by Gavin Lyall
"You didn't ask."
"I didn't ask if you were taking one of the new FH-70 howitzers, either, but next time I'll have a complete list. And you really burned down that houseboat?"
"The letter might have been on board; it wasn't in the papers I'd pinched. I was just trying to stop as many rabbit-holes as I could."
"If she was going off with you," Agnes said, "it was most likely in her handbag."
"If she read thrillers," George said, "she probably left it in a sealed envelope with her solicitors and orders to send it to number 2 Dzerzhinsky Street in the event of her untimely demise. Do we know who her solicitors are?"
"I can find out tomorrow," Agnes said. "And then…" she delicately took a book of matches from her handbag and laid it on the desk beside Maxim.
"Thank you," he said politely. "But I prefer my own."
"Dear Heaven, are you two trying to give me a stroke?" George asked.›From the floor below, there came a gentle rumble of applause; somebody had just finished a speech. "And now where are we?"
"If Professor Tyler was bidding for it, we know the letter's real," Maxim said. "At best it could have been burned. At worst we know who wrote it."
"Who?"
"Robert Reginald 'Etheridge." Maxim took a notebook from his pocket. "Born 1923 in a place called Bishop Wilton near York. He was a farm boy brought up on tractors. He enlisted in 1940 and the Yorkshire Dragoons took him as a driver…"
"Whatever happened to them?" George asked instinctively, pouring more champagne all round. The room was small enough that nobody had to get up, just reach.
"The Yorkshire Dragoons were amalgamated with two other regiments to form the Queen's Own Yorkshire Yeomanry in 1956. Since then, they've been reduced to just a squadron in the Queen's Own Yeomanry."
After a while, George asked: "Did you just happen to know that?"
"I never look these things up just because you might ask."
Agnes swallowed a chuckle and choked on it.
"Go on," George said stiffly.
"He was in Egypt with their motor battalion and volunteered for the Long Range Desert Group in 1942. They accepted him with a drop from corporal to private, and the only mention of him in The Gates of the Grave is on the last patrol Tyler led in the LRDG. Etheridge was one of the three survivors. After that he was shipped home and never went abroad again. He finished the war as a sergeant driving instructor, demobbed late '45. No claim for any disability pension."
"Why d'you say that?" Agnes pounced.
"There seems to be a doubt about his mental stability. Just a hint in his records."
"Doubt?" George said. "I should have thought it was a crystal certainty. The man went to Canada voluntarily, didn't he? – and then changed his name to Bruckshaw and drank himself to death. Guilty on all three charges."
Maxim smiled politely and sipped the lukewarm champagne. He didn't much like champagne, even cold.
"You say three men survived," Agnes said. "Etheridge, Tyler himself, and…?"
"A French lieutenant, Henri de Carette. We don't have his records, of course, but it's in the book. He was a career officer, commissioned just before the war and retired as a full colonel something over ten years ago. He's still alive."
"That can't be in Tyler's book," George said suspiciously.
"I rang our military attache's office in Paris. They're going to find his address."
"God, I hope they go carefully. The French get paranoid at any hint of us playing the Great Game on their pitch. No, they'll know what they're doing… So now where does that leave us?"
Maxim shrugged.
"There's one other person who knows what's in that letter," Agnes said.
"I know that," George said. "But we can't exactly walk up to him and say, 'Excuse me Professor but what horrible thing did you get up to in the desert in early '43 that could be the subject of a letter from the late Sergeant Etheridge?' We need that man."
"What for?"
George held up the champagne bottle, stared moodily at how little was left, and poured it out. "The state provideth and the state drinketh, blessed be the name of the state. The taxpayer can always eat cake." The bottle clanged into the waste bucket. "You two can keep shut up; you wouldn't be in your jobs if you couldn't… In a couple of weeks Tyler goes to Luxembourg to talk to the French and West Germans about nuclear targetting policy. All this is rather behind the Americans' backs.
"He's the only person we've got whom the French will listen to on defence, particularly nuclear. He speaks the language well, he doesn't trust Washington, and he really seems to believe in a third world war. What more can they ask?"
