Death in Focus

by Anne Perry

  Lucas knew thousands of men who felt the same. There had to be another way, no matter what it cost. Those who had fought and returned felt it so deeply, one had only to look in their faces, in their eyes for any argument to die.

  Charles had lost his only son. Lucas still had his, and whatever their differences, he must not quarrel. He must not for Josephine’s sake. She knew enough about war to think of it realistically. She had spent a lot of the time during those years working at a decoding center outside London. Lucas knew something of her work, though he could not share his own with her.

  His friend Peter Howard was one of the few with whom he could speak openly, and they were still close. Howard was his one liaison with MI6 and the secrets he still knew, the actions he still contributed to. Technology had advanced, codes were mostly different, but human nature was the same, in its weaknesses and its strengths.

  As Lucas prepared himself for the evening ahead he looked at his own face in the mirror: lean, aquiline, and, at first glance, ascetic. Only with a closer examination did one see the humor and a certain gentleness about the eyes.

  * * *

  —

  Charles and Katherine arrived exactly on time, as Lucas had known they would. Katherine was a uniquely elegant woman, not quite beautiful but, better than that, full of character. She was a little taller than average, and very lean. She managed to make herself graceful, and to dress with individuality. Tonight she wore a long charcoal gray silk dress that was all soft lines, very flattering to her angularity. It looked completely effortless, but that, too, was one of her gifts.

  She came in now with the cool evening breeze behind her. With a friendly greeting about the promise of an enjoyable evening, she smiled at Lucas and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. He returned it, lightly, realizing that, as always, he had no idea what she was thinking, in spite of her words.

  Charles was right behind her. “Evening, Father,” he said with a smile. He looked every bit the diplomat: graceful, immaculate, neat black mustache adding a dash to his face.

  Lucas held the door wider. “Come in. How are you?”

  Charles came into the hall, the men shook hands warmly, and Charles hugged Josephine. She hugged him back with sudden warmth, as if it surprised her how much she cared.

  They went into the drawing room. The deep red and blue Turkish carpet had withstood a generation; the Dutch painting of a harbor scene, all in muted shades of blues and grays, had hung there longer than any of them could remember, almost like a window whose view never changed. There was an inner peace to it, a timelessness that governed everything else. The curtained French windows looked onto the garden, but even though it was May, they were closed now, islanding the room from the rest of the world, at least visually. Emotionally, it could not be done.

  They had barely sat down when Charles began to speak of the most current news. “I know he’s a bit eccentric in his manner,” he said, referring, as they all knew, to Oswald Mosley. “But he’s the only one so far to grasp the nettle. We can’t go on spending like this. Hasn’t the Depression taught us anything? This is the last time in the world that we should think of rearming, let alone building more ships! We simply can’t afford it!”

  “It would give employment to men desperately needing it,” Josephine pointed out. “The shipyards, in particular.”

  “We don’t need warships, Mother,” Charles replied patiently. “The war is long over, and we have all realized that such a global disaster cannot ever be allowed to happen again.” His face was pinched. He could not even mention the word “war” without remembering the loss it had brought, not only to him personally, but to almost every man with whom he had been at school and university, every friend of his entire life.

  Lucas ached for him. He understood his son with a recollection of grief that was bone deep, but he simply did not agree. He kept silent with difficulty. They would have one family dinner without the anger that lay barely below the surface of all their political disagreements.

  Josephine regarded her son patiently. “It will be a little late to build them when we do need them,” she pointed out. “Shipbuilding takes a long time, and a lot of men.”

  “And a lot of iron, steel, and other materials that could be far better used for houses, trains, or if you must build ships, for the Merchant Navy,” Charles responded. Without looking at Lucas, he went on, “You’re listening to Father, and he’s listening to Churchill.” He lowered his voice and made an obvious effort to take the sharp edge off it. “Churchill is finished, Mother. He’s yesterday’s man, with yesterday’s ideas. I know Mosley is a bit…vulgar, at times, but a lot of what he says is true. And look at what Mussolini has done for Italy! When you get the infrastructure right, the roads, trains, draining the marshes and building houses and factories, you get the people united and self-disciplined, you can achieve miracles.”

  “It might work well for Italians—” Josephine began.

  “It does work for them!” Charles insisted. “There’s no ‘might’ about it. Ask Margot when she gets back. She’ll tell you.”

  “Or Elena…” Katherine suggested.

  Charles smiled at her briefly. “Darling, Elena won’t even notice, she’ll be far too interested looking for faces to make pictures of. She’s hell-bent now on being a great photographer. She won’t consider a new factory or the trains running on time to be interesting, much less a work of art. I’m just glad she’s found something harmless to do…” It was an oblique reference to her disaster at the Foreign Office, and a reminder to Lucas that Charles had not forgotten it, or forgiven the embarrassment it had caused him.

  “Has anyone heard from her?” Josephine asked before Lucas could speak. “Or from Margot?”

  “It’s a little soon.” Katherine shrugged. “A wire from Margot to say they’ve arrived, but that was three days ago. I expect they’re having fun. Amalfi is a gorgeous place, and very fashionable this time of year. Everybody who’s anyone at all goes to Capri.”

