Into the Blue

by Robert Goddard

  ‘There’s somebody here to see you, Harold,’ she whispered, gesturing towards the closed door of the front parlour.

  ‘Who is it?’ Harry’s first thought was that Dysart’s promise to call off the police had not been fulfilled.

  ‘That fellow who telephoned you last week. Dr Kingdom.’ The name was like a clutch at Harry’s throat. ‘You know, there’s something about him I don’t quite like.’

  Peter Kingdom looked even taller and more elegant than usual in the humble front parlour, the tangy scent of his after-shave blending oddly with the indefinable aroma Harry always recognized as home. He was standing by the corner cabinet, leafing idly through a photograph album, the old dog-eared leather-covered album on whose thick black pages Harry’s mother had meticulously gummed every family snapshot, whether good or bad, since the inaugural church door portrait of Mr and Mrs Stanley Barnett, Whitsun 1932.

  As Harry closed the door behind him, Kingdom turned and smiled in greeting. ‘Mr Barnett! Good to see you again.’ He held up the album. ‘Just admiring these vignettes of your childhood. Tell me, what’s “Trip”?’

  Harry was too taken aback to reply. He had read Kingdom’s secret notes on Heather and the knowledge they had left him with was incompatible with the relaxed and charming exterior this man chose to show to the world. He moved unsteadily across the room and found himself at Kingdom’s elbow, staring down at a page of photographs of his own barely recognizable eleven-year-old face, frowning on a pier, grinning on a beach, pouting at a boarding-house window, with a caption beneath in white ink recording Trip, Weston-super-Mare, July 1946. ‘It was the annual summer holiday for GWR employees and their families,’ he heard himself say. ‘I hated them.’

  ‘Really? Why?’

  The answer was that, even as a child, Harry had distrusted the herd mentality. Every July, the Railway Village emptied as the population boarded excursion trains for the coast. And every July young Harry wished he did not have to go. The sheer compulsory jollity of the whole communal extravaganza repelled him. But to Dr Peter Kingdom, forty years on, he was not about to admit any of that. ‘I’m sure you didn’t come here to listen to my reminiscences of a deprived childhood,’ he snapped.

  Kingdom raised his eyebrows. ‘Was it deprived?’ Then he seemed to have second thoughts about pursuing the point. ‘Excuse me,’ he said with a smile. ‘It’s my training getting the better of me.’ He closed the album and slipped it back into its place. ‘Actually, of course, I came here to ask if you’d decided yet whether to take up my suggestion of hypnosis.’

  ‘No. I’m still thinking about it. I was going to contact you after Christmas.’

  Kingdom nodded. ‘I thought you probably were.’

  Every second Harry spent under this man’s scrutiny was, in present circumstances, a torment. He tried to cut it short. ‘In that case, I don’t understand the purpose of your visit.’

  ‘It was prompted by something else, I must admit. If you don’t mind my asking, how long have you known my secretary, Miss Labrooy?’

  Harry’s heart seemed to miss a beat. He felt sure his mouth had sagged open before he could shape a reply. ‘Why … why do you ask?’

  ‘You’d be within your rights to tell me to mind my own business, of course.’ The smile that accompanied the remark gave it an unmistakeable weight of sarcasm.

  ‘What is there … What makes you think I know Miss Labrooy?’

  ‘A photograph, Mr Barnett. A rather puzzling photograph. I received it through the post yesterday morning. See for yourself.’ Kingdom drew an envelope from an inner pocket and slid the contents into Harry’s hand. It was the photograph taken of Zohra and him in Kensal Green Cemetery. ‘There was no note with it and the address was typed,’ Kingdom went on. ‘Posted in London EC1 on the twentieth.’ The twentieth: the day Harry had found a copy of the self-same photograph wedged under the windscreen wiper of his car. ‘Odd, isn’t it?’

  One glance at Kingdom’s face was enough to convince Harry: this was Kingdom’s devious way of announcing he was on to them. The man in the raincoat was working for him. And therefore he knew Harry and Zohra had joined forces against him. But, if so, surely he would not have been so careless as to give Zohra the chance to copy his file on Heather. Unless, thought Harry with a sudden lurch of fear, he no longer cared how much they learned.

