‘As though I’m floating.’
She took his arm and put it under her neck so that she could put her head on his chest. ‘Aren’t we lucky?’ she said.
‘Touch wood.’
His free hand stretched out and touched the wooden bedside table. Lucky. It was too small a word, too weak a word to describe his situation. Long ago with Margaret he had learned that happiness consisted of a series of negatives: it was not being ill, not having a row, not having a disaster at the factory. He imagined that when he had married Margaret he had been happy, or when Dick was born, and there must have been times when Dick was growing up that they’d been happy together. Or when his grandson was born. Or when he’d had success in business. But he could not remember those times now happiness was an almost tangible thing. It was being with Susan, it was enjoying what she called their luck. Here he was at fifty-two, when most men are levelling out, perhaps over the top, some with grandchildren, here he was with a young and beautiful wife who seemed to love him as much as he loved her, with a business that was booming, with a house in Hampstead, with all the good things of life at his fingertips. That was why he sometimes felt frightened. It was too good. A slight irritation came over him. It wasn’t just luck. That assumed a passive role and long ago, long before he had met Susan and long before he had met Margaret he had learned how dangerous that could be. You had to grab life with both hands and force it to go your way otherwise it sucked you along like a blown leaf and then all you had to depend on was luck. No, he’d worked hard in more ways than one for what he had got, it wasn’t simply luck.
Sue groaned lightly and he realized she must have drifted into sleep. The baby was due in just over a month and she often had spells of drowsiness followed by bursts of activity. Gently he raised her head and slipped out from under it. He covered her with the eiderdown and quietly went into his dressing-room. He put on a pair of corduroys, a thick plaid shirt and a pair of soft moccasins, went downstairs, made himself a fresh drink, and took it to his study on the first floor.
The house which was detached and stood in its own garden faced onto the small road, but the rear windows looked out over London from almost the top of Hampstead Hill. Because of the view Spencer had placed his desk directly in front of the window. He loved this room and spent a great deal of time in it when he was at home. Many an evening when he had work to do, he would sit at the desk and Sue would curl up on the big leather Chesterfield with a book.
He had lavished a great deal of money on the room. The carpet was heavy brown Wilton, the desk of English yew with a green leather top and a tooling of gold fleur-de-lys. One wall was covered in books from floor to ceiling, a second had been designed for his stereo equipment: his big Tandberg reel-to-reel, his Grundig TV with video recorder, his Sony 32-band global radio. To the left of his stereo equipment were his two Nikon cameras with their series of wide-angle and telephoto lenses. Once, in the last years with Margaret, these technological toys had been his life-line, now he hardly touched them.
In those days he had practically lived in his study, while Margaret had had the room directly above him as her sitting-room. Every night, as he worked on his papers, he would hear her crossing the floor to her bathroom to fetch water for her whisky. He could tell the number of drinks she’d had by the amount of walking she did. Some nights he would hear her cross the floor eight or ten times, on others five or six and then there would be silence and he knew she would be asleep in her chair or in a heap on her bed. Sometimes she fell — a crash over his head as he worked — and he would go upstairs and find her in a state of drunken collapse and he would have to put her to bed. He hated that part, he hated undressing her.
They had lived a strange life, just the two of them in the big house, he with his work, she with her half-read books and magazines, her TV set, her bottles. In the old days the house had been filled with people. They had employed a cook, a Portuguese maid and a chauffeur. But when Margaret had started drinking things had changed. First the maid had gone because she refused to clean up the physical mess left by his wife, and then the cook had given notice because everything she made was returned uneaten. The chauffeur, Armstrong, still drove him back and forth to the office but he was a company employee and had nothing to do with the household.
It was not always the same. Sometimes Margaret would seem to recover for several days at a time, not totally, she was always slightly drunk, but enough to get him his dinner when he came home in the evening; enough to pretend that they were maintaining some vestige of ordinary life. They might even go out together to a theatre or a movie. Soon after Margaret started drinking in earnest they no longer went to friends, there were too many disasters in other people’s houses. After a while they had dropped out of touch with the few friends they had made.
Spencer remembered once during a ‘normal’ period he had bought a Morgan sports car and had taken her for a drive in it, up through Golders Green and Hendon and on to the Ml as far as Baldock and back. She had endured the hard springing and noise and the cutting draught that came in under the canvas hood, and when she was safely out on the pavement once more she had looked down on the little car and smiled that bitter twisdng smile with which he had grown so familiar, and had said, ‘Don’t you think it’s a little young for you, John.’ Then she had gone up the stairs to the house, a thin haggard woman, and had never mentioned the car again.
He had understood her; had understood her anguish, her need for drink, the books, the constant TV, but what he could not explain to her was that because of what had happened to their son and his family — terrible though it had been — his life was not over. How could he make her understand that he really did feel young enough to drive a sports car, young enough to accept the challenges that came to him every day, young enough to dominate a board meeting, young enough to want to impose his will on men still younger? How could he explain that to a woman who was simply a dry husk?
