Harry looked from Heather to Sheila and back again. He had no proof of his sincerity, no way of persuading them to trust him with anything, least of all their very lives. ‘It’s no trap,’ he murmured.
‘But how can we be sure?’ said Heather.
‘You can’t,’ he replied.
‘Exactly,’ said Sheila.
‘But if you don’t come with me,’ Harry continued, ‘what will you do? Stay here and wait for whatever’s going to happen?’
‘We could go to the police here in Athens,’ said Sheila.
Heather shook her head. ‘They wouldn’t believe us. Not for a moment.’ She looked at Harry intently. ‘You really think Miltiades might take us seriously?’
‘Yes. I do.’
For a few silent moments, she hesitated. Then she strode across the room and snatched up the telephone.
‘Who are you calling?’
‘Olympic Airways. To book three seats on the next flight to Rhodes.’
‘Don’t!’ Harry shouted. Into his mind had come a host of crossed lines and anonymous calls and with them an awareness that already they might not be proof against prying eyes or ears. ‘Our only advantage is that nobody will guess Rhodes is our destination. We must keep it that way. Phone nobody. We’ll drive to the airport, buy the tickets, then wait. It’ll be safer there anyway.’ He turned to Sheila. ‘Is your car outside?’
‘Yes. It’s been there all day.’
‘In that case—’ His words were cut short by a sudden upsurge of fear. Her car had been outside all day, obligingly parked opposite the entrance to the address he had given Dysart. Sabotage. Booby-traps. Expertly arranged accidents. There was no reason why the list might not yet be extended.
‘What’s wrong?’
Harry swallowed hard. ‘Have you used the car since you drove to Shelley College yesterday?’
‘No. I went into Athens this morning on the metro.’
‘You’re afraid of a bomb, aren’t you, Harry?’ said Heather. ‘A bomb like the one he used to kill Clare.’ Her voice was flat, her expression a mask, but behind them terror was beginning to stir.
‘Not afraid. Just cautious.’ Even as he lied, Harry knew he was doing so as much for Heather’s benefit as his own.
‘We could take a cab.’
‘Phone for one, you mean? Or start walking? Through the streets, at night?’ Harry shook his head. ‘No.’ He scoured his mind for whatever courage he could find there. ‘Give me the keys. I’ll go down and start the car. Join me when I sound the horn. Not before. There’s nothing to worry about. Nobody could know which car is yours. But just in case …’
‘You really think he might …’ Sheila began.
‘I don’t know,’ said Harry grimly. ‘I don’t know anything. Except this. For what it’s worth, I’ll do my best to get you both safely out of here.’
‘Your best?’
‘It’s all I have to offer.’
Nothing had changed outside. Odos Farnakos was still a residential cul-de-sac consumed in darkness and domesticity. Harry stood beneath the pine trees, letting his eyes adjust to the lack of light, aware his heart was racing, the blood pounding in his head, conscious with heightened sense of every small sound that reached him. A baby was crying somewhere nearby, its wailing merging oddly with a distant siren. A dog was barking several blocks away. He could hear the needles stirring faintly in the tree above his head, could detect the clip of what sounded like a woman’s high-heeled shoes in the next street. All, by any rational analysis, was normal and secure.
He took a deep breath and marched swiftly across the road, taking a diagonal route that led him to the driver’s side of the car. He slipped Sheila’s torch from his pocket and shone it at each of the windows in turn. All the lock buttons were depressed: so far so good. He glanced along the street in each direction: not a soul to be seen. He moved to the front of the car and prised gingerly at the bonnet: it was firmly fastened. Then he lowered himself to the ground, rolled onto his side and trained the torch on the underside of the car. Everything looked as uniformly caked in grime as he could have hoped: no tell-tale pool of brake fluid, no sign of any tampering. The engine was the same. For the first time he could remember, he felt glad of the experience Barnchase Motors had given him. He rose to his feet and returned to the driver’s door.
