The Ways of the World (40 page)

‘What for?’

‘Kneel down. Please.’

A moment passed. Then there was a thump and a cry of pain.

‘Are you all right, Brigham?’ Max called.

‘Tell him, Mr Brigham,’ said Tarn.

‘I … I’m all right.’

‘Now tell
me
. Where is Lemmer?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You know.’

‘As God’s my witness, I don’t.’

‘You will tell me.’

‘I can’t.
I don’t know
.’

There was a sudden, indecipherable sound. Then Max heard a gurgling, scrabbling noise. And Tarn’s voice: ‘
Tell me
.’

‘Leave him alone, Tarn,’ Max shouted. ‘He doesn’t work for Lemmer.’

‘Do you work for Lemmer, Mr Maxted?’ Tarn responded, raising his voice above Brigham’s spluttering and choking.

‘What are you doing to him?’ Max wrenched at the handcuffs. But they were firmly fixed. He could not move so much as a pace from the bed.

‘
Do you work for Lemmer?
’

‘No. Of course I don’t. Neither does Brigham.’

‘I think he does. Well, Mr Brigham?’

The choking ceased and gave way to coughing. Tarn had given Brigham a moment to recover – and to confess. But it was only a moment.

‘Well?’

‘I don’t … know where Lemmer is. You must …’

‘
You must believe me
,’ Max imagined Brigham had been about to say. The irony was that now, too late to help either of them, Max did believe him. Somehow, he had got the wrong man. So had Tarn. But Tarn did not know that yet. And Max suspected it would take Brigham’s death – and his too – to make him understand.

‘
Where is Lemmer?
’

THERE WERE NO
customers in the shop when Sam entered. Nadia emerged from the rear office to greet him. She was dressed in black, as usual, but this was the sombre, unrelieved black of mourning, and she was paler than he recalled. The smile that might once have warmed her expression was missing. There was something tremulous about her – fear, he suspected, fused with grief.

‘I am glad to see you, Sam,’ she said, kissing him lightly on the cheek.

‘Are you alone here, Nadia?’

‘Yes.’ She looked puzzled. ‘Of course.’

‘Didn’t Zamaron say he was going to give you protection? I expected to see a bobby outside.’

‘Bobby?’

‘Policeman.’

‘Ah. Yes. There were two. I sent them away.’

‘Why?’

‘My uncle’s friends are nervous people, Sam. They do not like the police. They would doubt my loyalty if they saw I was being guarded by the French authorities.’

‘They would?’

‘Doubt and exile march together. Now, come upstairs. I will close the shop.’

Sam had not been in Nadia’s flat before. It appeared to contain almost as many books as the shop, along with a lumber-room’s
worth of china, paintings and extravagantly framed mirrors.

‘My uncle brought from Russia only the things he said he could not live without,’ Nadia explained, following Sam’s gaze. ‘Now they will live without him.’

‘Will you stay here, running the shop?’

‘I am not sure. Tell me about Max, please. I need to understand what is happening.’

It did not take Sam long to explain that Max had gone to London in pursuit of Brigham. Nadia expressed concerns he could only echo about how fit Max was to undertake such a journey.

‘I am worried for him,’ she said.

‘You and me both,’ Sam admitted.

‘Whenever I close my eyes, I see my uncle in that sack in the canal,’ she said, shaking her head sadly.

‘It was a horrible thing. You shouldn’t have had to see it.’

‘But I did.’ She stroked her neck reflectively. ‘Do you have a cigarette, Sam?’

He pulled out a pack and offered her one with an apologetic grimace. ‘They’re French. I ran out of Woodbines.’

‘Woodbines?’

‘Proper British fags.’

‘Ah. I see. These are fine. Thank you.’

He lit the cigarette for her and one for himself.

‘What did you mean about the other man – Norrees?’

‘Norris. A friend of Brigham’s, as far as I can tell. He brought the car in yesterday for repair.’

‘What car?’

‘Brigham’s Daimler.’ Sam remembered then that he had not told Nadia about his encounter with le Singe. Evidently, neither had Max. And something he could not quite have defined deterred him from doing so now. ‘It was the registration number of the car that first put Max on to him,’ he continued inaccurately.

‘Why is the number important?’

‘I’m … not sure.’ Sam was floundering. ‘Max didn’t say.’

‘Does he think this … Norris … is an accomplice of Brigham’s?’