  ‘I wondered if you could suggest an explanation, Mr Barnett. The incident left me at a loss.’

  ‘No. That is … No, I can’t.’

  ‘But you do know Miss Labrooy? Socially, I mean.’

  ‘No. We’re just …’ Every lie he could contrive would be transparent, he sensed, yet anything was preferable to the truth. ‘We met by chance … in Kensal Green Cemetery … last Saturday.’

  ‘Really? Who took this photograph, then?’

  ‘I don’t know. But … I’ve received a copy as well.’

  ‘Have you? That strikes me as odder still. What does Miss Labrooy make of it?’

  ‘I haven’t told her.’

  ‘Has she been sent a copy?’

  ‘No.’ Too late his brain overhauled his voice. ‘I mean I don’t think so.’

  Kingdom slid the photograph back into the envelope and replaced it in his pocket. He was frowning now, his keen eyes scanning Harry’s face in search of clues. ‘When did you receive your copy, Mr Barnett?’

  ‘Tuesday.’

  ‘Through the post?’

  ‘No. Actually … it was left under the windscreen wiper of my car, in a blank envelope.’ Kingdom knows this already, thought Harry: this charade of question and answer merely a test of nerve.

  ‘Here in Swindon?’

  ‘No. I was in London at the time.’

  ‘Meeting Miss Labrooy, perhaps?’

  ‘No. I told you: we met by chance last Saturday. We’ve not met since.’ There had been nobody watching them at the Victoria and Albert, Harry felt certain. And Kingdom could not know that he had just returned from Kensal Green. In this lie at least he was secure.

  ‘So what makes you think she hasn’t received a copy as well?’

  ‘I’ve spoken to her on the telephone. She’d have been bound to mention it if she’d been sent one.’

  ‘But you didn’t feel bound to mention it to her?’

  ‘I didn’t want to worry her.’

  ‘Very considerate of you.’ Kingdom’s frown faded into an ironic stare. ‘Well, I suppose there is no point bothering Miss Labrooy. She’s on holiday until Wednesday. But when she returns, I shall certainly inform her.’

  ‘That’s up to you.’

  ‘What really puzzles me, Mr Barnett, is that being sent a photograph of yourself, taken anonymously and without your knowledge, doesn’t seem to have surprised you at all. Why is that, may I ask?’

  ‘I’ve had a few days to get over the shock.’

  ‘It was a shock, then?’

  ‘Well … yes.’

  ‘Yet you’ve done nothing about it.’

  ‘What am I do?’

  Kingdom did not reply. In the silent interval during which his eyes remained fixed on Harry, all the bluffs and double bluffs that were the substance of their encounter seemed to refine themselves into the piercing intensity of his gaze. Then, as if satisfied that he had learned all he could hope to learn, he broke away and strode to the door. ‘You’ll let me have your decision before the end of next week, I trust?’ he said, pausing with the door half open and smiling back at Harry as if they were discussing a business proposition of small moment.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. I’ll wish you the compliments of the season then, Mr Barnett, and I’ll look forward to hearing from you.’

  As the door closed behind him Harry suddenly noticed how tense every muscle in his body had become. Unclenching the fists his hands had formed, he found every crease in his palms lined with sweat. His first inclination was to rush to the telephone and alert Zohra to what had happened. But that was surely what Kingdom wanted him to do. That was w
hat his visit had been intended to provoke. Therefore Harry must do what was most difficult in such circumstances: he must do nothing. He moved to the window and twitched back the net curtain. There was Kingdom, climbing into his car a little way down the street. ‘You’ll be hearing from me all right, Doctor,’ he heard himself murmur. ‘Perhaps sooner than you think.’

  44

  HARRY HAD NOT spent Christmas Day in England for ten years and had forgotten just how gruelling the experience could be. Why people considered annual torture by turkey and television to be in any way desirable was to him an impenetrable mystery. For his mother’s sake, however, he tried to pretend that three pairs of green woollen socks were just what he needed and that the Queen’s speech was something he could not bear to miss. Only when darkness fell and his mother began looking for her double-set of Salvation Army carols to put on the gramophone did he sense that his tolerance was ebbing; it was time to beat a retreat. But the streets of Swindon were empty, the pubs were closed and the scenes of his childhood had vanished; there was nothing in all the silent night to give him either comfort or courage, nothing, that is, except the knowledge that tomorrow he would be on Heather’s trail once more.

