by Joseph Hone
‘Don’t you fellows carry any weapons?’ he asked brightly. ‘Trained, I suppose? Small arms and all that? I should have seen that chap off pretty quick in my day: always carried a little ’un inside my jacket, as well as the service .45.’
‘I’m afraid I’ve no skills there. I only worked for Intelligence Research, going through a lot of old Arab newspapers.’
‘Well, you’re in the front line now. It’s interesting: someone doesn’t want poor Lindsay found, it seems.’ The Brigadier sneezed then, a great bluster of a sneeze. ‘High pollen count,’ he said after he’d wiped himself up with a hanky, glancing round the hall, seeking some floral reason for his nasal discomfort. There was a big vase of fresh lavender on a table near us. ‘Might be that,’ I said. ‘Shall we go outside?’ We moved out onto the porch.
‘Yes,’ I said, in the relative quiet, Rachel occupied inside with some other neighbours, a school friend from Perth with her husband, who had come to visit as well that evening. ‘I can’t think who would want to prevent him being found. I offered to help –’
‘It’s an outrage,’ the Brigadier interrupted angrily. ‘Intelligence chappies in London told Madeleine he’d probably just lost his memory and wandered off somewhere – some cock-and-bull story. Lindsay would never have done that. He was abducted, kidnapped – and it must have been the Russians.’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, who else? Of course Lindsay was involved with them. Never really spoke about it. But one knew. A messy business. He should have stayed in the army: he was a fine officer, first-rate – never knew why he went back to Whitehall after the war, all that cloak-and-dagger nonsense. And now look what’s happened. Never could follow it – chap like Lindsay tied up in all that back-door politics. Not like him at all.’
‘Yes, exactly … remembering him.’
‘Doesn’t add up. He was the most straightforward man I think I ever knew. Only once heard him tell a lie. But we all had to lie then.’
‘Oh, when was that?’ I asked innocently.
‘After Monte Cassino when we’d got up into the Po valley, Tolmezzo, and then into southern Austria. Just at the end of the war.’
‘What happened?’
‘Had a lot of fascist Croats on our hands. Pavelic’s rag-tag army, must have been three or four hundred thousand of them who’d come over the Yugoslav border, chased by the Partisans. Landed up in a little town called Bleiburg, just at the edge of our command, on the Yugoslav frontier. Unpleasant business.’ The Brigadier drank again and smacked his lips, his faint blue eyes looking out over the loch, but narrowing now over some indelible memory from his past.
‘Yes?’
‘Well …’ the Brigadier turned and humphed and I could tell now that he was the kind of old soldier who bloomed in face of an attentive audience. ‘Well, the war had just ended, two or three days before, but this was the worst thing in my war. You see, these Croat fellows, and their families too, women and children – close to half a million of them in all – well, knowing they’d get the chop in the biggest way if Tito’s chaps ever got their hands on them, they made hell for leather across the border to surrender to us, but looking simply for our protection in fact. Sort of mass emigration of the whole province. Said they could never live under the commies. True enough, as it turned out: they didn’t.’
He paused, brushed his lips with a hanky, remembering carefully now, going back through the outlines of the story into the precise facts of the time, living them again. ‘Well, there we were, a little to the north, in the Drau valley, with thirty thousand fully armed Cossacks on our hands which we didn’t know what to do with either – except we knew they’d eventually have to be sent back to Russia under the Yalta agreements – which didn’t apply to the Yugoslavs. So then this other crowd cropped up, fifteen miles south in Bleiburg, and we couldn’t spare more than a platoon or so to deal with them. Impossible situation. Anyway, I went down there – taking Lindsay with me of course, since he was fluent in the Croat lingo.
