‘Very little. I tell you, I thought he was only a crazy rumour,’ Shapiro spread his hands.
‘We don’t think he is.’
‘Indeed?’ The Israeli looked directly into Roskill’s eyes. ‘Well, in that case I should move very carefully, Squadron Leader. Very carefully and slowly. What did Razzak have to say about him?’
‘He said very much the same thing, Colonel Shapiro.’
‘Then for once I agree with him. He’s giving you good advice.’
One thing was certain now: neither Razzak nor Shapiro wanted trouble. And as the threat of trouble had moved the Egyptian to offer a deal, it might serve equally well to get something out of the Israeli…
‘That’s one thing we can’t do, I’m afraid. This time we’re not going to take things lying down.’ Roskill fumbled for the right formula. ‘Llewelyn may not be as important as he thinks he is, but he still pulls a lot of weight. So if you can’t give me a line on Hassan, we’re going to have to take this city apart hunting for him.’
He carefully kept his voice casual. Even as it was it sounded bloody thin – all Shapiro had to do was to tell him to go ahead and do his worst. The Israelis had nothing to lose – and the proof of that sat across the table: while Razzak had been seeking him out, Shapiro had been boozing contentedly!
The Israeli sat silent for a moment, doodling with a fingernail on the tablecloth. Finally he looked up again at Roskill, a conspiratorial glint in his eye.
‘Very well… then if you want to play it the hard way I’ll tell you what I’d do if I were you’ – the finger wagged at Roskill – ‘I’d have a word with David Audley, that’s what I’d do.’
‘David!’ Roskill had no need to feign surprise. ‘But David isn’t even in the Middle East section now.’
‘You don’t need to tell me that!’ Shapiro gave a short, bitter laugh. ‘But in or out, he’s still the best man you’ve got – and you’re a friend of his. He’s not in quarantine, is he?’
Roskill frowned. The best man – maybe; but this hadn’t been in the best man’s calculations!
‘Look, Roskill’ – the finger pointed at him like a pistol – ‘you don’t want to go at this half-arsed. You need someone who can calculate the angles. You go to David, and tell him I sent you. Tell him about Hassan – and Llewelyn. And tell him that what’s scaring the pants off everyone is the Alamut List.’
‘The Alamut List?’
Shapiro nodded. ‘Alamut. He’ll know exactly what it means when he hears it – in fact, he’ll probably know better than any of us!’
X
EAST FIRLE WAS its eternal, unquestioning self, tucked comfortably in the shadow of Beacon Hill.
As Roskill steered the hired MG carefully round its blind corner he felt unreality pressing in on him. It was impossible to relate feuding Arabs and Jews to privet hedges and japonica; outside the pub only four years since – a lifetime’s four years – he had sat with Harry and an old man who had spent his working life making waggon wheels. They had talked for an hour about the war, and it had been fifteen minutes before he had realised that the war the wheelwright was remembering was the Kaiser’s, not Hitler’s.
It might just as well have been Napoleon’s, when the old chap’s grandfather had probably done his duty with the other beacon watchers on the hill, serving his turn beside the great pile of furze and pitch and damp hay, waiting for the French as other lads had once waited for the Spaniards and the Normans and God knows how many other invaders down the ages. The past still ran deep and strong in East Firle; it was the present that was blurred.
Unchanged, it was all unchanged. Even the immense wooden gates were still immovably open for him at the bottom of the Old Vicarage drive, decrepit, but too expensive to replace four years ago and now far beyond a widow’s pension. The tattered white paint had flaked a bit more perhaps, and the straggling lilac thicket behind had grown wilder. But it was the same old place exactly, run down yet welcoming.
The neat electric button on the front door buzzed confidently, though. That would be some of Alan’s work; in the old days the house had always been full of his electrical enthusiasm, from shaving points in unlikely places to a complete internal telephone system, all beautifully installed – to the chagrin of visiting electricity board experts.
‘Who is it?’
The disembodied voice caught him by surprise, coming from just above his head.
