The Diplomat's Wife

by Ridpath, Michael

‘Calm down! I’ll tell you.’

  ‘No, I won’t calm down!’ said Phil. ‘Your plans have just involved two people dying. We have to call the police.’

  ‘If that man had escaped, then I’d say fair enough. We’d call the police so they could catch him. But he’s dead. There is no murderer to catch. And they’ll start asking me questions, questions I can’t answer. Much better for us to leave now.’

  ‘Leave now?’ said Phil incredulously. ‘And go where?’

  ‘Switzerland. Geneva’s only fifty kilometres away. With any luck we’ll be over the border before the police start looking for us.’

  Emma’s face was determined. But Phil knew what the right thing to do was.

  ‘No. We call the police.’

  He spotted a telephone on a desk in the corner and moved over towards it.

  ‘No, Phil!’ Emma raised her gun and pointed it at him.

  ‘Oh, come on, Grams,’ said Phil. ‘You’re not going to shoot me.’ He was surprised at his own confidence, but confident he was.

  She lowered the gun. ‘You’re right, Philip. I’m not going to shoot you. But please. Just do as I ask. If we do get stopped at some point, you can say I made you leave without calling the police. I’ll back you up.’

  Her eyes were pleading. ‘You know how important this trip is to me, even if you don’t know exactly why yet. If you call the French police, they will stop me. And it’s not as if a murderer is going to escape justice.’

  Phil stood still and looked down at the two bloody bodies slumped on the floor. This was all spinning out of control very fast. Then he turned to his grandmother. She had brought him along because she trusted him. Now, at the end of her own life, she needed him. He didn’t want to let her down, even though he knew he should.

  Suddenly, he knew. He was with her. Whatever happened, he was with her.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘What do we do now? Do we just leave them here?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Emma. ‘Let’s quickly wipe down any surfaces we touched today and yesterday. And then let’s go.’

  ‘Wait a moment,’ said Phil. ‘I want to see who this guy is.’

  Gingerly, he reached out and gripped the neck of the balaclava. He pulled upwards, trying to ensure that none of the warm blood seeping through it touched his own clothes.

  Slowly, a face was revealed.

  ‘Do you recognize him?’ said Emma.

  Phil nodded. ‘He’s been following us since England.’

  ‘You can explain in the car,’ said Emma. ‘Now I want to check if Kurt wrote anything down. Like Kay Lesser’s address in Berlin.’

  ‘Be quick.’

  Emma searched for five minutes through Kurt’s desk, and Phil tentatively checked Kurt’s trouser pockets.

  Poor man. Phil had only just met him, but he’d liked what he’d seen, and his grandmother was clearly fond of him. And now Kurt was dead, killed by that psycho sprawled on the floor by the door.

  ‘Philip. Come here.’

  Phil moved over to the desk. A name was written on the back of an envelope, which was lying by Kurt’s telephone. Kay Ortmann.

  ‘Ortmann must be Kay’s married name. Or at least the name she goes under now.’

  ‘Is there an address?’

  They looked, carefully, using a biro from the desk and a handkerchief to try to avoid leaving fingerprints on the papers.

  Nothing. Or at least nothing obvious.

  Emma got two cloths from the kitchen and they began wiping. Fifteen minutes later, Phil and Emma were in the TR6, heading through the fog.

  * * *

  Phil fought to concentrate on the road ahead as the enormity of what he had just experienced crashed around him.

  He had just watched someone die.

  He had just seen his grandmother blow someone’s brains out.

  He had risked death by launching himself at a man with a gun.

  Nothing in his life up till now had prepared him for this.

  But he had to concentrate on the road ahead. On getting out of France safely without the police stopping them. Then he could think properly about what had happened, what was happening.

  ‘For once, I wish I owned a Ford,’ said Emma. ‘This car is so noticeable.’

  ‘To say nothing of the GB number plates.’ Phil was relieved to talk practicalities, to focus his mind on evading the police.

