“Killed to order?” demanded Jeremy Simpson, the prescient lawyer. “Are you suggesting Norrington was killed to order? A far-reaching, carefully calculated conspiracy?”
“It fits,” asserted Charlie, unworried by the obvious disbelief from everyone in the room, even shared maybe by Sir Rupert himself. What concerned Charlie more was the still persistent, intrusive feeling of having overlooked something!
“Stuff and nonsense!” sneered Williams, who never swore. Addressing the lawyer, Williams said, “Is there anything we’ve been told this morning that you’d be prepared to argue in a court and expect to be taken seriously?”
“I’d like better proof,” conceded Simpson, uncomfortable at being Charlie’s critic instead of his defender. Pedantically he said, “Your main premise that there was another Englishman at the murder scene is the apparent finding in the grave of a button from a British officer’s battle-dress uniform, as well as a torn-out label and British-caliber bullet? But we don’t definitely know about the button; that’s based on a remark the Yakutsk pathologist thinks he overheard the Russian forensic scientist make when the man was using his laboratory facilities?”
“Yes,” said Charlie, accepting it to be his weakest evasion but with no way of telling them how he knew the button to exist.
“What on earth does a Yakutsk medical examiner know about an English officer’s battle dress or its fastenings?” demanded Hamilton.
“Absolutely nothing!” snatched Charlie. “Which is why he couldn’t have misheard or imagined the remark! Moscow knew it was an apparent British officer before sending their forensic expert. Who would, obviously, have been chosen for knowledge beyond his particular discipline. He would have known what a British uniform-and its buttons-looked like!” On second thought, maybe it wasn’t as weak as it had initially sounded. The rehearsal really had been useful.
“I think the suggestion is absurd,” rejected Williams. “Does the report of the Berlin pathologist state that the body in Norrington’s grave was murdered?” This really was going far better than he could have hoped, Williams thought. The man was being made to look ridiculous.
“No,” admitted Charlie. “That would be impossible, after so long.”
“So it’s purely your interpretation!” sneered Williams.
“The body was chosen to be that of Simon Norrington-had theman’s identity planted on it,” Charlie pointed out. If Gerald Williams hadn’t existed, he would have had to be invented; the man’s unthinking determination to oppose and argue with everything was taking all their minds from any awkward questions. Most importantly Charlie was able so far to avoid volunteering anything new.
“You think it could have been the Russians who tampered with the visitors’ records at the cemetery?” asked Patrick Pacey.
It could, even, have been possible, Charlie accepted, but he had to be careful with the reply. “The Russians took Berlin-totally controlled it, initially-and were responsible, I suppose, for the burials during those early days. But the Four Powers were in control when the Allied cemetery was created.” If there’d been colored ribbons and a stake tall enough, he could have led everyone a merry dance around the maypole. He was aware of the director-general regarding him quizzically.
“I don’t consider there’s anything to support the idea of another British officer being involved in this,” insisted the political officer, siding with Williams. “I expected a lot more from this meeting.”
“So did I,” said Hamilton.
“In fact,” said Williams, recognizing his support, “I think you should go back to Moscow as soon as possible, pick up whatever crumbs drop from the table of others and leave us to reach far more sensible and acceptable conclusions than you’re offering.”
Charlie gazed unspeaking at the fat man for several seconds, aware at last what had been nagging him, the feeling at once relief more than apprehension. Quietly, almost humbly, he said, “There are some more inquiries I want to make here first.”
“Which I’ve approved,” came in the director-general quickly, ahead of any opposing argument. “There’s certainly the need to speak again to Sir Matthew Norrington.”
“Isn’t the more immediate urgency finding out what the FBI in Moscow wants, as well as what this latest Russian declaration is all about?” demanded Hamilton.
Charlie was almost sad at the adjournment, so well did he consider the encounter to have been going, but it gave him time fully to consider Gerald Williams’s slip. The assertion to Sir Rupert Dean the previous night that Williams’s participation was entirely financial was unarguable. How, then, could Williams have known that MiriamBell had been in contact with Richard Cartright unless he, in turn, had been in direct touch with the SIS officer in Moscow? Cartright’s communication route was through his own, separate department. Which in turn, according to regulations, should have advised the director-general-as the Foreign Office had told the political officer-not the finance director. So Gerald Williams was talking, unofficially, to Richard Cartright. Who in Moscow had formed some relationship with Natalia’s sister. What silly men, Charlie thought. What silly, silly men.
The connection, from a side office off the director-general’s suite, was immediate. Miriam said, “You don’t write, you don’t phone, you don’t send flowers …?”
Forced cool, judged Charlie. “You called?”
“You didn’t, before you left.”
“It was a rush.”
“You still in London?”