‘Well, they were camped out all over the village and all the hills for miles around, like some exodus out of the Bible. And just across the border in Yugoslavia was a whole assault division of the Partisans getting ready to come over and slaughter them. Well, Lindsay managed to bluff our way out of that little holocaust. We met the two rival commanders separately, insisted on fair play and all that, got the thing off the boil. And then we received precise instructions from HQ to repatriate all the Croats. Every damn one of them. Tito was our ally by now after all – and these others had fought with the Germans. So we had to do that. Packed them all into cattle waggons for several weeks and sent them back over the frontier. No one knows exactly what happened to them – so they say now.’ The Brigadier laughed drily. ‘But I needn’t tell you. They were put to the sword in the next few weeks and months, we heard the news afterwards, we were still in the area – upwards of half a million of them: throats cut, machine gunned into mass graves, dumped in rivers, forced marches – the lot. Unbelievable. No one talks about it these days, least of all the Yugoslavs. But it was the biggest slaughter of the war. After the Jews and Poles.’
The Brigadier finished his whisky abruptly, as if to wash away the unpleasant memory.
‘But Lindsay,’ I said. ‘You said something about his lying?’
‘We all lied. That’s when I had to use the little ’un, inside my jacket.’
‘What –’
‘Lindsay and I were down by the waggons one morning, seeing them in. We tried to make it all as pleasant as possible – though you can imagine what I felt like when I got home afterwards and saw those Nazi transports en route to the camps on the newsreels. Of course it wasn’t pleasant at all. It couldn’t be: we had to lie to them, telling them they were all going off to Italy, else we’d never have got any of them near the damn waggons. Anyway, that morning one of these Croats – with his wife and child – broke ranks and came up to Lindsay, recognised him apparently – a friend of Lindsay’s when he lived in Zagreb before the war. And this chap knew they were all being sent back into Yugoslavia and that Lindsay had been lying to everyone. The two of them started to argue on the siding. And then this fellow took out a revolver he must have hidden somehow, and I thought: the bugger’s going to shoot Lindsay. Well, he wasn’t, Lindsay told me afterwards. He was going to kill himself and his family: sooner dead than red you know. Anyway, I got in a shot at him first – and missed, can you imagine? But my sergeant was onto him in a flash. Lindsay just stood there, frozen, couldn’t do a thing. We put them on a later transport – I dealt with it. Lindsay couldn’t face him again, naturally enough I suppose. It was all a disgraceful business. But we had absolutely no alternative. Orders from the top – all in aid of jollying along Stalin and the rest of his bloody crew, which of course included Tito then.’
‘What happened to the man?’ I asked.
‘Who?’
‘The Croat who knew Lindsay.’
‘Expect he ended up in a lime quarry. The big cement works outside Maribor took a lot of them, we heard.’
‘You don’t remember his name, I suppose?’
‘No idea. Lindsay said he was a teacher of some sort, at some university. Why?’
‘I’m still hoping to find out what happened to Lindsay. Perhaps that man survived. He’d certainly bear Lindsay a grudge.’
‘Yes. I see. But it’s unlikely. They all got the chop.’
‘Not everyone, surely? There were survivors even in the worst of the Nazi death camps.’
‘Perhaps, but it’s a hell of a long shot. Wish you luck. It’s my view the Russians took Lindsay – and Whitehall doesn’t want to make a fuss about it for some political reason. Just like they did with Stalin over those poor bloody Croats.’
Rachel came out soon after and we dropped the subject. I asked her when they were going to cut the hay in the long meadow beneath us.
‘Cut it with me tomorrow, if you like. There’s a small tractor you could drive and we could bal
e it. It might be fun.’
‘Need a gallon or two of ale for that job if this weather keeps up,’ the Brigadier said, looking up at the cloudless evening sky.
‘Why not?’ I said, going along with Rachel’s brightness.
The heat had died at last; the shimmer had gone from above the loch and the water had become a darker, plummier blue, while the tall copper beeches began to reach across the meadow, filling it with long shadows. The guests were ready to leave, bumping about with goodbyes on the porch – and Ratty stood amongst them curling his lip and whining slightly, jumping up and down in front of Madeleine, pleading for an evening walk.
I went off with her and Ratty when they’d all left and Rachel had gone inside to see to the supper.
‘I won’t take you along the Oak Walk,’ she said, ‘where the bees are.’