  “Then Margot will be there,” Charles said with a smile. References to Margot’s spirit and glamour always pleased him. She understood loss as much as he did.

  “There’s no reason why she shouldn’t have fun.” Katherine was instant in her defense, misunderstanding. Charles had meant no criticism. She longed for Margot’s happiness. She was a woman very aware of her children’s pain. It was simply a side of herself she seldom allowed to show.

  “Of course she’s having fun,” Josephine agreed. “It’s part of survival. And the little dash of wit or glamour serves others as well. They can aspire to it, too, if they see it’s possible.”

  Charles drew in his breath as if to argue, and then seemed to change his mind. For the moment the discussion was over.

  Quite willing to turn the conversation along a different course, even if her tactic was obvious, Josephine asked if anyone had seen any motion pictures recently.

  “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Katherine said, immediately picking up the thread. “Fredric March was brilliant.” She went on to describe the actor’s skill, and how thoroughly she thought he had deserved the Oscar that he had won for it.

  Lucas smiled. He admired Katherine’s diplomatic skill as much as her good humor. Did Charles realize what an asset she was in his career? Probably. Lucas looked at him now and saw the total attention in his son’s face as he watched his wife. His regard for her was unmistakable. He was surely aware that she was deliberately keeping the peace, for all their sakes. No one could heal the differences, but she could ignore them. Perhaps that was what diplomacy was really about: finding the meeting grounds you could, and choosing to ignore those that could never blend, because to force them to mix required a winner and a loser. In a good agreement, there were no losers.

  They went into the dining room shortly after and Josephine left briefly for the kitchen. Katherine offered to help, as she always did, and wa
s declined, as help always was. Now that there were only Lucas and herself at home, Josephine preferred to do all the cooking, which she was good at, though she had other domestic help.

  They had saved the best for entertaining, and they ate an excellent roast saddle of mutton with the very first of the spring vegetables from the garden.

  It was Katherine who touched back on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. “It’s extraordinarily clever acting,” she said with admiration. “No special effects or makeup. You could watch him almost changing shape in front of you. He begins as a gentle, benign person, then the darker side of him gradually takes over, and within seconds, less than a minute, he becomes brutish, all humanity gone out of him and something vile in its place. Something completely out of his control.”

  “It was in the writing,” Charles observed, “but it was certainly clever. I wonder how long it took him to get that effect?”

  Lucas did not answer. It suddenly seemed to him far deeper than the skill of an actor or even the imagination of a fine writer. “Did he fear it in himself, do you suppose?” he said to Charles.

  “What?” Charles asked, interested but slightly puzzled.

  “Stevenson,” Lucas replied. “Did Jekyll know there was a monster inside him over whom he had no control? Was that what Stevenson was showing us? Knowledge, and at the same time, helplessness.”

  “What on earth made you think of that?” The way Charles’s face was set showed his determination. He had scented a real meaning, something deeper than polite discussion over the dinner table. Was that what he himself had intended?

  “All sorts of things can spark off emotions we can’t control,” Lucas replied. “A good artist knows that, and so does a good politician—or a good demagogue.”

  “A contradiction in terms.” Josephine shook her head. “Demagoguery is not good, by definition. The only civilized rule is by consent.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant,” Lucas corrected. “Not good as regards morality. Perhaps I should have said skilled, effective, achieving its aim.”

  “There’s a lot to be said for that, at certain times.” Charles looked at him steadily. “Now would be one of them. Feed the hungry, house the homeless, create jobs to bring honor and a sense of purpose to those who have none. Is that demagoguery?” There was challenge in his voice, and in his eyes.

  The temperature in the room had dropped, or perhaps it was the light that had changed. Everyone was watching Lucas. Josephine still held her dessert fork in her hand, but she had forgotten the pastry on her plate. She was watching Lucas, knowing him too well to imagine he could be stopped from answering.

  Lucas chose his words very carefully, looking only at Charles. “It isn’t what you do with power, certainly not to begin with. It is whether those who give it to you have any chance of curbing it once you have it, when and if you abuse it. And one day you will.”

  Charles sidestepped the issue. “Would they rather be cold and hungry? There’s not much point in worrying about a problematical tomorrow if you don’t survive tonight. Any woman with hungry children pulling at her skirts will tell you that, Father. Sometimes I think you live in such an ivory tower that you have no idea of the realities of war and Depression, and what it has done.” There was pain in his voice, as well as anger. “If you back people into a corner and leave them no dignity, and no hope, sooner or later they’ll fight…and to the death, if you take it that far! You’ve left them nothing to lose. Always leave people a way out, to save face. That’s the essence of diplomacy. You live in your safe Civil Service castle and don’t even see the realities, never mind taste them.”

  Josephine drew in her breath sharply, as if to speak, and then looked down at the table and said nothing.