‘Speak into the mike above you,’ said the voice – a young female voice, apparently rather weary of explaining to idiot callers how they could communicate with her.
Roskill stared up at the apparatus. More of Alan’s work. It was skilfully done, too. Made to last – and it would probably outlive the family’s tenure of the house, to become a curiosity for future occupants: Alan’s memorial.
‘Speak into the mike over your head,’ the young voice commanded him sharply. ‘Who is it, please?’
‘It’s Hugh Roskill,’ he projected upwards.
‘Hugh Roskill,’ repeated the voice, perplexed. ‘Hugh Rosk – Uncle Hugh! Good Lord – come on in, Hugh! The door’s open and I’m coming down.’
‘Uncle Hugh’ could only mean that it was the baby of the family, the unprogrammed late addition that had always mooned around in the background, clad in the hideous uniform of the English schoolgirl and hero-worshipping the godlike Harry from afar. Poor kid, the last four years had taken Harry and her father from her, and now Alan too.
He pushed open the door and walked hesitantly into the hall. It was bigger and barer than he had remembered, with no clutter of shoes and gumboots on the red polished tiles, carelessly hung coats and school scarves on the row of wooden pegs.
That was only to be expected, though: there were fewer wearers now, and those who were left were older and tidier. Only to be expected, but saddening. It was as though the house was dying round its occupants, and he, the killer, was returning to the scene of his crime.
‘Hugh? It is Hugh, isn’t it! I hardly recognised you in that beard – I didn’t know the R.A.F. allowed that sort of thing.’
Gone the school uniform and the pony tail; instead a shockingly disreputable shirt and trousers and the long straight hair. Harry’s little sister had become indistinguishable from the millions of nubile teenagers who had sprung up like buttercups and daisies in the last decade.
‘I don’t fly these days, so they don’t really mind. Sorry to disappoint you, Penelope.’
‘But it doesn’t – it doesn’t at all! I think it looks madly cinquecento and sexy.’
The beard, thought Roskill grimly, would have to come off, and the sooner, the better. It had never occurred to him that little girls would find it sexy.
Penelope looked at him. ‘I suppose you’ve come down about Alan,’ she said. There was neither grief nor curiosity in her tone. It was a simple statement of fact.
‘Something of the sort,’ he replied gently.
‘Well, Mother’s gone to Lewes to shop, but his room’s open and you can poke around it if you like. I don’t mind.’
‘Why should I want to poke around his room?’
She tossed the hair out of her eyes. ‘Well, it was all hush-hush, what he was doing – bugging people with his electronic things, I suppose. So we’ve been expecting someone to come down and sort out his what’s-its.’ She regarded him with a trace of truculence. ‘Now that you don’t fly, do you bug people too?’
It was the rebel generation, of course, and hardly to be wondered at. But in this house it was surprising somehow, nevertheless; and there would have been a pretty tug-of-war in her loyalties if Harry had been still alive.
‘I don’t bug anybody. Navigation’s my line – radar and that type of thing,’ he said neutrally. It wasn’t the conversation for which he’d mentally prepared himself, and it made the sympathy on his tongue taste more than ever like hypocrisy. ‘I’m sorry about Alan, Penelope. It was rotten luck.’
‘Yes, it was.’ She paused. ‘Or I suppose it was, becau
se; they didn’t tell us much about it, except that there was this explosion in the laboratory where he was working. Do you know what happened? Is that why you’re here – to tell Mother all the ghoulish details?’
‘I just happened to be passing by, actually. I don’t know anything about the explosion.’
‘Oh.’ The flicker of interest faded. ‘Well, Mother won’t be back for a couple of hours. She may not even be back for lunch if she meets up with anyone. Aunt Mary’s in, naturally – you can go up and see her if you like.’
Aunt Mary was in, naturally. Always in, or at least no further than her wheelchair could go. But it was nevertheless Aunt Mary he had come to see, for she of all people saw almost everything and heard in the end what she had not seen. If there had been anything to see or hear around Firle that day, Aunt Mary was as good a bet as any for the information.