"I believe in a third world war," Agnes said. "It's the fourth one I've me doubts about. But thank you for telling us this, since Greyfriars must have known long ago, the way they've stepped up their campaign on Tyler."
"They knew he was going to head the review committee; we don't know if they know about Luxembourg."
"If Bonn's involved, then they know." There had just been a new eruption of security scandals in West Germany, with lonely secretaries to important officials getting seduced by trained gigolos from East Germany. It was an old story, but to Box 500 it didn't get any better in the constant retelling.
"Maybe, maybe." There was another rumble of laughter and applause from the drawing rooms. "At least I'm missing the speechifying… So – it seems as if we'd better talk to this de Carette, once we know where he lives. I'm not farming it out to Six; Harry, can you do it, the soldier to soldier approach?"
"I can try."
"Also try not to take a flick-knife this time."
Back down in the Private Secretaries' room, George checked through the tray of paperwork that had arrived in the last two hours. Agnes sat on the edge of his desk, listening to the guests clumping down the stairs outside in seven languages.
"Would you have thought of simply burning that houseboat?" George asked.
She considered. "I hope so."
"You hope so?"
"He might have destroyed the letter, and I assume that's what we want. Especially now we know whatever it says is true."
"Yees." George made it a long, unleavened word.
"And if he hadn't had that flick-knife, he could be dead, the way he told it. I assume that's something we don't want: British Army officer attached to Number 10 found dead on Irish houseboat of woman murdered in-"
"Yes, yes, yes." George glared at a paper in his hand. "Why don't they write to the AUC? The Headmaster isn't responsible for the ice at Heathrow… You don't think Harry blew that bloody woman up himself, as well?"
"Why should he? And the funny thing is… I think he'd have told us if he had."
George let the letter drift back into the tray but went on staring at it, unseeing. Then he said quietly: "I hope you won't tell Harry, but I advised the Headmaster to pick somebody else. I think he chose Harry not because he's going somewhere in the Army, since he's quite likely not, but because he doesn't care where he's going any more. I still don't know if we did the right thing, but yes, I think he'd have told us. So who did it?"
"There was a certain Major Azarov also in the cast."
"If he lit the fuse, wouldn't that suggest that Muscovy already has the letter? They wouldn't want to kill her before they got it." George shivered. "But if they'd got the letter, what was Azarov doing on the houseboat?"
"Setting up our Major Maxim for a nice Anglo-Irish scandal? He could have tailed Harry from Limerick. He's a good soldier, but…"
"Yes… Will you go with him to France, once we've located this de Carette?"
"I'd love to watch him in action." Agnes grinned mischievously. "Perhaps we'll get ourselves into another war with France and see Britain restored to her former glory."
"Agnes, do not say these things."
Opening the door to his flat, Maxim knew immediately there was something wrong. A smell? A draught? The way the lock had turned? He stayed very still and carefully took the revolver from his
briefcase. For once he had it when he might need it.
But he didn't. There was nobody there – not any longer. They seemed to have taken nothing and done nothing like vandalise the place. There were just tiny things like a few books upside down in the bookshelf, the tea and sugar jars switched around in the kitchen cupboard, his usual chair moved out of line with the TV set. Little things that said: we could have done big things, and next time…
He threw out the tea and sugar, just in case, and took a can of beer from the fridge – left with its door slightly open. It had all been nicely done, because the local police would give you one of those ay-ay-he's-one-of-those looks if you complained that someone had broken in just to change your tea and sugar jars around, then relocked the door on the way out.
Nicely done, perhaps too nicely. It was frightening how easily they had got in, but no more than frightening. Maxim couldn't share Barbara Masson's feeling of being despoiled by strangers picking over her property, because he had no property to be picked over. The flat was just the ninth – or was it tenth? – place he had rented since his marriage.
