Dunster (19 page)

‘I don't need to.'

‘It might be difficult, anyway, seeing that Sergeant Blaker was killed later in the war. I'd like to know if you've found the demolitions specialist. I think I've got a lead to him. But we're supposed to be working on this project. Perhaps we could investigate it together.'

‘There's nothing to investigate. I know Cris.'

‘Such touching loyalty. You've always been such a simple soul, old man!'

‘He's not a murderer.'

‘Oh, I don't suppose he's ever called himself that. He was just doing his patriotic duty. Avenging the deaths of those two thoroughly good chaps. Troopers Ashley and Pickering, who'd been handed over to the fascists.'

‘He couldn't have killed women and children. In a church. Forget it, Dunster.'

‘How do you know what people are capable of? In a war? You've never been in a war, have you?'

‘Neither have you.'

‘But I haven't got your simple faith in the morality of the chairmen of television companies. I can imagine exactly how it happened.'

‘Your fatal imagination.'

‘We'll get the facts. Find the man who planted the explosives. He'll confirm who gave the orders.'

I thought of an irresistible argument, ‘If Cris had been guilty of anything like that, would he have been so dead keen to do a series about war crimes?'

‘Yes.' No argument seemed likely to stop Dunster. ‘Of course he would.'

‘Why on earth?'

‘Have you never heard of the need for confession? Murderers have it. They hang around police stations. They offer to help the police with their inquiries. They make witness statements. In the end they have to give themselves away. Don't you know that's what happened? Sir Crispin Bellhanger's been longing to tell the world about this for years.'

‘For almost half a century!'

‘It's a long time to keep a secret. Too long for your friend Cris. Your hero.'

‘I don't have heroes.'

‘I forgot. You don't, do you? Nothing so positive as that.'

There was a silence and I could only repeat, ‘It's just something he wouldn't do.'

‘You weren't sure Jaunty wouldn't.'

The answer was no, I wasn't sure. But I didn't give Dunster the pleasure of hearing me say it.

‘Beth told me. You got terribly steamed up, for you, Progmire. You thought I was on the verge of exposing the galloping Major. You thought she'd mind dreadfully. Do you think he's a more likely killer than your boss in the office? That doesn't say much for your opinion of your ex-wife's family.'

Was Jaunty so entirely different from Cris Bellhanger? The answer was yes, but, again, I didn't want to say it. I didn't want to argue with Dunster. I wanted to be rid of him and his awful, smiling certainty. I said, ‘I've got to get back to the office. I'll have to talk to Cris.'

‘You mean warn him?'

‘Tell him what's happened.'

‘I'm sure he'll be interested.'

‘And I expect it'll be the end of the series.'

‘You're going to kill the story?' Dunster was laughing now.

‘Don't you think it's gone far enough?'

‘Oh, no, not nearly.' The joke, for Dunster, seemed to be getting better all the time. ‘Not nearly far enough.' And then he was serious again. ‘You can't stop it now. There's no way you can stop it.'

‘I can try.'

Then I got up and left him, sitting on the bench under the guns and enjoying the situation. I walked quickly to the gate and got into my car, but Dunster wasn't far behind me and as I started the engine, which responded with a complaining whine, I saw him unfasten a crash helmet from a motor bike as formidable as Jaunty s horse. This was a new interest in his life, which I supposed he had bought with his earnings from Cris Bellhanger.

I had told Dunster I'd try to stop him. At that time I thought I could.

‘Good news! You've got Sir Percy Blakeney.' Dennis, the dentist, picked up the spectacles that hung round his neck, elevated them to his nose and looked at me closely, as though doubting whether I was an appropriate choice for the Scarlet Pimpernel in the light-hearted romp that was to be the Mummers' big autumn production.