‘No, let’s go that way. I’d like to see where … The bees will have gone to sleep.’ And so we set off across the croquet court and into the first of the woods, where the evening had arrived earlier than elsewhere, with swarms of midges and pools of warm shadow.
‘There. He was dealing with that second hive – you can see it clearly from the morning-room, where I was. That’s where I last saw him.’
The hive was between two oak trees and there was a small stone wall behind them which gave on to the vegetable garden. The oak walk ran away westwards for about a quarter of a mile before the pine forest started and we took this course now. But Ratty was disinclined to follow us, stopping before the first of the beehives and looking back anxiously towards the house.
‘He doesn’t like the bees,’ Madeleine said. ‘He always hangs back here. Come on Ratty,’ she called.
‘Was he with Lindsay that afternoon?’
‘He wasn’t with me. But, as I say, he’s never liked the bees. He was probably nearby, though. Ratty was crazy about Lindsay, of course. He was his dog.’
‘That’s interesting – he’d have followed him, you mean?’
‘He usually did – everywhere. Inside and out.’
The dog had taken evasive action now, going behind the row of beehives and running along by the garden wall when suddenly he stopped, putting his front paws up on it, as if trying to climb it. Again, my spine prickled all the way down my back.
Madeleine turned to me, quickly, her face suddenly sharp with pain. ‘How could a dog tell, Peter – three months afterwards – where anyone went?’
‘Dogs have memories. If he could speak, he could tell us.’
Instead Ratty simply howled at the gathering night, his shrill cries piercing through the empty garden, floating away into the emptier forest beyond.
2
The fine weather never really broke that summer. But around the heights of Glenalyth, at least, the heat was spiced with pine and cooled with water, when Rachel and I – and sometimes Madeleine – walked up the long dry corridors through the pine forest, or bathed from the small island in the loch, while George and Max, before their wives broke up the party that weekend, remained tied to their repetitive themes and variations in the study and Madeleine gave me directions to all Lindsay’s old papers, stored in the morning-room or in trunks and boxes up in the long attics that ran almost the length of the house, and in the tiny, white-washed bedrooms beneath them under the eaves: rooms like dog-kennels, filled with lime dust and dead butterflies, rooms that had been servants’ quarters in more severe times.
But each day’s vivid brightness had its shadow counterpart every evening when I went back into Lindsay’s past, shuffling through his papers, making notes of names from old letters or faded carbon memoranda; sifting through inexplicable loose sheets of paper that had long since come adrift from their original context – letters that began half-way through some vital or casual event: ‘… and wasn’t it unbelievable that he should have behaved in that way …’ with nothing left of who he was or what he had done; thumbing through a forgotten address book which I found curled up in the attic heat – a spider running from a nest under the letter J and a whole gallery of distant people elsewhere between the pages – dead, or perhaps still living down the road or in another country, early friends or just acquaintances of Lindsay’s – one couldn’t tell which – marked out clearly here in his neat hand: ‘John Botting, 23 Abercromby Place, Edinburgh.’ Someone called simply ‘Maria’ – with the address: ‘32 Reisnerstrasse, Viena 3’, ‘Miles McGough, 12 Smith Street, London, SW3’, ‘Sally Haughton – SLOane 2798’ – no address, but the old Chelsea telephone exchange proposing itself brightly once more, after a lapse of more than forty years – a temptation come to life again now in the dry attic: ‘Shall I phone her? Shall I not’ … I could almost hear the young Lindsay speaking. Though perhaps Sally Haughton had been a deaf old cousin or his nanny’s London sister to whom he had a present of oatcakes to deliver, back from a summer in Glenalyth before going to the Foreign Office, walking up from Sloane Square and down the Mall one glittering October day.
The meagre little address book with its stained, bent covers was in fact the key to an empire, the world of Lindsay’s youth.
