She grabbed at the reins of the scarf behind her neck and found that a pair of strong, male, gossamered hands held the loop of silk. She tried to move but the taut body behind her jammed her against the table. She kicked back at the shins, saw a pair of mahogany Doc Martens. He pushed her forward again with his hips, bending her down over the table so that she felt her last chance was to get her legs up on to the table, try to scrabble across it. The powerful hands reined her back, bore down on her. She rolled back towards him, clawing at his shoulders, trying to weaken him in any way she could but the fight was going out of her. Her face was swelling, her vision darkening at the rims. Blood blackened in her head and through the narrowing tunnel she saw his face. She mouthed his name with her thick, purple lips. Her last word, a soundless question:
‘Morgan?’
Voss woke up. The only light in the room from the red digits of the clock which read 00.28. The pain had woken him. He clicked on the morphine dispenser but this time he didn’t feel the trickle of Lethe, as they’d begun to call it. He looked at the pillow next to him. Empty. He moved his arm, which swung freely, and saw in the weak red light that the morphine-drip tube had been cut. The pain in his side was crushing, as if there was a steel hand in there relentlessly closing on an organ. He threw back the bedcovers, turned on the reading lamp, saw that the overhead drip-feed bag was empty when he knew it should have been at the halfway mark.
He launched himself out of bed, sent the drip clattering to the floor. He called out, ‘Andrea!’
It was a weak cry. The steel hand was crushing the breath out of him as well. He reached the door frame, the cut tube, still with the intravenous needle taped to his arm, whipping around his face. He staggered down the stairs and turned into the kitchen and saw the bodies on the table. The dog at her feet.
What is she doing?
A spear of pain shot through his chest, so sharp and fast that neon flashed in his brain. He staggered to the edge of the table, gripped it with his fleshless hands and looked down into the face that was hers but not.
He coughed against a pain that was far greater than anything the steel hand could produce. He coughed against a whole agony in his chest, the departure of possibility, the flight of future. Drops darkened on the wool of her fuchsia cardigan as he put his face down to hers, touched her cheek with his good cheek, felt the residual warmth. He lay next to her on the table, clasped her hand in his and for one bright moment felt happy, saw her falling through the bubbles of water as he rushed down to meet her, to bring her up, to bring her back to the light. And then the pain in his chest tightened but this time didn’t let go and, although he didn’t want to resist it, his body arched against it, the last pain. And through it he saw her across the river from him, on the opposite bank, waving.
Morgan Trent, who’d been sitting at the dark edge of the room waiting for his bit of sadistic amusement, came forward. He inspected the bodies, drumming his chin with his fingers. He saw the hands clasped. How sweet, he thought, how very sweet. He looked over the faces, found himself mildly curious at the quizzical smile on the good side of Voss’s face. As if he’d seen something. Received a welcome.
He checked for a neck pulse. None. He went up to the attic and brought down the trunk, which he passed over the wall into the garden of his rented cottage. He returned for the two suitcases of documents. He went back a third time, planted his foot firmly in the flower bed outside the dining-room window and broke a pane of glass. He climbed in through the window and walked out of the front door, closing it behind him.
He put the suitcases and the trunk in the back of his car. He removed the Doc Martens and put on a pair of crêpe-soled shoes. He trotted down to the Brocks’ house and put the Doc Martens where he’d found them, in the garage. He drove to Swindon and made a call from a public phone box. They exchanged passwords and he said: ‘It’s done, I’m dumping the paper now.’
The nurse found the bodies in the morning. She had her own key. She called the police and an hour later three officers were standing around the bodies on the refectory table.
‘You know what this looks like to me?’ said the DC.
‘Apart from murder, you mean?’ said the DI.
‘The way the bodies are positioned, with the dog at their feet, and the fact that he’s holding her hand…’
‘Odd that.’
‘…it looks like a tomb,’ he said. ‘One of those old tombs, carved in stone. You know, the knight in armour and his lady wife.’
‘You’re right,’ said the DI, ‘and they’ve always got those little dogs at their feet.’
‘There’s a poem written about that,’ said the third officer, who was young, new in the job.
‘A poem,’ said the DI. ‘I didn’t know they read poetry at Police College these days.’
‘They don’t, sir. I got a BA in General Arts from Keele University. We read a few poems.’
‘All right,’ said the DC, thinking – acceptable.