  ‘It’s fortunate it’s so foggy. It’s likely no one saw us at Kurt’s house just now.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Phil. ‘But it’s also likely someone noticed the car yesterday.’

  ‘And, once the police start asking questions, Frau Redlich will come forward and tell them we asked her where Kurt lived.’

  ‘That will take them a few hours. Maybe even a day.’

  ‘Poor Kurt,’ said Emma with a shudder. ‘And poor Martine.’

  Phil winced as the image of Kurt slumped next to the dining table, blood pumping out of his chest, flashed before him.

  ‘Who do you think that guy was?’ he asked. ‘The only reason I noticed him following us was he looks a lot like a famous football player.’

  ‘Why didn’t you mention it?’

  ‘I saw him twice: once on the ferry to Brittany, and once in a bar near Place Saint-Michel. I thought he was a student tourist and I assumed it was a coincidence. Do you know who he worked for? He spoke German.’

  ‘No,’ said Emma.

  Phil didn’t believe her.

  Emma glanced at her grandson. ‘He didn’t say much, but from what he did say, I thought he had an accent.’

  ‘What kind of accent?’

  ‘Slavic maybe?’

  ‘You mean Russian?’

  ‘Perhaps. Or Polish. Or Yugoslav. There are lots of Yugoslavs in Germany.’

  ‘Was that the KGB, Grams?’ said Phil.

  Emma didn’t answer.

  ‘We need to get rid of the gun,’ said Phil. ‘If the police find us with it, they’ll eventually be able to tell you shot the man. If we don’t have it, even if someone saw us, we can plausibly act as if we didn’t see anything. Let them think we left the house before the thug showed up.’

  ‘We should keep it,’ said Emma. ‘We may need it. It’s lucky I brought it with me.’

  ‘I insist, Grams.’ He realized his voice was rising. ‘I didn’t insist that we go to the police, but I do insist we ditch the gun.’

  Emma looked across at her grandson. Phil was firm.

  ‘OK,’ she said at last. She examined the map. ‘Turn right in about a kilometre.’

  They were in the village of Veyrier, and Phil took a couple of turnings until he was on a steep track leading up the mountainside through woods. After following a winding road for five minutes or so, they stopped. They were in thick forest, the lake just visible through the trees.

  ‘Wait here,’ said Emma. She got out of the car, clutching her handbag in which Phil knew she had stuffed her gun, and climbed up through the undergrowth until she was out of sight.

  Five minutes later, she was back.

  ‘Done,’ she said. ‘No one will ever find that. Now, back to the hotel.’

  ‘The hotel?’

  ‘Yes. It’s actually more suspicious if we abandon our luggage there and don’t pay the bill. If we collect our luggage, check out and head off for Switzerland, we can just tell anyone who asked that we changed our plans after talking to Kurt.’

  Phil pulled up in front of their hotel. In ten minutes they were back in the lobby, packed, and Emma was paying the bill. No sign of any cops. With luck, the alarm hadn’t been raised yet.

  They loaded the car and headed north to Geneva. They spent the half-hour to the border going over the story they would use if they were stopped. How they were asking Kurt for Kay’s address – eventually whoever Kurt had spoken to in the German bureaucracy would mention that. And how when they left Kurt he had been alive and well.

  The horror of those seconds in Kurt’s house rushed back. The shots. The blood.
>
  Focus.

  They reached the border crossing to Switzerland at Saint-Julien-en-Genevois. There were two checkpoints, and a queue: this was one of the most popular entry points between the two countries.

  They were stuck behind a Belgian caravan. The French police seemed to be letting through most of the traffic, but they stopped the Belgians to check their documents.

  Phil glanced at Emma. His palms, resting on the steering wheel, felt sweaty. He hoped she had their story straight. He hoped he had it straight.

  He was worried his nerves would give him away. He should relax. He tried to loosen his shoulders, but his hands gripped the wheel more tightly.

  Just then, he realized they had made a mistake. Kurt had laid a table for three: he was clearly expecting them to stay for lunch. But they hadn’t eaten anything. So why had they left early? It was a question the investigating police might ask them.