Keep the pot bubbling, decided Charlie. “People aren’t happy.” Maintaining the pretense, he said, “Particularly when I’m here and Moscow’s issuing enigmatic statements.”
“It’s something to do with Tsarskoe Selo is all I know. I don’t know how it fits. If it fits at all, although I suppose it’s got to, somehow. Lestov wants to know when you’re getting back.”
Charlie frowned, not just at the immediately volunteered information-which he knew from Natalia to be accurate-but more at the tone of Miriam’s voice. “What’s the matter?”
“Problems with Washington. I could do with your being back here: talk through some stuff. When are you getting back?”
“A few things to sort out here first. You want to talk now?”
“Later. But not too much later. And you watch your back, you hear?”
“You think I need to?” asked Charlie, seriously.
“Yeah, I think you need to. Maybe we both do.”
“You think this new Tsarskoe Selo stuff is important?” Charlie pushed on.
“Lestov says it’ll take a few days to sort out.”
There was his excuse for not immediately returning, Charlie recognized. Still more, possibly. “You called the embassy twice?”
“Thought we had a deal. Wondered what happened to it.”
Ignoring her implied question, he said, “You spoke to Cartright?”
“My call got redirected. Anything wrong?”
“Not at all,” assured Charlie, who hadn’t initiated such an arrangement. “Obvious person to backstop.”
“There really are things to talk about when you get back.” Now that she was working to her own, different agenda there was no reason why she shouldn’t tell Charlie of the conversation with Kenton Peters, although she wouldn’t throw it away. She wouldn’t offer too quickly what she’d gotten from the World Jewish Congress, either. She had a lot of things to trade: to buy insurance with.
By the time Charlie got back to the conference room, the coffee was cold. They didn’t bother to reassemble for the result of his phone call.
“It seems very much like the blind leading the blind,” said Williams.
But who’ll be seeing more clearly by the time it’s all over? wondered Charlie.
Richard Cartright wasn’t happy with the way things had evolved. It was, for all intents and purposes, a combined operation that initially and on the face of it had made quite acceptable his talking as he had with Gerald Williams. But he wasn’t sure any longer. From the
sheer restriction of anything and everything he was begrudgingly being allowed to know by his own department-against their constant and unremitting demands for any scrap from him-it had become increasingly obvious this was a very important assignment indeed for someone on his first tour of duty and that it was anything but the combined operation he’d first imagined it to be.
And now he was trapped. On the one hand he’d already cooperated too much with someone from another department suddenly to seek authorization for doing so from his own controllers, which too late he now realized he should have done from the start. On the other, and by the same measure, he didn’t see how he could abruptly refuse, not knowing how much power or influence Gerald Williams possessed.
“You’re not saying a lot,” complained Irena. The man she believed to be mafia was in the restaurant again and if the evening didn’t pick up soon, she was considering changing partners.
“Sorry. Things on my mind. Seen Natalia lately?”
Irena shrugged. “We had a row.”
“So you didn’t know Charlie was back in London?”
“Permanently?”
“Just a discussion recall, as far as I know.”
“Probably banking his profits,” suggested Irena. “Not a bank I’d trust in this city.”
Cartright regretted most of all telling Williams of Charlie Muffin boasting of currency speculation. “I can’t think you’re right about that.”
“You imagine he could afford that apartment any other way?”
It was difficult, acknowledged Cartright, although if Charlie Muffin was doing something as bloody silly as that, it did justify his cooperation with the man’s finance controller. It was a total mess and he desperately wanted to be out of it.
28
After driving parallel to it for what seemed forever, Charlie decided that the redbricked perimeter of Sir Matthew Norrington’s Kingsclere estate must have been modeled on the Great Wall of China although probably went on for much longer. The gate he finally located opened noiselessly to his identifying himself at the security voice box and closed just as quickly behind him. The wall was lined inside by trees and there were more meticulously cultivated on either side of the paved drive that ribboned away ahead of him. He could not see the house. Through the trees to his left there was a herd of disinterested, unafraid deer. He thought there were some white ones but wasn’t sure. To his right, sheep grazed. Far beyond them, too far away to distinguish man from machine, a figure rode a disappearing tractor over the brow of a hill tufted with more trees. Would this have been the scene of perfect, safe tranquillity that Simon Norrington thought about kneeling in front of a grenade-made grave on the outskirts of Yakutsk, waiting for a pistol shot?
Not suspecting its length, Charlie had not timed how long it took to circumnavigate the outer wall. It was a full five minutes before the house came into view, a huge square pile-Georgian, Charlie guessed-with creeper-clad walls and a flagpole on the central turret for the proudly flying red cross on white pennant, the whole thing a monument to the permanence of the English landed class.