When they were first married it had been she who had driven him forward. That had been a few years after the war when he was still in a kind of limbo after what had happened to him in Berlin. He had never spoken of it, never, but she had sensed some deep emotional shock and had pulled him through that period. And then they had been married and his father had died and he had taken over the small engineering works in Battersea which he had expanded into the John Spencer Group of Companies, with three factories on the outskirts of London.
Now Margaret was dead and he was alive and married to Sue with a new family on the way and happier than he had ever been in his life. He had been given a second chance and he was making the most of it Susan had put his post on his desk and he began to go through it. There were a dozen or so brown envelopes that meant bills. As he looked through them he heard her begin to move in the room above him and after a few minutes she came down to the door to his study and said, ‘I’m going to make a salad and then I’ll put the steaks on.’
‘Fine.’
‘Oh, I nearly forgot. Someone phoned two or three times while you were away. He had a foreign accent; sounded German.’
‘What did he want?’
‘To check when you were coming back.’
‘German? It couldn’t have been Dutch could it?’
‘Could have been, I suppose. Anyway he phoned again today and I said you’d be home this evening.’
She went to the kitchen on the ground floor and he could hear her begin to prepare the meal. He turned back to the mail. Rate bill, TV repair bill, water, electricity, all the old familiar horrors. At the bottom of the pile was a white envelope. On the front was written ‘Mr John Spencer’, with a line under the name. That was all. No address. No postmark. No stamp. Which meant that it had been delivered by hand. Frowning he slit it open then shook it and something fell out on to the green leather top of his desk. It was a piece of black cloth about two inches square on which was embroidered in silver thread the heraldic device of three leopards superimposed on a bolt of lightning. There was no le
ttering. No other clue to what it was. It lay there innocent yet malevolent, harmless yet dangerous, inert yet powerful. He stared at it grimly. There wasn’t one person in five million who would know what that small piece of cloth represented. But Spencer did.
*
In Hyde Park too the drizzle had stopped and broken cloud had reached London. The moon was two-thirds full and its intermittent appearance gave the grass a silvery glow. Jurgen Muller and Louis Tellier finished zipping themselves into their track-suits and climbed out of the Volkswagen.
‘It is more cold,’ Tellier said, shivering.
‘Never mind, it is dry.’
‘Which way?’
‘He starts from down there at the other side.’ Muller pointed to the end of the Serpentine closest to Park Lane. ‘Then he comes up here, past the boats, over the bridge, and back past where there is swimming. Twice. Then back to the hotel.’
‘Which way do we go?’
‘The other side.’
They jogged through the car park, up and over the bridge, passing the restaurant on their left, then off the carriageway again and down towards the swimming area. As they approached the narrow end of the lake they slowed their pace until they came to a stop and began to do exercises. Away to their right a man was walking his dog, but after a few minutes he disappeared in the direction of Knightsbridge and they had the place to themselves.
‘There he is,’ Muller said, and Tellier saw a single figure come running into the park. ‘Let him get to us.’
Muller and Tellier began to jog again and soon they were leading the single runner by thirty or forty yards. He, too, was dressed in a dark track-suit and running shoes. He was a man of middle height with long curly hair that hung almost to his shoulders. From the rear he might have been mistaken for a woman but his face was thin and angular on top of a wiry body and as he ran one might have observed a steely springlike quality in his muscular rhythm, a sense of purpose. His name was Werner Riemeck. He had been bom in the Berlin suburb of Spandau forty-one years before, and he had always tried to keep himself fit. Above all things he feared a stroke. Jogging was supposed to be good for the heart so whenever he could, he jogged.
He had only been in London for five days but it had not taken him long to discover that Hyde Park and the Serpentine were almost deserted by nine o’clock. The English, it seemed, were not so health-conscious as the Germans.
On this particular evening he noticed the two other joggers immediately he entered the park. He had grown used to having the place to himself and he resented the intrusion. He decided to pass them, then he would not have to look at them. He turned the corner at the east end of the Serpentine and began to run in the direction of the boathouse and the car park. The two joggers were thirty years ahead and he increased his pace and began to draw up on them. Twenty yards... fifteen... ten... The taller of the two men stopped and bent to tie the lace of his running shoe. The other man slowed down almost to walking pace. Riemeck put on a spurt; he could pass them now without embarrassment, without seeming to make a race of it.
‘Good evening,’ he said in English as he ran between them.
The man in front of him, wearing the mountaineer’s knitted hat turned away without answering. This surprised him, for the English were usually a well-mannered race. Perhaps he hadn’t heard. There was a slight noise behind him; the scraping of a shoe on gravel. The man in the mountaineer’s cap seemed to get in his way. Then a voice behind him said, ‘Guten Abend, Werner.’
Riemeck reacted without conscious thought. He flung his body to the left and felt hands grab his back, then slip off.
‘Schnell!’ the voice said.
The man in front had something in his hand, a length of wood or pipe.
Riemeck saw the water. He splashed into it. He tried to dive. Arms grabbed him around the waist. He felt a blow high up on his shoulder and burning pain down the length of his arm. He fought back, wrenching his body from side to side. He leant back, then jerked forward, bringing his captor off his feet. He twisted so that the man fell beneath him. The water was about two feet deep. He pressed down, holding the man under, trying to drown him. Then came the second blow. This one was more accurate.