  Trip 1949 – Harry’s last before school leaving age rescued him from its annual excruciation – was to Paignton. That, and Alan Dysart’s wedding day, constituted all he knew of South Devon. The consequence was, as he drove down through the West Country on Boxing Day, that the two events coalesced in his mind. It was as if a sherbet-stained schoolboy had blundered into the wedding reception and elbowed his way through the champagne-sipping guests. None of his memories seemed willing to obey orders: they jostled and hid and appeared in disguise.

  The car too was playing up, producing enough rebellious symptoms to force Harry off the motorway and on to slower routes through empty market towns slumbering in a Christmas trance. An enforced halt to let the radiator cool finally turned the journey into an ordeal and it was not until the afternoon had taken its first turn towards dusk that he reached Strete Barton through a switchback of high-hedged lanes halfway between Darmouth and Kingsbridge.

  A tarmacadammed drive between bare-branched trees, sleek Jersey cattle chewing nettles in softly sloping fields: Harry remembered none of this. It had been early summer last time, of course, with the trees in leaf and the birds in song: perhaps that was the only difference. He drove over a cattle-grid, then through a gateway into a wide and empty yard, with a Dutch barn to one side and an older stone barn doing service as a garage on his left. Ahead, beyond a low hedge, stood the house itself, slate-roofed and cob-walled, with mullioned windows and a porched entrance, smoke curling from the chimneys. Beside the house, a lane led off past a double-fenced paddock towards a stable-block where Harry could see a figure at work with a bucket and broom. In the garage stood Dysart’s Daimler, a mud-spattered Range Rover and a gleaming red sports car. Here, the scene left Harry in no doubt, landed wealth was at its most tangible. And here, one glance at the picture propped on the dashboard reminded him, Heather had taken her thirteenth photograph.

  As Harry climbed from the car, Dysart appeared in the porch, his arm raised in greeting. He was wearing an old Navy sweater over twill trousers, his hair was swept casually back, he was smiling broadly. Before he could even wonder why the thought had come into his head, Harry pondered the mystery of this man’s easy transition from tie-pinned mandarin to glad-handed man of leisure: there was no occasion, it seemed, no setting or context for which Alan Dysart could not devise and present the ideal persona.

  ‘Good journey, Harry?’ The firm handshake, the touch on the shoulder, the flashing smile: the warmth of Dysart’s welcome, the admission it always implied to the charmed circle of his friendship, was undiminished. ‘Come on in. I‘m afraid Virginia’s not here at the moment.’ He led the way and Harry followed, glimpsing as they moved along the hall towards the rear of the house a large and richly furnished lounge, where a huge and splendidly decked Christmas tree stood beside a crackling fire. ‘I was in the study when I heard your car. A politician’s work, you know …’ The study was darkly panelled and lit by one broad window that looked out over rolling pasture and wooded coombes towards the church tower and clustered cottage roofs of the nearest village. ‘I expect you could use a drink. ‘

  ‘Please.’ Harry glanced round at the sporting prints and well-stocked bookshelves, at the broad and paper-strewn desk with its ever-present, ever-changing view of the Devon countryside. Was this, he wondered, the real Alan Dysart – the man of tweed and tradition, of shooting rights and rural values? Or was this just one more expert pose, one more approximation of what others expected of him? A glass was pressed into his hand. ‘Cheers,’ he said, sipping the contents; Dysart’s taste in malt whisky was as impeccable as ever.

  ‘What’s in the envelope?’ said Dysart, nodding at the parcel Harry held by his side.

  ‘Something rather significant.’

  ‘Concerning friend Kingdom?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then let me tell you what I’ve learned about him since we last met.’ He waved Harry to a chair. ‘It’s amazing what you can find out when you have the resources of Interpol unofficially at your disposal.’

  ‘Where was he on the eleventh of November?’