Both the gas fire and the record player seemed to be working. He put on the first side of Ralph Kirkpatrick playing 'The Well-tempered Clavier' – Jenny had given him the album, to show there was more to the keyboard than Ellington and Basic – and sat down yet again with The Gates of the Grave. The twenty-year-old paperback was coming unbound in lumps, but he knew which lump he wanted.
The patrol started from Zella oasis, the new headquarters of LRDG, about 200 miles south of the coast road…
24
Nice airport was swarming with would-be skiers off some cancelled or diverted flight. The floors were piled with tartan-coloured luggage and skis in long red plastic cases, the desks surrounded by suntanned men in short fur jackets of the sort women wore to the 1953 Coronation.
Maxim and Agnes hired a Citroлn Deux-Chevaux and, after a few mistakes, untangled themselves from the complex of fast new coast roads and began weaving up into the hills behind the city. For the first twenty miles the land was all used up, busy and untidy with olive groves on every slope, red-tiled villas, garages, souvenir shops and pylons. But after that it thinned out, and the rock bones of the hillsides showed through.
"The French," Agnes said, as they passed a very old farmhouse, "let their buildings flourish but keep the trees very much pruned and in their place. In Britain it's the other way round: it's an offence to enlarge your house or cut down your trees. What a basis for entente."
Maxim smiled and went on winding the bouncy little can of a car around the sharpening bends. Above, the sky was a hard cold blue, and against it they could suddenly see the place they had come to visit. And miles before they got there, it could see them.
The Chateau de Carette had always been small, by castle standards. Now it was just the tall square keep, a shaft of grainy honey-coloured stone rising firmly out of a rabble of extra buildings and wings that had been built on down the years. There was almost no sign of the curtain wall and its gatehouse that had originally defined the boundaries, but Maxim could see just where it must have led around the subtle curves and advantages of the hilltop. A soldier's eye is the same, whether he's positioning a laser target designator or a frightened peasant with a crossbow.
The rough driveway – the French don't take gravel seriously – led around to a small door set in one corner of a newish wing. A worn Citroen Safari was parked untidily by the edge of a bank of rough grass that slid down towards the valley. Maxim put the Deux-Chevaux in beside it.
"He's watching us," Agnes said suddenly.
"Yes."
"Do you feel it, too?"
"Not particularly. But he would be; it's what the place was built for." The keep reared above them, its narrow top windows still holding an all-round view: down the valley, up the valley, across the hills to either side.
The arched door, criss-crossed with ironwork, opened just before they knocked on it. A dour old man-servant poked his head out and grunted at them.
"Nous sommes M'mselle Algar et Major de Chasseurs Maxim" Maxim said in a very flat accent. He had already learnt that Agnes spoke the language almost perfectly, but she was letting him lead.
"Vous avez des cartes de visite, M'sieur, M'mselle?" The old boy had wet blue eyes and the look of a Dracula with indigestion.
Solemnly, they both handed him calling-cards. What on earth does Agnes put on hers? Maxim wondered. They were led down a stone corridor into a wide reception room, and motioned to stay there.
The interior of the keep had been torn out, or possibly fallen down, and rebuilt recently in a more-or-less mediaeval style. But real money had been spent: you don't pick up floor beams over twenty feet long just by strolling around Cannes market. The furniture was thick, dark, square, and the walls partly rough-plastered, partly raw stone that felt slightly warm to the touch, the way southern stone does even in winter.
Agnes was humming: "Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen…"
The servant came back and led them upstairs, breathing in dry gasps like the swish-swish of a stiff broom. At each floor, the glimpses of decor got more and more personal: thick rugs in front of fireplaces that were obviously used, the sparkle of silver and glassware.
The last flight was a steep stone newel curling up a small turret at one corner. The old man stayed at the bottom, wheezing loudly.
At first sight, Colonel de Carette was both dapper and plump. He was shortish and Maxim knew he was just about sixty. The face was round but not fat, with a sharp nose and very expressive thick eyebrows. He had a neat little moustache, still a lot of silvery-black hair and he could never be anything but French, or think of trying to be.