Allowing himself no opportunity for a loss of nerve, he took the key from his trouser pocket, slid it into the lock and turned it to the right. The button rose. He withdrew the key and reached for the handle, pausing halfway to command his hand to stop shaking. To his amazement, it obeyed. He lifted the handle. The door clicked open, creaking like some dungeon entrance as he swung it back. He flashed the torch around the interior. There were some dog-eared papers and a couple of folders on the back seat, a screwed-up peppermint packet on the dashboard: the normal car driver’s detritus. He reached out, found the lever Sheila had told him about and slid the seat forward till it hit the stop. Then he clambered in behind it, crouched to the floor and shone the torch beneath each of the front seats. Again, there was nothing. He climbed back out and switched off the torch.
The air was cold, but he was sweating. The barrel of the torch was clammy. He could taste the salt on his upper lip. This is laughable, he thought, this is madness: there is nothing to fear. He smiled to himself. ‘I can’t turn back now, can I?’ he whispered to the night.
He slid the driver’s seat back into position and lowered himself into it, his arms shaking with the intensity of his grip on the door-frame. He could have done with a cigarette. Or a drink. He wondered if Heather was watching or if she could not bear to. He let go of the door-frame and shifted in the seat, then groped for the ignition, found it and pushed the key in. A couple of reassuring grates of metal on metal: that was all. The notches and grooves of a simple mechanical function: how could anything be wrong? How indeed? Perhaps nothing was wrong. Perhaps this was all a grotesque misunderstanding. He had known Dysart for more than twenty years. He owed him more than he could ever repay. How could the nearest he had ever had to a friend be a murderer several times over?
He turned the key, felt the steering wheel loosen and moved his foot to the accelerator. One more turn was all it took. One more simple turn and it was done. Or he was. He could still stop now, of course. He could still climb out and walk away, wash his hands of Heather and Sheila as they had washed theirs of him. Or could he? Did he really any longer have a choice? A window in Oxford. A country lane near Burford. A river estuary in Hampshire. This act might or might not be one further link in the chain, but, either way, it had become inevitable. The moment held him prisoner.
He twitched at the key. The engine coughed and died. He turned the key again, more firmly. The engine fired. When he touched the accelerator, it roared absurdly. But that did not matter. Relief – a ludicrous desire to sing – was all he could feel. He jerked the car into gear, reversed out down the road, then drove across to the opposite pavement, pumping the brakes several times before he came to a halt. He sensed he was smiling, though what about he could not have explained. There was, he supposed, a childish pride at what he had done, a pathetic delight that not all his judgements had been wrong. When he thumped the horn, it sounded almost triumphant to his ears.
56
‘THERE WERE TIMES when I wanted to trust you,’ said Heather. ‘But Dysart was your best and oldest friend. You said so yourself. So how could I tell you what was in my mind, Harry? How could I trust you with anything?’
Harry did not reply. He stared ahead at the darkness beyond the car windscreen, scanning it as he had a dozen times before. They were in the middle of the airport car park, safely distant from other vehicles, with a clear view on all sides, waiting as patiently as they could for the sluggardly night to pass. The flight to Rhodes was not due to depart until 5.40 a.m. Until then there was nothing to do but wait. Sheila had fallen asleep on the back seat, but for Harry and Heather sleep was out of reach.
‘Not that I e
ver really suspected you,’ Heather went on. ‘You seemed the nearest to an innocent bystander I’d met since becoming caught up in all this.’
‘Is that why you chose me as your witness?’
‘Yes. I’m sorry they gave you such a hard time, Harry, truly I am. You should have told me about the trouble with the Danish girl. Then I’d have found somebody else. But I can’t think my family genuinely believed you’d murdered me. Not that I have much idea what they genuinely believe about anything. I hardly feel I know them anymore.’
‘Because of Clare?’
‘Because of what they did to convince me I’d imagined her pregnancy, yes. That’s what set me on the road to a breakdown: the brick wall they erected around her memory. And then to discover, as I did, what it was really all about …’ She fell silent for a few moments, then resumed. ‘I wasn’t so much horrified as gratified when I learned that Roy and my father had used undue influence to win the Phormio contract. It gave me a way to get back at them, you see, a way to prove I wasn’t the brainless child they seemed to think. But what was their reaction? Shame? Repentance? Oh no. All they were interested in was how they could shut me up. They didn’t care what the knowledge might do to me or what it told me about the kind of people they were. All they were concerned about was how to keep me quiet.’