‘I’ll do that. I’d like to see her again.’
‘Okay then – just go straight up. She’s in the end room, the usual one.’ She turned on her heel towards the kitchen. ‘I’m on lunch duty today, so I won’t come with you. But you can have a bite with us if you like.’
‘I’ll have to get on my way soon.’
‘Suit yourself.’
She left him standing.
The room at the end – that had been Mary’s ever since she had finally surrendered to the wheelchair, It was the best room in the house and the whole family had united to force her to accept it. They had united, too, to overcome its one disadvantage, labouring through one long, hot summer to build a miniature lift from the first floor to the ground floor. Not that there had been any shortage of volunteers; relays of guests and neighbours had willingly lent muscle-power and technical assistance – fifteen courses of the brickwork were Roskill’s own: for everyone who knew Mary it had been a sad labour of love.
So the room had become her base rather than her prison, catching the sun the whole day to warm her and giving her a great sweep of landscape as well as the curve of the downland on which to focus the German naval telescope her father had brought back from the Zeebrugge raid.
If she had seen anything on that…
‘It’s Hugh!’ She was awaiting him, already facing the door; she would have heard the distant murmur of voices and no visitor to the Old Vicarage ever left without visiting the end room.
He had forgotten how beautiful she was. There had been some old general – he had read a book about him way back – of whom it was said ‘he made old age beautiful’, and the same was true of Mary. Except that sixty years was not old and it was the crippling arthritis and the pain which had aged her, though without tarnishing that beauty. Isobel would age like that, exactly.
She held out her hands to him. ‘It’s been such a long time, Hugh – far too long. We’ve missed you.’
It wasn’t a complaint; somehow it implied that the fault was hers, not his, and that she wanted to make it up.
‘Mary…’ He took the cold, twisted binds.
‘It is good to see you, Hugh!’
Her unashamed pleasure cut deep into him. This was the darkest treachery: dearest Mary, I haven’t come here to see your eyes light up. I’ve come to ask you what they saw up there on the hill. Did you see anything, Mary? Did you? And did Alan tell you anything?
‘It’s good to see you too, Mary darling.’
The truth, but what an empty, guilty truth it was!
‘I hadn’t the heart to come after Harry was killed,’ he heard his voice say in the distance. ‘I think – I somehow felt I was to blame. It ought to have been me that time.’
‘What a very silly thing to think!’ She underlined the word ‘silly’; for Mary silliness was the venial sin and only wickedness carried a heavy penance. ‘And Harry would be the first to tell you so. You were each promoted, and you weren’t to blame for that.’
‘It wasn’t quite as simple as that, Mary.’ He could hear himself still, as though he was listening to a tape. ‘I didn’t take that promotion because I really wanted it – I took it because I was losing my nerve. I could feel it running out of my boots every time I flew.’
It sounded strange, blurted out just like that, unmasked, the thing he’d kept hidden from everyone but Isobel. And he’d never intended to share it with anyone else, either. Yet telling it to Mary now seemed perfectly natural – it was the curious effect Mary’s charisma had on everyone, from the milkman to the vicar. She had never sought confidences, they simply tumbled out in her presence.
Perhaps that was really why he had never returned to East Firle: it was too easy to talk to Mary.
‘Hugh! Now that’s the silliest thing of all! If you felt like that, then you were right to do what you did, not wicked. If you hadn’t you might have killed someone else as well as yourself. But you certainly didn’t harm Harry.’
The plain facts in black and white, sensible and honest. But that wasn’t how the scales of guilt were balanced: guilt was always the might-have-been that could never be outweighed by good sense and honesty.
‘Perhaps you’re right, Mary.’
‘Of course I’m right. And it’s all past and done with now – there’s no sense in remembering bad things in the past unless they help to make the present better. And I’m sure your present doesn’t need any helping.’ She patted his hand. ‘Are you happy, Hugh? And are you doing a useful job?’
Roskill smiled at her. Happiness and usefulness had always been Mary’s criteria for the good life.