*
Spencer and his wife ate in the kitchen. ‘All right?’ she said, meaning the steak.
‘Perfect.’ He had tried to retain some of the mood of the early part of the evening, chatting about America, as if nothing had happened and all the time cold fingers were touching his stomach and bowels and finally, like a clock, he ran down and was silent.
‘You’re tired,’ she said.
‘I shouldn’t be, I’ve gained five or six hours flying this way. It’s really only the middle of the afternoon by my time.’
He helped her clear up and stack the dishes in the dishwasher. He’d offered her a maid when they were married but she’d said a ‘daily’ would be enough and so Mrs Collins came in five days a week from nine till two. It had worked well because Sue was a good cook and liked to have the kitchen to herself, and it suited Spencer who had never liked servants under foot.
‘I think I’ll go up,’ Sue said. ‘The strain of having my husband back is beginning to tell.’ She put up her hand and touched his face. ‘Are you coming?’
‘In a little while.’
‘Don’t be too long, I’ll get lonely.’ She went up to the bedroom and he heard her switch on the TV. He pictured her in bed propped up on the pillows and again fear touched him. He had wanted to ask her about the envelope but she might have questioned him. Would he have told her? The secret had been buried for so long he found it unthinkable he should share it. He had never been able to tell Margaret and he would never be able to tell Sue. Every fraction of her love and respect was of infinite value to him and he would do nothing to jeopardize it.
He went back to his study and sat down at his desk and stared out at London lying below. But between the room and the twinkling lights was the ghostly image of himself reflected in the window. He saw a man with a square face that was softening somewhat at the edges but still looked ten years younger than his real age. This was partly due to his hair which was as thick as it had ever been and still mostly dark except for the line of white above his left ear where once the skin had been opened to the bone. When the hair grew again it had come up white and in an odd way it gave him a more interesting, more arresting appearance. Now the face looked older, grim. The cheeks were drawn, the jaw muscles knotted.
He opened the drawer and took out the piece of cloth with the three heraldic leopards. The moment he had opened the envelope earlier in the evening he had seen in his mind a series of vivid pictures of Bruno: Bruno at the house in Berlin; Bruno primping, showing off the uniform: ‘Look, Johnnie,’ and he had turned slowly like a mannequin, ‘Don’t you like it?’
That was when Spencer had first seen the leopards. They had been sewn onto the collar of the field-grey jacket.
Astley had died in the bombing of Berlin. Richards had died fighting the Russians. There had been others, of course, but he had never met them. Just the three: Astley, Richards and Bruno. And if Astley was dead and Richards was dead, then Bruno had sent it. And that meant he was alive: that was ultimately what the piece of cloth meant. All these years he had hoped Bruno was dead. That had been part of the wall of confidence he had built around himself when he’d come out of that limbo after the war.
He tried to remember Bruno as he had first seen him, tall, blond, Aryan, good-looking, but wherever he placed him — walking down the Kurfurstendam, at the house in Charlottenburg, or the battered villa in Graf Speestrasse — the picture would deliquesce, only to reform as it did in all his nightmares. The dreams were reality, reality dreams. It was always the cellar with the body, always the animal, and always Bruno. What did he want now, Spencer wondered? How would it affect his life? That it would have an effect he had no doubt; Bruno never did things without purpose. Money? Was that it? And if he didn’t pay? There was no statute of limitations as
far as he knew. Prison? The ruination of his career? And what would happen to Sue? No, he’d pay all right. And Bruno knew that How much, he wondered, did Bruno think his secret worth?
Just then the doorbell rang, cutting shrilly across his thoughts. He put the piece of material back into the envelope and dropped it into the top drawer of his desk. The bell went again. He could hear the TV on in the bedroom upstairs which meant that Sue would not have heard it. He looked at his watch. It was after nine. Who could it be at this time of night? Did it have something to do with Bruno? Could he ignore it? Pretend no one was home? The bell rang again, a shrill screaming in his ears. He ran quietly down the stairs into the sitting-room from the window of which he could see the front porch. A young woman was standing there.
He went into the hall, switched on the outside light and opened the door. She was in her late twenties and at her feet was a leather travelling bag. She was holding a newspaper in her hand.
‘Good evening,’ he said. ‘Can I help you?’
‘I have come for the room.’ She spoke a heavily accented English.
‘What room?’
‘The room which you advertise.’
‘There must be some mistake. I haven’t advertised a room.’
‘Here. It says in the local paper. Look.’ She held the Hampstead and Highgate Express towards him.
‘I’m sorry, but I didn’t place any advertisement.’
‘Is this...’ And she mentioned the number of the house.
‘...Cannon Place, London north west three?’
‘Yes, of course it is...’
‘Lwook what it says!’
‘I don’t care what it says. I’m telling you...’
‘Here.’
Unwittingly, he bent to the paper. It was folded in four and as he did so she raised one of the folds and he found himself looking into the barrel of a pistol. ‘Continue, please, to look at the newspaper,’ she said. ‘Continue to look and you will not be hurt. Now ask me to come into the house.’
Berlin Blind Page 2