  As Phil’s brain was fumbling for explanations, the Belgian caravan moved on.

  He let in the clutch and the TR6 edged forward. The gendarme glanced down at the car and its GB sticker and waved them through.

  As did his Swiss counterpart a few yards further on.

  They had made it!

  Part Four

  Berlin

  Thirty-Three

  June 1979, Switzerland

  * * *

  They decided to drive straight through Switzerland, through Geneva and Lausanne, and north to the West German border at Basel. Phil found it extraordinarily difficult to concentrate on the driving. In the streets around Geneva, he wanted to speed up, and on the highway which ran around the north shore of Lake Geneva he had to keep telling himself to slow down. Blood was pumping in his ears, and his hands were gripping the steering wheel in a sweaty death clasp.

  Death. He knew the image of Kurt and then the man with the gun crumpling to the ground would never leave him. The sight of the red and grey stuff oozing out of the balaclava and the smell of cordite from the guns mixed with the iron in the freshly shed blood would never leave him. Neither would the man’s staring eyes as Phil had lifted his mask.

  ‘Why was that man there, Grams? Was he looking for Kurt? Was he looking for you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Will there be more of them in Berlin waiting for us?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Has this got something to do with why we’re in Europe?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Of course you know! It must have. This isn’t some coincidence. These people want to stop you doing whatever it is you’re trying to do. It’s obvious!’

  ‘I suppose it is.’

  Emma’s voice was calm, but her face was tense as she stared straight ahead along the road. To their right, Lake Geneva reached into the gloom of the low cloud, its far shore invisible in the murk.

  ‘So what is it we’re trying to do? Why are we going to Berlin? To find Kay?’

  Emma sighed. ‘Yes. To find Kay.’

  ‘And why are we doing that?’

  She didn’t answer. She just stared straight ahead.

  ‘Are we looking for Lothar?’

  Nothing.

  After what Swann had told him in the Three Castles, Phil strongly suspected they were.

  ‘Is that why you had that gun? To use on Kay?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Then why did you have it?’

  ‘In case we needed it. And it turned out we did need it.’

  ‘So you knew this trip might be dangerous from the beginning?’

  ‘I didn’t know it. I thought it might be. I didn’t think people would die. I didn’t think Kurt would die. You were very brave back there, Philip.’

  ‘What choice did I have?’ Phil protested.

  ‘You could have sneaked back into the lavatory.’

  ‘And let him kill Kurt and you?’

  ‘He killed Kurt anyway. And I’m going to die soon in any case.’

  ‘Oh, Grams!’ Phil tried to get a grip on his frustration. ‘Why are we trying to find Kay? Why can’t you just let it all rest?’

  But Emma didn’t answer. She reached into her handbag, pulled out a packet of cigarettes and lit one. Her hand was shaking so badly it took her several attempts to light it.

  Phil’s anger and frustration were genuine, but they were tinged with guilt. He should have known when he had seen the revolver in his grandmother’s suitcase that whatever reason she had for taking it, she thought there was a chance she might have to use it.

  And then there was Swann. Their chat in the pub had added a frisson of excitement to the trip, transforming it from a tame holiday with an older relative into a bit of adventure.

  It turned out that that kind of adventure involved bloodshed and death.

  Somehow Phil had omitted to ask Swann whether he was likely to watch his grandmother blowing someone’s brains out.

  To be fair, that wasn’t Swann’s fault. It was Emma who had got him into this situation; he would be accompanying her now even if he had never met Swann.

  They drove through Switzerland in silence. It had started as a silence of anger, but as the TR6 ate up the kilometres, it became a silence of thoughtfulness, each of them trying to make sense of what had just happened and what would happen next.

  Phil was unsure what to do. Should he tell Emma about his conversation with the enigmatic Swann? He felt guilty not telling her.

  And yet, by her own admission, she had been an ardent communist in the 1930s. She may still be one.