‘It’s to your credit that they failed.’
‘Oh but they didn’t, Harry. The fear of going back to hospital stopped me talking more effectively than any gag. It’s just that it couldn’t stop me listening. It couldn’t prevent me asking questions and hearing the answers.’
‘Starting with Molly Diamond?’
‘Yes. I’d always half wanted to believe Clare was the victim of a conspiracy. According to Dr Kingdom, it was my way of coping with grief: to give it a purpose which the anguish and emptiness left by an indiscriminate terrorist killing doesn’t have. And I tried to accept that, God knows. But once I’d spoken to Mrs Diamond, it just wasn’t possible. The clues kept coming, the loose ends insisted on being followed. And I began to realize the scale of what Alan Dysart was trying to hide.’
‘You think he murdered Ramsey Everett?’
‘I’m sure of it. And I think Willy Morpurgo was as well. He either saw what happened or saw enough to know Everett’s death was no accident. He said nothing at first presumably out of loyalty to a fellow Tyrrellian. But he couldn’t remain silent. His conscience wouldn’t let him. He must have decided to speak out at the inquest. Perhaps he warned Dysart of what he would say. Perhaps Dysart guessed. Either way, the visit to Burford was arranged simply and solely to stop him, arranged, that is, between Dysart and Jack Cornelius. They were accomplices even then, you see. Cornelius suggested the trip when Dysart’s car was conveniently out of action and Dysart volunteered to stay behind. But did he really stay behind? I don’t think so. I think he followed the party to Burford and sabotaged Morpurgo’s car while they were in the pub. Then Cornelius dropped out of the return trip and the trap was sprung. They knew Morpurgo was a reckless driver. By then he was drunk as well. Somewhere on the way back to Oxford, they could rely on him coming to grief.’
‘But what about Cunningham and Ockleton?’
‘It’s the callousness of the whole thing that’s so breathtaking. They were simply regarded as expendable. So much for loyalty. Of course, it didn’t quite work, did it? Instead of speeding back along the A40, Morpurgo took a wrong turning, crashed on a minor road and survived. But not to tell his tale. And that was good enough for Dysart’s purposes.’
‘Why should Dysart have involved Cornelius? Why should Cornelius have agreed to help him?’
‘For a long time, I couldn’t understand that. Nothing I learned about Jack Cornelius made sense. Least of all the idea that he and Clare were lovers. It seemed incredible. She’d never even mentioned his name in my hearing. And nobody I spoke to thought they were more than vague acquaintances. Yet Cunningham had seen Cornelius’s photograph in her possession. “The sort of snap a lover might carry”, he called it. And Clare’s visit to the Reverend Waghorne seemed to provide the final confirmation. And yet …’ Another pause. ‘The answer came to me during the weekend I spent at Strete Barton. It was the way Virginia talked about Dysart, the way she used his surname all the time, the way she resented his owning the farm. She didn’t simply hate him: that would have been understandable. She despised him, Harry, felt for him nothing but an inexhaustible contempt. Why? That’s what I wondered. What had Dysart done to earn his wife’s contempt? And why did they have no children? You’d expect Dysart to want a son and heir: he’s that sort of man. Or seems to be. Well, the answer began as no more than a guess, but it’s a guess I know to be right. It explains why Cornelius should have risked his neck to help Dysart evade justice. It explains why Clare told the Reverend Waghorne she’d just realized the father of the child she was carrying was homosexual. Not because Cornelius was the father, but because, as she’d originally claimed, Dysart was.’
‘You mean …’
‘There were things I always disliked about Clare, things I preferred to forget in the grief of losing her. Her ruthlessness was one, her cool, dispassionate, far-seeing way of planning to reach some goal in life, then following her plan to its conclusion, whatever had to be done in the process, whoever had to be hurt. Only in this case it was Clare herself who got hurt. I suppose she calculated that if she could force Dysart to marry her, she would have access to the money and influence she needed to pursue a career in politics on her own account. But she must have misread Virginia’s character, must have assumed she’d be outraged by an accusation of paternity levelled against her husband. I suspect Virginia enlightened her about Dysart’s homosexuality. Revelled in doing so, in fact. Hence Clare’s visit to the Reverend Waghorne. She’d been to Hurstdown to confront Cornelius all right, but not because he was the father of her unborn child. She’d been there to confirm that Cornelius and Dysart were lovers.’