‘And we'll be playing opposite each other again,' Lucy said in her quiet and businesslike manner, ‘I've got Marguerite. Martin was trying to get hold of you to tell you all about
Pimpernel.
'

‘I'm sorry. I've been out of London.' I had been down to Windhammer and had called in at the Mummery for a drink, hoping to find something to talk about other than long-ago deaths in the High Apennines. So I discovered that I was to play, for the first time, a positive hero engaged, despite his languid and flippant manner, in springing aristocrats from the guillotine. I would be raising a weary eye-glass and saying lines like, “Odds my life, Lady Blakeney! I have spent the entire morning in the perfection of me demned cravat.' Dunster would have found that entirely ridiculous, but then I no longer cared what Dunster thought about anything. I was now at war with Dunster. I had talked to Cris and made up my mind that, at whatever cost, Dunster had to be defeated.

When I had paid my first visit – and I hoped to God it was my last – to the Imperial War Museum and got back to the Streetwise office, I had found Peregrine Gryce agitating because on his return from the North of England I wasn't waiting in my cell, staring at the back wall of the Malibu Club, breathing in the smells of last night's dinner and eager for instructions. ‘Pippa tells me you've been looking through the files. I hope you've come up with some ideas?'

‘Yes, I have. I've also been talking to our writer.'

‘And did you manage to get any sense out of him?'

‘I don't think so. I hope not.'

‘Tell me.'

‘I'll tell you what I can, after I've spoken to Cris, Pippa, get me Megapolis, will you? The chairman's secretary.'

Miss Pippa Marching looked at Peregrine for confirmation and then made the telephone call. You have seen from this passage that I was, in some ways, a different associate producer. It was as though Dunster, riding away on his huge black motor bike, had left me some of his determination to act, whatever the consequences. I felt frustrated when Pippa got me through to Megapolis and I discovered that the chairman was spending a couple of days at Windhammer, when once I should have been relieved at the postponement of an almost impossible meeting. I left Peregrine Gryce protesting at my going to Cris over his plaintive little head and I took a taxi to Liverpool Street Station.

I sat in the corner of a dusty railway carriage, looking out at the trailing farewell of London, the back gardens full of weeds and broken toys and grimy, lean-to greenhouses, and the new but already shabby suburban stations. Then came the flat countryside on the way to that sham Gothic castle which Cris treated, as he did so many things in his life, as some sort of a modest joke. I wondered exactly how I was going to ask the man who had given me my job, and taken me away to forget my pain over Beth and Dunster, and who had always been more like an exceptionally companionable father than an employer to me, whether he happened to recall having taken part in a massacre.

My life, as you will have understood by now, has been much concerned with the performing arts, not to mention make-believe. Only Dunster, my former friend and long-time enemy, has shunned pretence and invention and shown an unreasonable addiction to what he felt to be the truth. My own happiest moments, at Oxford, at Megapolis and with the Mummers, have been theatrical. Drama surrounded me, so it wasn't a surprise to discover that what had kept Cris at home was a touring opera company's performance of
Cost fan tutte
in the baronial hall of Windhammer for the benefit of Angie's favourite charity, the local branch of the War Widows' Association.

When I arrived she greeted me even more warmly than usual. She kissed my cheek and made the small noise of ‘mmmnyah' as her lips departed. She was clearly as excited by the preparations going on around her as she had been when she first came on to the set in Pinewood Studios to act the part of an intrepid ATS girl in the war her husband had been fighting in bitter reality. She stood in the hall and watched curtains being hung, lights set up, props assembled. She organized cups of tea and sandwiches with the efficiency of a film unit caterer as the singers went through their exercises and the small orchestra tried out the more difficult moments in the overture. Cris was with her working, as always, in his snow-white shirtsleeves and blue braces, and he was still smiling when I told him we had to have a serious discussion on the subject of war crimes. ‘We'll go outside and talk,' he said. When he told Angie we were going to look at the garden, she said she wouldn't come with us because of early clouds of midges.

There were sheets of butter-yellow daffodils and white narcissi in the rough grass under the beech trees. The first azaleas were coming out in the borders and there was the start of blossom and fresh green leaves on the tall Japanese cherries. As we walked away from the house we heard the faintest sound of the quartet ‘May the Wind be Gentle' As you can see, the setting couldn't have been more inappropriate for the business in hand.