‘I only remember the last line.’
‘That’s all right, we don’t need the whole damn thing.’
‘“What will survive of us is love…”, sir. That was the line.’
‘Well, that’s a load of crap, isn’t it?’
Oxford Times 3rd December 1991
At 11.30 a.m. in the Oxford Crown Court Gary Brock was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Karl Voss and Andrea Aspinall.
Oxford Times 3rd February 1992
Morgan Trent and Kathleen Thomas would like to announce their forthcoming marriage to take place at Langfield Church, Oxfordshire on 28th June 1992.
The Times 30th June 1993
On 28th June 1993 Sir Meredith Cardew died peacefully at home. He was 84 years old. There will be a memorial service at St Mary’s in the Strand on 15th September 1993.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Col. Peter Taylor (retd), Mrs Pam Taylor and Elwin Taylor for helping me with books, maps and information on Berlin in the 1960s and 1970s.
About the Author
ROBERT WILSON
Robert Wilson was born in 1957. A graduate of Oxford University, he has worked in shipping, advertising and trading in Africa. He has travelled in Asia and Africa and has lived in Greece and West Africa. He is married and writes from an isolated farmhouse in Portugal.
He was awarded the CWA Gold Dagger Award for Fiction for his fifth novel, A Small Death in Lisbon.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Praise for The Company of Strangers
‘Wilson’s narrative is calm, chilly and engrossing. He writes with energy, appetite and a kind of unflinching compassion that allows him to scan horrors without excusing them. It is a rare talent and it gives his book purpose, muscle and stature’
PHILIP OAKES, Literary Review
‘Displaying once again Wilson’s gifts for atmospheric depiction of place, this ambitious experiment is streets ahead of most other thrillers’
JOHN DUGDALE, Sunday Times
‘A big, meaty novel of love and deceit, a thriller which spans Europe from the final flickers of the Second World War to the collapse of the Berlin Wall…Wilson writes telling descriptions and precisely achieved set pieces. And his sense of place is terrific…with this novel Robert Wilson vaults to the front rank of thriller writers’
PETER GUTTRIDGE, Observer Review
‘The plot twists and turns, inexorably drawing you on to what is a realistic, sadly believable, conclusion. Wilson’s writing is admirable throughout, sure-footed in the dialogue; and in description, clean, clear and at times quite beautiful’
SUSIE MAGUIRE, Scotland On Sunday
‘Wilson employs a slightly out-of-focus prose style that eminently suits his tale of intrigue and double-dealing. There is no doubt that he is a promising writer, his novel operating on many levels, to divert and to tease the intellect of his readers. Watch his star, for it is surely in the ascendant’
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VINCENT BANVILLE, Irish Times
‘The Company of Strangers is an even more ambitious novel than A Small Death in Lisbon – a complex interplay of brutality, love and treachery…Combining historical novel, thriller and love story, Robert Wilson has created an intelligent, wide-ranging drama that satisfies on each of those levels’
NATASHA COOPER, TLS
‘Wilson writes beautifully and is a meticulous observer of his characters. The book is absorbing’
SUSANNA YAGER, Sunday Telegraph
‘An entertaining and gripping novel. Wilson has constructed an agreeably complicated story and tells it very well…immensely enjoyable’
ALLAN MASSIE, The Scotsman
‘Robert Wilson takes a young romantic heroine who would not be out of place in a Daphne du Maurier novel and drops her into the intrigue of a neutral country in wartime…His tale is a plotter’s delight: spanning several decades and cleverly reworking past narratives in the light of new evidence he creates an intriguing moral maze for his heroine to negotiate – and a puzzle of metaphors to match (he’s a better stylist than du Maurier). Recommended’
CHRIS PETIT, Guardian
‘The Company of Strangers spans the years from World War Two to glasnost and the collapse of the Berlin Wall, yet for all the inevitable social commentary the novel remains at heart a conventional socio-political thriller with strong echoes of le Carré, Ambler, Deighton and others…an evocative and compelling thriller’
Publishers Weekly
By the Same Author
A SMALL DEATH IN LISBON
BLOOD IS DIRT
A DARKENING STAIN
THE BIG KILLING
INSTRUMENTS OF DARKNESS
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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This paperback edition 2002
First published in Great Britain in 2001 by HarperCollins
Copyright © Robert Wilson 2001
Robert Wilson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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