These long evening investigations were like playing Scrabble in an unknown language or trying to make up a huge jigsaw puzzle that might never, in fact, have had any picture imprinted on it – where some of the pieces in front of me, a railway ticket or a negative in a yellowing Kodak folder, could be vital clues to the puzzle: and other bits and pieces, an ornately die-stamped bill from a pensione in Florence in 1934 or a bank statement from the same year, might be irrelevant. For the moment I had no way of distinguishing between them, of giving this detritus any exact hierarchy of importance in Lindsay’s life. At times I gave up any attempt to establish a precise chronology or location to the events in some folder or suitcase and simply trusted to luck, hovering like a clairvoyant in the small dry rooms, a necromancer among the dusty cobwebs, my hand spread out over the papers, selecting them quite arbitrarily – by touch almost, or picking them out in random sequence, as in some elaborate card trick, hoping that so chancy a method would correspond to, and release, the kind of lucky magic I knew I needed if I was to find anything which bore on Lindsay’s disappearance in all this mass of ancient material.
Thus a day would start in the sun, with a Glenalyth honey breakfast on the porch, hay baling until midday, and afternoons in the limpid water. But each evening would bring me back into some pre-war continental darkness, for here in the violent thirties, I soon realised, lay the events which had formed Lindsay’s life and given it a far more complex and contradictory character than I had ever imagined: an existence light-years away from that of the traditional Scots laird walking his grouse moors and patronising the annual Highland games, which was how I had seen much of Lindsay’s essential life in the old days.
But the evidence I got together over the first two or three evenings pointed to some very different, if entirely conflicting political absorptions; in the first instance, an apparently deep and sympathetic involvement with all the socialist tragedies in Europe between the wars – and on the other and far larger hand, an almost outright condemnation of those same socialists and all their doings throughout the same period.
Here was something I couldn’t follow at all – this far earlier confirmation of something which Marcus and Fielding had told me a week before in London: that Lindsay had been both left-and right-wing at the same time, information which I had taken then as no more than part of some bureaucratic trickery towards me in London. But here was the evidence, from Lindsay’s pen itself, of the apparent truth of their statements to me.
At least, at that moment, I saw no other way of interpreting some of his papers, both quite opposite in their political enthusiasms – and most notably in two sets of letters which I discovered in different attic rooms – one collection written to Lindsay’s mother at Glenalyth, and the other (only one letter, in fact) addressed to Eleanor before Lindsay married her obviously, while he was a junior secretary in the Diplomatic Service and she was still at Ox
ford in her last year reading Modern Languages, apparently. This latter note, though it was without date or heading, I could place and date fairly readily: it must have been February in Vienna, 1934, for it dealt with the outbreak of brief civil war there when Chancellor Dollfuss, together with the fascist bully-boys in the Heimwehr militia, had started shelling the workers’ apartments in the suburbs of the city, killing off hundreds of people, trapped in their fine new municipal estates: February, 1934 – a classic date in the destruction of European democracy and the rise of the dictators.
‘…we knew something was up, because I could see from the Legation window that two trams had come to a stop, blocking the junction out to the Schwarzenberger-platz – and that, of course, was the agreed sign for a general strike throughout the city – and a sign for the Schutzbunders, too, to take up their hidden arms. So I hung about in the Legation most of the morning, doing nothing, trying to ’phone people – and I was mad with frustration by lunchtime – and though H.E. had told us to keep indoors I crept out by the chauffeur’s exit and just as I got outside I heard what sounded like thunder from the east, sort of drum rolls which shook slightly over the inner city. And then I knew – but I couldn’t believe it! They were shelling the workers – Howitzers and trench mortars as we learnt afterwards: no small arms fire at all – just a massacre. There were Heimwehr and police all over the inner city but just a few shots here and there, nothing serious. Obviously they were intent on flattening the workers’ blocks and leaving it at that – and I was determined to get out to the Floridsdorf or Ottakring where we heard the worst of the fighting was, and see for myself what was going on, and I did that evening. Of course the British press will say how the workers started it all – stabbing poor little Dollfuss in the back just as he was establishing some sort of Austrian independence from the Nazis. But that is just untrue. Must run now. I’ll finish this later …’