Down the broad, grass walk between the long beds of flowers preparing for their annual display, I started on my story and Cris listened. I tried to tell him all I felt about Dunster, how our lives together had seemed a long, comical-tragical preparation for that morning's meeting. We stopped in a grassy circle, surrounded by a tall yew hedge, with a moss-covered sundial in the centre – a place as quiet and private as a room. There I told him about Dunster's account of a late-night, brandy-inspired conversation with Jaunty. I said Jaunty had spoken about a dynamited church packed on a saint's day. Jaunty had nothing to do with this atrocity.

‘Of course not,' Cris said, ‘the Germans did it, after one of their officers was found strangled.' So it
was
the same church, the same ghost town, that he had told me about after dinner as we sat together and he had played the piano. I was troubled by that for a moment but then relieved. Cris's simple sentence sounded a hundred times more convincing than Dunster's over-excited account of Jaunty's drunken confidence, or his contact with an unnamed deserter gone native in the Apennines.

‘You said my ex-father-in-law fought the war in a way you didn't approve of?' I asked Cris, postponing the final question.

‘I couldn't be sure but I had my suspicions. That garrotted officer had the mark of Jaunty about him. We shouldn't have held that against him, only it had such terrible consequences.'

‘So Jaunty's section was there when the incident happened.' I knew it was ridiculous to try to protect ourselves by calling it an incident.

‘Oh, yes. He was well established over and above Pomeriggio at the time.'

‘And you?' I had to ask.

‘We'd had a job to do, further south, towards Monte di Speranza. We only joined up with the support group, Jaunty's lot, after the church business was over.'

Relief again, a tide sufficiently strong to allow me to launch the great attack. ‘Dunster says Jaunty told him you were there, before it happened.'

‘Does he?' Cris's eyes were blue and clear, their corners wrinkled by his customary smile. He seemed not in the least perturbed.

‘And that Jaunty said you commanded the church parade.'

‘Me and who else?' Cris asked, without a pause.

‘I'm not quite clear. Three or four others. A sergeant who was killed later.'

‘Blaker.'

‘And someone who deserted and married an Italian girl. Dunster's been to see him in Italy.'

‘Lance Corporal Nathaniel Sweeting. “Natty Suiting” I used to call him because he was always such a bloody mess. He must have a defective memory after all those years on the run. Or one that can be altered if the price is right.'

It hadn't occurred to me that Dunster might have paid for his information. I might once have thought that for him to do so would have been out of character; now I was prepared to believe him entirely ruthless. But I still had to say, ‘There's even a suggestion that you've been paying Jaunty all these years – I suppose to keep him quiet about what happened. I went through his accounts once, and he does seem to have some mysterious source of income.'

‘Me pay Jaunty Blair?' Cris seemed to find the idea entirely comic. ‘I'd rather contribute to the Pit Bull Terriers' fighting-fund. Please don't ask me to explain Jaunty's finances.'

‘No. I wouldn't.' By now I felt able to smile. I had been worrying about Cris's pay-off to Jaunty going into my down payment on Muswell Hill.

‘There might be a hundred explanations. Good, bad or indifferent.'

‘Of course there might.'

Well, then.' Cris was standing with his hands in his pockets, his face turned up gratefully towards the sun. ‘The whole thing's the most complete and utter balls, then, isn't it?'

‘That's exactly what I told Dunster.'

‘I'm sure you did.'

‘As a matter of fact,' I assured him, ‘I didn't believe it for a moment.'

‘Your friend's just looking for a sensational story.'

He's not my friend. He's my enemy. And I'm sure that's what he's after.'

‘Yes.' Cris looked down at the grass now, at the carefully shined brogues planted firmly apart on the short grass. ‘We'll have to think what we ought to do about it.'

‘I'll do anything,' I told him. ‘Anything I can to kill this absurd story.'

‘We'll talk about it when we're back in the office. Meanwhile, you will stay tonight, won't you? You wouldn't want to miss the Mozart.'

So, that evening I sat next to Cris and Angela Bellhanger and listened to the opera which informs us that our personalities are irrelevant, and indeed interchangeable, that one lover is really quite as good as another, that all women do it and it all comes to the same thing in the end. And this hard lesson is set to music of such perfection that war crimes slipped out of my mind for a little while. I even forgot to worry about Cris letting it all wait until we met again in London, which seemed a rather too laid-back way of dealing with the problem.