"M'mselle Algar. "He brushed her hand with his lips. "Enchantй. And Major Maxim." They shook hands. "Will you take a glass of wine? It is from the region only, so you will not expect too much…" The bottle was waiting, misted with cold, on a silver tray. He poured three glasses.
"May I ask you not to smoke? The doctors…" he waved a hand. "And I believe the weather in England hasn't been too good? We even had a few flakes around the hills here. But I think perhaps we see more snow than most of England." Beyond the tall windows on the east wall they could see a grey corner of the Mediterranean and then the jagged white peaks lifting out of a hazy horizon. The Ligurian Appenines, far across the Italian frontier.
The room was the whole top floor, with windows on all sides and a fireplace with a small wood fire burning in between the two on the west wall. It was low-ceilinged, for its size, and obviously de Carette's private hideout. There was no mock-medievalism about the furniture and panelling, just comfort and a respectable untidiness: piles of books and papers but no dirty glasses or full ashtrays. On a big table at the north end, dozens – maybe hundreds – of model soldiers were laid out in the formal patterns of an eighteenth-century battle.
Maxim glanced at Agnes and wondered if she was thinking what he was: we're privileged to be met in this room instead of downstairs. That means he's going to talk to us. It doesn't mean he's going to tell us the truth.
De Carette chattered on, pointing at views through the window, picking up little silver and china ornaments and showing them to Agnes. His English was very fluent, contrasting with his French habit of cocking his head, bird-like, at a fresh angle for every new phrase.
When they had finished the first glass, he poured refills and then they all sat down. Now it begins, Maxim thought. De Carette had dressed the part carefully, in a dark green velvet smoking jacket over narrow check trousers, a precisely folded silk kerchief at his throat.
"And what, if it not is a secret, is a major of the light infantry – I believe you said you were a chasseur? You know of course that I was once of the Chasseurs d'Afrique? – what is he doing in Number 10 Downing Street?"
"What's any major doing without a command?"
"Yes… it can be an… an uncertain rank."
"It can last a long time."
<
br /> "But for you, obviously it will not." It was politely put. He didn't ask Agnes what she did, so he probably knew. There would be well-placed friends in London.
"And now, what may I do for you?"
They had talked over this moment and hadn't managed to think of any better tactic than honesty, though Agnes had certainly tried.
Maxim began his party recitation. "A couple of years ago, a man called Bob Etheridge died in Montreal. When he knew he was dying, he wrote a letter to a man in our Ministry of Defence, Gerald Jackaman." But de Carette gave no flicker of recognition. He smiled and nodded. "Jackaman committed suicide last November. His widow took the letter and – we now know – offered to sell it to the Russians. Whether or not they have it, we have no idea. Somebody killed her. We do know the letter says something about Professor John White Tyler. We hoped you might be able to tell us what could be in it."
"Ah yes. John is somebody quite important, now."
Agnes said: "He's coming up to some delicate negotiations on European defence, soon. Of course, we'd rather you didn't spread that around."
De Carette smiled again, accepting that she had passed a little of the responsibility onto him. "Yes… John would be good for that work… But why do you ask me?"
"You, Tyler and Etheridge were the only survivors of that last Long Range Desert Group patrol," Maxim said. "It's the only thing that connects you. He doesn't mention either of you in his book again."
"You might always ask John himself."
"We may have to," Agnes said. "But that won't stop the Other Side, if they haven't got the letter, coming and asking you. They can read books, too."
De Carette's eyebrows leapt into a sardonic slant. "Are you trying to frighten me, Miss Algar?"
"Am I succeeding?"
But he just sipped his wine and cocked his head back at Maxim. "This letter seems… like the jewel one takes from the idol and then, whoever owns it, he must die. What did poor Etheridge die from?"
"Drink."
De Carette slanted his eyebrows again and began a cold chuckle. Abruptly it became a retching cough. He stiffened and went very pale, Maxim and Agnes leaning forward but unsure how they could help. Then de Carette lifted his hand feebly and waved them back. For a long time he sat very upright in his seat, seeming to hold his chest together with his hands.