Sir Matthew Norrington waited by one of three parked Range Rovers, white-haired, tweed-suited and brogued. The spectacles were horn-rimmed. As he got out of the rented car, Charlie decided it was impossible to decide between his or the other man’s whose suit was the more comfortably shapeless.
Norrington said at once, “Glad to see you. I want to understand what this is all about.” The voice was firm, like the handshake.
“I don’t fully understand myself, but I’ll do my best,” promised Charlie.
“But you are definitely in charge of the investigation? That’s what Sir Rupert said on the phone.” There was an impatience in the question.
“Yes,” said Charlie. I wish, he thought.
The house into which the elderly man led him was as comfortably lived in as the suit and Charlie decided that perhaps it wasn’t a monument to anything after all. The cavernous flagstoned entrance hall was lined with oil paintings, which continued along a paneled corridor. Aware of Charlie’s interest, Norrington said, “The Holbein and the Reynolds are ancestral, but a lot of the more modern collection was Simon’s choice. It’s thought to be quite remarkable.”
The door at which Norrington stopped was halfway along the hall, from the far end of which-or maybe from another room-there was the sound of people. A dog barked, very briefly. The library into which Norrington took Charlie was more neatly arranged than Sir Rupert Dean’s but at the same time more obviously occupied. There were more framed oils, men in ermine and robes, bejeweled women and velvet-dressed children with ringlets and spaniel pets, but there was an obvious working desk dominating the window looking out over the rolling grounds. Charlie was immediately aware of a lot of photographs on its top and even more, practically overcrowding, on side tables at either end of the huge, inglenooked fireplace. He recognized a lot of Simon Norrington, two in the uniform the man hadbeen wearing in the Yakutsk ice tomb. Another had him in graduation gown with a man Charlie assumed to be his father, who’d looked remarkably similar to Sir Matthew Norrington now. There was a photograph of a teenage Matthew smiling up toward Simon in visible bigger brother admiration. The chairs, also by the fireplace, were leather, which creaked when they sat.
Norrington said, “Tell me what this is all about.” It was the voice of a man accustomed to being obeyed.
Charlie left out all his supposition and suspicions and anything about a second English officer, so it only took minutes.
“I’d expected more,” the dissatisfied baronet said, at once, with a frown.
“I wish there were more,” apologized Charlie, meaning it.
“They were planned killings? Of my brother and the man in his grave in Berlin?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“Why him?”
“I don’t yet know how or why, but I believe art is the most obvious factor: something to do with its looting. But not that by itself. There’s a lot more.”
“Simon despised the Nazis, Rosenberg’s lot, for what they did to art. And the Russians’ Trophy Brigades. Judged one as bad as the other. He knew it would be impossible to reassemble the European art heritage, no matter how hard he and others like him tried.” The man stopped, pointedly. “You imagine you’ll ever find out who killed him?”
Charlie hesitated. “Who committed the actual murders, probably not, not after fifty years. They would have been functionaries.” Which was true, he realized. It had been a Russian bullet that killed Simon Norrington.
“What about the people who ordered it?”
“That’s who I’m trying to find. If I do, we’ll know why.”
Norrington stirred in his chair, which creaked again. “What are your chances?”
A lie wouldn’t help and Charlie didn’t want to slip sideways into his theories and guesses, either. “I’d like them to be better. I’d appreciate a lot of your time.”
Norrington shrugged. “As much as you need.” He got up. “I drink gin.”
“Whiskey.”
The old man returned from a separate side table with their drinks, settled noisily and said, “So?”
“You were, what, sixteen when it happened?” Charlie spoke looking at the young Matthew gazing up at his elder brother.
“Just seventeen, at the war’s end. Felt cheated. Was an officer cadet at Eton, all ready to go. Wanted to go even more when Simon was killed; thought it had been in action then, of course. Imagined I’d find the actual person who did it.” The man snorted humorlessly. “Some irony about that now, isn’t there?”
“Let’s hope not,” said Charlie. “You can remember everything about the time? Not simply the death but immediately before? And afterwards?”
“All of it.”
Everything from the family, recalled Charlie, remembering the Berlin conversation with the military attache. Charlie indicated the photographs of Simon Norrington on the table closest to him and said, “He was-is-obviously deeply mourned?”<
br />
“My father was devastated. We all were, naturally. But my father took it dreadfully. The war was over, for God’s sake!”
Charlie thought it was too much to hope, but he hoped, just the same. “How did you learn?”
The older man frowned. “Letter. Official notification. June third.”
That was encouraging, thought Charlie. “There were some personal belongings returned?”
“Arrived much later, from his unit: cigarette lighter-it matched a case my father gave Simon when he graduated-his wallet. Family ring. There was a personal letter of regret, too, of course. From his commanding officer.”
“And then there was the notification of the burial?” coaxed Charlie.
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