie loves these survivors.
There was once also a real Steve, although, as far as I know she didn’t evolve to become a belly dancer in a seedy Cyprus hotel. Steve was the second girl with whom I fell in love – I was probably 12 or 13. She was older, gentle, more intelligent and (in my memory) very, very tall. Although at different schools, for part of a magic year we travelled daily on the same bus between Rose Hill and Carshalton. My pals made fun of me, and called her ‘Tarzan’ behind her back. Boys can be cruel, can’t they? I lost touch with her, and my school, at roughly the same time – one of my former classmates recently described me as a ‘serial absconder’ – and sadly, now, can’t even remember her family name. I hope she made it.
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