‘I sometimes wonder whether what I do is useful, Mary. But it’s certainly interesting enough.’
She nodded, smiling at him. ‘And are you married yet?’
It was on the edge of his tongue to tell her: no, Mary, not married. But I love a married woman seven years older than I am, with two sons at boarding school and a rich busy husband who doesn’t give a damn provided she doesn’t rock the boat. And. what the hell am I to do about that, Mary? Just tell me what…
But one slipped confidence was enough for one day.
‘No, Mary – not yet, anyway.’ He smiled back at her. ‘And you – have you still got your finger on East Firle’s pulse?’
‘Shame on you, Hugh! You make me sound like a nosey old woman, and I hope I’m not that.’
‘Not at all. It’s a sympathetic ear you have, not a nosey nose,’ He looked at her affectionately. No elaborate lies now, for she would see through them. And no excuses either, for she deserved better than that; if he couldn’t trust Mary’s good sense, there was no sense left in the world. ‘And I need your ear now, Mary.’
For a moment she regarded him in silence, searching his face. And there was sadness in her own face now as she identified his purpose: he was no longer her special visitor, redeeming a long absence, but a duty caller like the meter reader and the postman, just doing his job.
‘It’s Alan, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
She held his gaze steadily. ‘What is it you want to know about him?’
‘He spent his last leave here.’ Roskill felt a muscle twitch in his cheek. If he’d ever wondered why one was never normally assigned to a job involving one’s own friends and relatives, he had the answer in full now. ‘I want – we want to know what he did and where he went. And who he met, and anything he said or saw out of the ordinary.’
He could see from the stricken look on her face that he’d bungled it ridiculously: he’d made Alan sound like Philby and Burgess and Maclean rolled into one, and the report of his accidental death transparently the officifd lie that it was. How could he have been so clumsy?
‘Alan hadn’t done anything wrong, Mary. But we think he may have had some information for us – something important. And we don’t know what it was. What I’m doing now, asking you these questions, is really just routine.’
‘But it was important?’
‘It might be very important.’
‘Well, I’m surprised he didn’t tell you.’
It was an oddly stupid thing for someone as sharp as
Mary to say. Unless the years really were beginning to tell.
‘We never saw him, Mary. The accident was on Tuesday night. He wasn’t due back on duty until the next day.’
‘I mean in his letter to you.’
Letter?
‘His letter?’
‘Haven’t you had it? He wrote it on Tuesday morning – he borrowed a five-penny stamp off me for it. It had to be a five-penny because he wanted it to go first class.’
‘To me?’
‘He said it was to you. Because in return for the stamp he said he’d send my love. I thought that was why you were here – because of his letter. The Ice Maiden posted it from Lewes, to make sure of the London post.’
‘The Ice Maiden?’
‘Sorry – it’s the family name for Penny. And you haven’t had it? That’s really too bad of them, even though it is usually reliable.’
A letter from Alan. So he had seen something, and knew he had seen it. Or at least wanted a second opinion on what he had seen – that made sense. For Alan had never sent him a letter before, but he was the most obvious contact for advice inside the department.
And a letter somewhere in the G.P.O. pipeline, since it had so far reached neither the department nor the flat…
Mary swivelled her chair round and lifted the old-fashioned phone beside her.
‘I’ll just make sure Penny really did send it,’ she said. ‘I know she did go to Lewes that morning. But – Penny? That letter of Alan’s on Tuesday, the one he wanted to get the next London post – did you take it in?’
She watched Roskill over the receiver, listening. ‘You didn’t … you did what?’ She frowned in puzzlement. ‘I think you’d better tell Hugh about that.’
Roskill took the receiver from her.
‘Penelope – what did you do with that letter?’
‘Haven’t you got it? Well, you can blame Alan’s friend if you haven’t. He was the one who posted it.’
‘Which friend was this?’
‘Good Lord, I don’t know. He turned up on the doorstep about twenty minutes after Alan disappeared in a cloud of blue smoke – he wanted Alan urgently, but I told him Alan had cleared off.’
The Alamut Ambush Page 14