Now Heather had said it, Harry could only wonder he had not guessed the same himself long before. All those intangible hints of complicity; all those echoes of something more than friendship: they pointed unwaveringly in the direction Heather’s thoughts had taken. It was the truth. It was the answer. ‘You think they’ve been lovers since Oxford?’
‘Yes. It must have begun at Breakspear College. A close and secret love they shared with nobody. It endured through long separations and diverging careers. It left them cold to others, seemingly devoid of emotion. It ensured they would help each other in any emergency. And the exposure of their relationship was just such an emergency. Quite apart from political ruin for Dysart, it would have given Cunningham the answer he’d sought for twenty years: who’d betrayed whom that day at Burford. Cunningham was right to call the photograph of Cornelius the sort of snap a lover might carry, but wrong to think it belonged to Clare. I think she found it in something Dysart owned: a wallet, a jacket, a secret place. I think she stole it, intending to use it as proof of his relationship with Cornelius. Once her intentions were clear to them, however, her fate was sealed. Camouflaging her murder as a terrorist attack on Dysart was a master-stroke. And it was cleverly done. According to the police, it had all the hallmarks of the IRA. They even phoned later to claim responsibility. Or somebody did. But who better than a government minister to know the code words an IRA spokesman would use? It left them completely in the clear.’
‘Except for you.’
‘Not really. As long as any suspicions of mine could be dismissed as symptoms of mental illness, I posed no threat. Besides, I really believed I was imagining it all. Dr Kingdom persuaded me of that. So did Dysart. He was so kind, so calm, so unlike what a murderer should be. He admitted Clare had been blackmailing him, but he deceived me about the reason and convinced me her death had been a pure coincidence. I tried hard to go on believing that. I accepted his invitation to stay in the villa. I went to Rhodes. I met you. And every day I told myself: forget it all; enjoy yourself; relax; recover; prove your s
anity. You helped, Harry. You knew nothing about any of it. You were my touchstone of normality: genial, reassuring and fallible.’
Little better than an aged and disreputable labrador: that, Harry thought but did not say, was the role he had briefly filled in Heather’s life. It was not enough. It was not what he had aspired to. But it was all he had been allotted. And now he was glad of the darkness inside the car to cloak his disappointment.
‘When Dr Kingdom came to see me, he must have been reassured to find I no longer believed there was anything suspicious about Clare’s death. What he can’t have realized, though, was that it was the environment, not logic or reason, that had changed the way I thought. On Rhodes, everything seemed long ago and far away, disproportionate, irrational, simply not worth worrying about.’
‘But that changed when you saw Cornelius?’
‘Yes. Utterly and completely. He was sitting on a bench outside the post office, reading a newspaper. My heart nearly stopped when I recognized him. Until then I’d been able to believe that my theories, however plausible, were baseless: they just couldn’t be true. But Dysart had phoned the day before to say he was coming to Rhodes on official business and would be in Lindos the following Monday. With that in mind, the sight of Jack Cornelius on the island could mean only one thing: they were planning to kill me. My only advantage – my only hope – was that they didn’t know I was on to them. Assuming they meant to use the same ploy as before – a faked terrorist attempt on Dysart’s life claiming an innocent victim – I had until Monday to make my escape. But simply running away was no good. It would only have postponed the day of reckoning. An unexplained disappearance seemed the only answer. I’d confided in Sheila during the weekend I spent with her on my way out to Rhodes and she’d offered to shelter me in an emergency. She’d been the one person to take my suspicions seriously, you see. And Dysart didn’t even know of her existence, so I reckoned there was a good chance he’d never trace me. When I contacted her, she agreed to help straightaway. She’s been a good friend to me, Harry: a very good friend.’
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