  As told by Emma, there had been something heroic about the communism of Hugh and her and Kurt, and the socialism of people like Dick. They were standing up for justice and equality in a world of cruel, broken capitalism.

  Yet, now, the communists were the bad guys.

  Phil had enjoyed studying history at school, but one of the things he had found hardest to accept was his teacher’s precept that good historians didn’t see history as the battle of the good guys against the bad guys. You weren’t supposed to take sides when you were writing an A-level history essay. Reluctantly, he had grown to understand that the reason why he thought the Protestants were the good guys in the Reformation, and the British the good guys in their empire, was because he was a Protestant Englishman. He was beginning to see that Vietnam, Northern Ireland and Israel were more complicated than they seemed once you dropped the idea that the good guys were the ones who looked most like you.

  And yet he wasn’t prepared to give up some judgements just because Mrs Hauser, his history teacher, had told him to. The Nazis were the bad guys in the Second World War. The communists, as personified by the Soviet Union and China, were the bad guys now.

  Which meant that his grandmother might be one of the bad guys.

  Phil didn’t like that idea at all.

  Swann had said something about how if Emma discovered he had asked Phil to look for Lothar, she might do something she would regret.

  At the time, Phil had no clue what that might be. He wasn’t sure now, either, but he did see how it might involve the KGB. And, if Swann was correct, it might lead to getting them both killed. He knew Emma had a mind of her own. He knew Emma had been and indeed still might be a Russian spy.

  Swann could easily be correct.

  He wasn’t going to tell her about Swann. At least not yet.

  This was all crazy. A week ago, he had been arguing with his father over a minor traffic accident and whether he could join his grandmother on a staid holiday to Europe’s capitals. Now it turned out that his grandmother was a Russian agent, that MI6 wanted Phil to spy on her, and that two men had died because of her, right in front of Phil’s eyes.

  Phil was scared. It was a kind of fear he had never felt before, a fear that there was a realistic chance he and his grandmother might be killed. Soon.

  He could easily have lost his life a couple of hours back. It hadn’t occurred to him at the time, but maybe he should have crept back into the toilet and left the hi
t man to kill Kurt and Emma. He didn’t want to die, especially for reasons he didn’t understand, and that Emma refused to explain to him.

  But he was glad he had jumped the man in the balaclava. He was glad Emma was still alive, and he had been responsible for saving her. Deliciously mixed up with the fear was excitement. He had faced danger and he had triumphed.

  Emma had tried to tell him that, since she was going to die soon anyway, saving her life was pointless. Phil didn’t buy that. He wasn’t sure he had completely come to terms with the fact that she was going to die, but if she was, he would make sure it was in bed, not by a KGB bullet.

  He would stick with her.

  Thirty-Four

  Emma had other ideas.

  They drove into West Germany and turned off the autobahn at a small town on the edge of the Black Forest. The town’s only hotel had two free rooms, and they sat in its near-empty restaurant for dinner.

  Phil ordered sausages and Emma a trout, together with a bottle of local Riesling.

  ‘We used to drink this stuff by the gallon, in Berlin,’ she said. ‘Hock, we called it. But it seems to have gone out of fashion now. I don’t know why. I think it’s rather nice.’

  ‘I like it,’ said Phil.

  ‘You’d like anything,’ said Emma.

  ‘Grams, I have a sophisticated palate! It might be just a little too modern for you to understand.’

  ‘Oh, Philip, you do talk absolute rot sometimes.’

  He did. But it made her smile.

  ‘Philip. I’ve been thinking. Those were perfectly reasonable questions you were asking me in the car. But I just can’t answer them.’

  ‘Can’t, or won’t?’ said Phil.

  ‘Both. I really wanted to bring you with me on this trip. I needed your help, I enjoy your company and I was getting you out of a hole rather neatly. Also, I wanted to tell someone my story before I die, and you seemed the best person to choose.’

  She smiled at him. ‘And I was right. Mostly. I do like your company. You were useful; I call saving my life pretty damn useful. And you seem genuinely interested in my story.’