  Of course, Charles had no idea what Lucas had done during the war, the sleepless nights worrying about the men he had sent on crazy, too often hopeless errands behind enemy lines. And the women! Never knowing if the men would come back. Too many of them didn’t. Charles didn’t know of the secret meetings, the waiting, the judgments that could win or lose, save lives, or cost them. He did not know how many times Lucas had taken a small boat across the Channel in the dark and landed secretly on the shores behind the fighting, in German-occupied Belgium or Holland, for secret meetings, dealing with misinformation, betrayals of every sort. Was it harder than in the daylight, when you could see the enemy? Or at least see your friends? What could Lucas say that would not break the secrets he had kept all these years, and must still keep? The one he hid even from himself was that he missed it, missed the passion of purpose, the knowledge that he was part of the battle, not a bystander. He saw the anger, and a degree of contempt, in his son’s eyes. It was the contempt that hurt.

  Josephine spoke softly, reproach in her voice. “You have no idea what your father did or did not do in the war, Charles, and your assumption that you have the right to judge has no place at this table. Perhaps if the diplomats had been a little more skilled at their jobs, and a little more diligent, we wouldn’t have had a war. Had you considered that?”

  Charles stared at her. It was a blow he had not expected, especially from her, and Lucas saw the idea cross his face and fill him with surprise. He turned to Josephine, but she was not looking at him.

  “I know many people are cold and hungry,” Lucas said, breaking the hot silence, but trying to keep the anger out of his voice. “And the homeless have no hope of jobs. A man who isn’t frightened of the future has no idea what the hell’s going on. Hitler offers them hope and, I suppose in his way, Mosley does too. We’re all afraid of war, because, dear God, we know what it is. We’re a long way from over the last one. We’re hideously vulnerable to being frightened out of our senses, or values, the better parts of ourselves that saved us before. I know that, Charles. I saw the war, too. And I know what hunger there is in Germany, and here. And I know how easy it is to believe someone is responsible for all the misery, and if we just get rid of them, it will all come right.”

  “Do you?” Charles looked at him steadily, his head a little to one side. “Do you really? Pardon me, Father, I’m sure you do in theory, but I don’t think you have the slightest idea of the reality.”

  Lucas must be careful. It was so easy to let your vanity, your need for the respect of those you love, provoke you into saying more than you meant to. Very deliberately, he eased himself back into his chair. “Don’t imagine you are the only one who knows anything, Charles. That is a dangerous position. I don’t want another war any more than you do. But I am a little less certain as to the best way to prevent it, or what price I am willing to pay…”

  “Do you think it will come to that?” Katherine asked, sitting very still. She looked perfectly composed, but a ragged edge was audible in her voice. Lucas knew her well enough to recognize it. He had known her through the loss of her only son, and then in her own grief, her attempt with immense fortitude to comfort her daughter for the loss of not only her brother, but her husband. Lucas never underestimated her courage, and he could see the fear in her now, for all its disguise and sophistication.

  “No, my dear, I don’t,” he said. Please God that were true. “But we must still be careful. This time we are forewarned. We must keep fear in its place, not let it make us act in panic, or with disregard for others. The easy path is sometimes right, but more often it isn’t.”

  Charles straightened his shoulders. “Of course,” he agreed. He, too, must have heard the edge in Katherine’s voice, or even seen the momentary flicker of fear in her eyes. “I spent quite a lot of time in our Berlin embassy. The Germans are strong people. They are finding their way again.” He smiled at her, then turned to Josephine. “Mother, may I help you get the coffee?”

  Josephine accepted, and the tension seeped away. By the time Charles and Katherine left an hour and a half later, the atmosphere was easy again, at least on the surface. That’s all it ever was.

 
As Lucas closed the door and locked it for the night, Josephine was still standing in the hall.

  “You meant that about fear, didn’t you?” she said softly.

  He had kept many things from her, necessary things about his work, but he had never lied to her. That would have broken something between them that he did not ever want to live without. “Yes. Fear begets violence and hatred,” he answered. “It’s the easy answer. Blame someone else. Blame the Gypsies, the Jews, the Communists, anyone but ourselves. Get rid of them, and it will all be fine. It’s as old as sin, and about as useful!” Then he smiled and put his arm around her. “Sorry. I don’t learn. I always let him get under my skin.”

  She put her arm around his waist and moved a little closer to him. “Yes, you do,” she agreed. “If you didn’t, then I suppose you just wouldn’t care, and I never want you to stop caring.”

  CHAPTER

  4

  The following day, Lucas received a telephone call early in the morning, before he had started breakfast. It was very brief, from one of the other close suburbs of London. All the voice said was, “Meet me as usual, ten o’clock.” He knew it was Peter Howard, so Lucas had no need to add anything but his agreement.

  Josephine did not question where he was going when, at half-past nine, he said he was taking the dog for a walk.

  Toby did not question either. Lucas had the lead in his hand, and Toby saw it and stood up, scrambling out of his basket and pattering across the floor, tail wagging. It was late spring, with sharp sunlight and a chill to the breeze, perfect for a walk in the nearby bluebell wood. There was no more heartachingly beautiful place on earth, and for Lucas, there could not be in heaven either.

  It was a twenty-minute walk and he set out briskly, though taking care not to overwork his ankle, plagued with an old injury that would never heal now. “No dawdling,” he said to Toby. “You can run where you please when we get there. Come on, now!”