  Dysart leaned back against the edge of the desk. ‘Bear with me for a moment, Harry. I should first explain that it seems Jack Cornelius is in the clear. He was given ten days’ compassionate leave by Hurstdown Abbey because his father had died. Well, I had the point checked: he wasn’t making it up. On the eleventh of November, he was at his father’s funeral in Dundalk.’

  ‘And Kingdom?’

  ‘A different story. Airline records confirm your sighting of him in Lindos on the sixth. He flew from Geneva to Rhodes on the fifth and returned on the seventh.’

  ‘But the eleventh?’

  ‘Still a blank. There’s no airline record of him paying a second visit to Rhodes. But in looking for one, Interpol came across something rather interesting.’ Dysart plucked a paper from his desk and began to read from it. ‘A Briton named King, initial P, travelled with Olympic Airways from Geneva to Rhodes via Athens on Thursday the tenth of November. He left Rhodes again the following day on the 17.50 flight to Athens, stopped there overnight, then caught the 8.20 Swissair flight to Geneva on Saturday the twelfth.’

  The dates and times were right but the name was tantalizingly wrong, unless P. King and P. Kingdom were one and the same. ‘You’re not suggesting—’ Harry began.

  ‘It’s possible. Passports and tickets tend to be checked separately at airports. Customs officers are more interested in whether your passport is genuine than in what name’s on your ticket. Besides, you know the Greeks as well as I do. Administration’s hardly their strong point. But there’s something else as well. According to the passenger lists, the mysterious Mr King travelled to Rhodes alone. Yet he returned with his wife.’

  ‘His wife?’

  ‘Or a female companion using that name.’

  Recited by Dysart, the facts sounded bland and inconsequential, but if King was Kingdom’s nom de guerre, then he had neither excuse nor alibi. He had been on Rhodes at the time – at the very hour – of Heather’s disappearance. And he had not left alone. His threatened intervention had found its form.

  ‘Now,’ said Dysart, ‘do you want to tell me what’s in the envelope?’

  Harry reckoned it would take Dysart at least an hour to read and appraise Kingdom’s file notes. He filled the time by taking his bag up to his room, unpacking and bathing away some of the strain of the journey. It was nearly dark when he returned to the yard for a breath of air. He lit a cigarette and decided to take a stroll down the drive, relishing the stillness and silence that was everywhere about him, the dampness that clung to his breath, the scent of woodsmoke that enveloped the barns and hedgerows. If England, his England, had been more often like this, he would not have been so eager to leave.

  Suddenly, loomi
ng through the thickening dusk, a horse and rider appeared, coming slowly up the drive towards him, seeming somehow ghost-like until the leisurely clop of the horse’s hooves caught up with the vision. A tall chestnut mare, clotted with mud to the hocks and blowing hard, ridden by a woman in full hunting kit. With a shock, Harry realized she was Virginia Dysart. He stepped back towards the hedge and thought for a moment she meant to ride by without acknowledging him. But no: she reined the horse in as they drew alongside.

  ‘Hello, Harry.’ The mare was even taller than he had supposed. From its saddle Virginia gazed down imperiously, unsmiling and unabashed. Her hair was drawn up in a snood beneath her hat, exaggerating the severity of her features. ‘Alan told me you were coming,’ she said. ‘I hope he’s looking after you.’ She was going to pretend they had not met at Minter’s flat. She was going to defy him even to imply as much. And already, gazing up at her, Harry found himself questioning how this proud and perfectly attired huntswoman could be mistress to an unscrupulous scandalmonger. ‘It’s good to see you again,’ she continued, ‘after all these years.’

  Now was the moment, if there ever would be a moment, to throw the evidence of his own eyes back in her face. But he could not. Shamelessness on this scale seemed to demand respect. ‘It’s a pleasure to be here,’ he heard himself say.

  ‘Good.’ Her eyes narrowed. her lips compressed in a smile tight as a drum-skin. ‘See you at dinner, then.’ And with that she twitched at the reins and the mare trotted on up the drive.

  Dysart had grown sombre in Harry’s absence. He poured them both a drink and paced the room in silence for fully a minute before subsiding into the chair behind his desk and sliding the photocopied file notes back into their envelope.