‘He’s got no reason to.’

‘If they are friends …’

‘Max doesn’t know that yet.’

‘Ah. I see. But you must tell him, of course. It may be important.’

‘Oh, I will. As soon as he gets back.’

‘We should take a drink for his safe return. Will you have a glass of wine with me, Sam?’

‘I’d be happy to.’

‘Sit down. I will bring the wine. Make yourself comfortable.’

She went into the kitchen at the rear of the flat, leaving Sam to choose a fireside armchair. He finished his cigarette and lit another, gazing up at a murky oil painting above the mantelpiece of a stern, hawk-nosed figure in the naval uniform of a bygone era.

‘Relative of yours?’ he asked, when Nadia returned with the wine.

‘Yes. The most famous of them all. Admiral Viktor Vitalevich Bukayev. A lover of Catherine the Great, if you believe the stories that are told.’

‘And do you believe them?’

‘When I want to.’ She handed him his glass and raised hers. ‘For Max’s safe return.’

They drank the toast. The wine was strong and peppery and hit some kind of spot, though Sam would very much have preferred a pint of Bass. Nadia sat down opposite him.

‘Max told you about the Trust, Sam, yes?’

‘Your organization? Yes, he did.’

‘Not mine. My uncle’s. There is a traitor in it who must be found.’

‘Do you reckon your uncle rumbled who the traitor was?’

‘Rumbled?’

‘Worked out. Found out.’

‘Ah. Yes. I think so. I think that is why he was killed.’

‘Maybe Max can get the name out of Brigham.’

‘Maybe. Yes. Or out of Norris.’

‘Well, it’s possible, I sh … sh …’ Sam rubbed his eyes. ‘Sorry. It’s been a busy day. It must’ve taken more out of me than I thought. Thish wine’s gone shtraight to my … head. I …’

‘You look tired, Sam. Maybe you are hungry also. I can give you something to eat, if you want.’

‘No, that’sh … that’sh …’ Sam made to set his glass down in the grate, but tipped it over in the process. He heard it smash on the tiles, but the sound seemed to come from some more distant place. He felt queasy and woozy all at once. ‘Shorree,’ he managed to say in a slow, slurred voice that he did not recognize as his own. He tried to push himself up from the chair. But his legs gave way beneath him.

He half-fell, half-rolled, to the floor, where he was aware of little beyond the musty smell of the rug he found himself lying on. He looked up, but could focus on nothing. The room was a blur. Nadia was nowhere to be seen.

Then he heard her speak. But she was not speaking to him. ‘You can come in now. He is—’

But he heard no more.

‘He is helpless,’ said Nadia, turning to look towards the kitchen.

A thin, grey-suited man walked into the room. His face was pinched and narrow, his mouth pursed, his eye piscinely moist behind the lenses of his round-framed glassed. ‘So I see,’ he said quietly.

‘What will you do with him?’

Herbert Norris stood for a moment, gazing down at Sam, who was sprawled unconscious on the floor. He tapped his lips thoughtfully and frowned.

‘You should not have taken the car to the hotel garage,’ said Nadia, with an edge of reproof in her tone.

Norris looked mildly at her. ‘You should have told me he worked there, my dear.’

‘I did not think it was important.’

‘Ah, well, the things we think unimportant are often the things that catch us out, don’t you find? To be honest, I had no idea they were interested in the car at all. I can’t quite understand why they were. But never mind. Once Tarn has dealt with young Maxted – and we’ve disposed of Twentyman here – Appleby will have no reason to suspect me.’

‘What about
me
?’

‘You have nothing to worry about. Your performance as the
grieving niece is entirely convincing. The Trust will be more of a problem for you than Appleby. I shall recommend you be allowed to leave Paris. I’m sure we can recruit another informant among your fellow exiles. They generally spend so much and earn so little that corrupting them is child’s play.’

‘You do not respect my people, do you?’

‘I respect professionalism, my dear, wherever I find it.’

‘Is that why you use Tarn?’

‘I certainly wish others would take note of how thorough the man is. He’d never be associated with anything as crass as the Ennis shooting.’

‘But he is outside the organization. He is not bound to us.’

‘He does what we pay him to do. And he does it well. Killing Appleby’s man was unnecessary, perhaps, but I can forgive him the odd surrender to vanity.’

‘What if he discovers you have misled him?’

‘Why should he care? His fee’s generous enough to console him for any minor misrepresentation. He’s altogether ideal for our purposes.’ Norris sighed. ‘But even Tarn can’t be in two places at once. Twentyman falls to us.’

‘What are you going to do with him?’

‘Dobson will arrive here shortly with a large packing case. We’ll stow Twentyman in it and remove him. You needn’t concern yourself with what happens to him after that.’

‘I would like to know.’

‘Why?’

Nadia looked down at Sam. ‘He is not a bad man. I do not want him to suffer.’

‘If only bad men suffered in this business, my dear, it would be easier on all our consciences. But that’s not how it is. As it happens, he’ll have drowned long before the effect of the drug wears off, so his will be a painless quietus. He’s as good as dead already.’

EXACTLY TWO MONTHS
earlier, almost to the hour, Sam was struggling with a recalcitrant carburettor on one of Twentyman & Son’s bread vans in the yard behind their bakery in Walthamstow. Darkness had long since fallen. He was working with the aid of a lamp on a trailing wire suspended from an adjacent post. It was cold and damp and everyone else had gone. By rights, he should have gone himself. But Sam was in no hurry to return to the family home, where his welcome back from the war had failed to match the touching vision of loved ones’ reunions relayed in the newspapers. His brother viewed him as a cuckoo in the nest, while his sister regarded him as a rival for a position in the business she had earmarked for her fiancé, a man who had braved shot and shell in the trenches while Sam, as she saw it, had lazed around airy hangars in the French countryside polishing propellers.

The truth was that Sam would have been delighted to grant his siblings’ generally unspoken (but occasionally muttered) wishes and take himself off to a different job and a home of his own. But he was constrained by penury and the harsh fact that an expertise in the workings of aero-engines was a qualification for nothing bar unemployment in the brave new post-war world. The Royal Air Force (as the RFC had become in the last months of his service) had jettisoned him – and many others like him – with perfunctory thanks and little ceremony. He was on his own now. His father would say otherwise, so too his brother, but that was how it seemed to him. The loaves might rise in the bakery. But he would not.

‘Buggeration,’ he swore, as he gave his already bruised thumb another knock with the spanner. He sucked the joint to ease the pain and wondered if he should abandon the task. Some deliveries tomorrow would just have to be late. That was all there was to it, apart, of course, from the apportionment of blame. That would be his to bear, without question.

‘Sam?’

It was a voice Sam did not immediately recognize, calling from the open wicket door in the gate that led to the street. He moved clear of the van and peered towards it. ‘Who’s there?’

‘It’s me, Sam.’ A figure in a hat and overcoat stepped through the door and walked towards him. ‘Max.’

‘Who?’

‘James Maxted, Sam.’ The newcomer reached the pool of light cast by the lamp, whipped off his hat and smiled – a familiar, self-mocking, defiant smile. ‘Don’t you remember me?’

‘Bloody hell, sir, it’s you.’ Sam grinned inanely. ‘You’re a sight for sore eyes and no mistake. I never expected to see you again.’

‘I’ve been in a POW camp. You didn’t think I was dead, did you?’

‘No. We got the word you were all right. I just … didn’t reckon our paths would ever cross again.’

‘Well, here I am.’

‘How’d you find me?’

‘You told me often enough your family ran a bakery in Walthamstow. It wasn’t difficult.’

‘I’m surprised you made the effort.’

‘Now I have, how about a drink to celebrate surviving the war?’

Sam’s grin broadened still further. ‘That sounds just the ticket, sir.’

They adjourned to the Rose and Crown, where Sam had eked out several mournful pints since his homecoming. But Max was paying and eking was not what either of them had in mind.

The first pint vanished while they did little more than laugh and joke and savour the sweetness of the moment. Comparing notes on Max’s experiences as a POW and the remainder of the aerial war as seen from Sam’s fly-on-the-ground point of view occupied them
for most of the second. Then Max surprised Sam by reminding him of a conversation they had had a few weeks before he was shot down.

‘We talked about what we might do after the war, if you recall.’

‘We did that, sir, yes.’ Sam had not forgotten. The miserable couple of months he had spent at the bakery had ensured he had been in no danger of doing that. ‘We settled on a flying school, didn’t we?’

‘Yes. An attractive idea at the time. Flying without being shot at. And being paid by others to show them how to do it.’

‘I bet a good few of our old comrades had the same idea.’