The Ways of the World Read online

  ‘I’ll call in at Scotland Yard tomorrow and have a word with Denslow’s boss,’ said Appleby when Max had finished. ‘I’ve already spoken to him on the blower and I’m confident there’ll be no charges brought against you. Killing Tarn could be regarded as a public service. You’ll have to appear at the inquest, of course, along with Brigham. But that’ll be a formality.’

  ‘I want to get back to Paris as soon as possible.’

  ‘I’m sure you do. And you’ll want to hear my news, as well.’

  ‘Is it good news?’

  ‘Some of it is, yes. Which is probably as much as we can ever hope for in this life.’

  Appleby’s account began with Sam’s impulsive decision – inspired, as it turned out – to sabotage Brigham’s Daimler. The car’s subsequent delivery to the Majestic garage for repairs, not by Brigham but by Norris, initiated a chain of events that led to Sam walking into a trap in Nadia Bukayeva’s flat.

  ‘Norris must have decided to eliminate Twentyman for fear his plan to cast suspicion on Brigham would fall apart once we discovered he had the use of the Daimler. I think le Singe was trying to tell you the driver of that car was your enemy, you see. What he didn’t know was that there were two drivers. And what Norris didn’t know was that Morahan had followed him to Little Russia, so was able to intervene before they could dump Twentyman in the Seine.’

  ‘How’s Sam now?’

  ‘Recuperating at the Hôtel Dieu. The drug they used left him pretty groggy, but he’ll soon be up and about. He asked me to say hello.’

  ‘Good old Sam.’

  ‘And good old Morahan. Why he should have bothered to involve himself I don’t really understand, but I’m glad he did. Twentyman had left me a note about Norris’s use of the car, but it would have been far too late for him by the time I read it. As it was, Morahan telephoned me from the hospital and put me in the picture.’

  ‘Have you got Norris in custody? Is that what you meant about him no longer posing a threat?’

  ‘I couldn’t have taken him into custody even if I’d had the chance, Max. Nor could the French police. I’d been warned off by the Permanent Under-Secretary and Foreign Office staff enjoy diplomatic immunity, remember.’

  ‘Nadia Bukayeva doesn’t, though.’

  ‘Good point. And one not lost on me. I hoiked Zamaron out of bed and persuaded him he should arrest her for conspiracy to murder Twentyman and probable complicity in her uncle’s murder as well. Time was of the essence, of course. I was afraid she’d already have done a bunk.’

  ‘And had she?’

  ‘Oh, yes. It looked like she’d packed some clothes before leaving. I think we can assume she’s not planning to return to Paris in the near future.’

  ‘She must have been the traitor in the Trust Pa was offering to identify.’

  ‘That’s how I read it. But working for Lemmer rather than the Cheka. Or maybe for Lemmer as well as the Cheka.’

  ‘Had Norris gone too?’

  ‘Not exactly. Though gone he certainly had in one sense.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We found him in Nadia’s flat, Max. Him and his assistant, Dobson. Both shot dead.’

  ‘Nadia killed them?’

  ‘Who else? She must have ice in her veins. I imagine she opted for a scorched-earth policy once she realized Norris’s plans were miscarrying. Perhaps she calculated he’d decide to kill her rather than risk her confessing all under interrogation, improbable though it seems to me that any interrogator could get more out of her than she was willing to give. Whatever her reasons, though, she carried it off efficiently. Two clean head shots. Bang bang, they’re dead.’

  ‘And she got away?’

  ‘Clean away, I regret to say.’

  Appleby sighed and thrust his pipe, with which he had been fiddling, back into his pocket, apparently concluding that lighting it in a hospital was out of the question. But he burrowed in his bag and pulled out a bottle of whisky with a satisfied smirk that suggested he regarded it as a more than adequate substitute. A grubby tumbler also emerged, inscribed SE & CR, evidently purloined from the train. He poured himself a generous measure and sloshed some into Max’s water glass.

  ‘Your health, Max.’

  ‘Well, despite the setting, I don’t feel too bad. And being the subject of a police inquiry does get you a private room here, so I’m not complaining.’ Max raised his glass and took a sip. ‘Even so, I’d have discharged myself by now if I had a home to go to. Denslow put the flat out of bounds.’

  ‘He tells me he’s finished with the flat now. And you could always visit your family, of course.’

  ‘Not a good idea. As soon as the police are off my back, I’ll head for Paris. Tomorrow, I hope, if you can do your stuff at Scotland Yard.’

  ‘You don’t really need to go back to Paris, Max. You’ve killed the man who killed your father. The man who hired the killer is also dead. And Zamaron’s confident the magistrate will approve Madame Dombreux’s release now it’s obvious Spataro was one of Tarn’s victims. You’ve done all that could have been expected of you – more, frankly, than I thought you were capable of.’

  ‘But Norris was only one of many spies in Lemmer’s network. And your condition for helping me, as I recall, was that I track down Lemmer for you.’

  ‘With Norris dead and Miss Bukayeva gone with the wind, I’d put your chances of doing that at close to zero. I could and maybe I should encourage you to persist. It’s what my boss would expect me to do. You might turn up some other spies and they might take us closer to Lemmer. But you’ve had several narrow escapes already.’ Appleby paused and looked at Max thoughtfully, then went on. ‘My son would be the same age as you, if he hadn’t been killed at Loos, you know. He was a volunteer too.’

  ‘You’ve never mentioned him before.’

  ‘No occasion to. I shouldn’t drink Scotch, really. It makes me sentimental. Oh, before I forget, you might like to know what I’ve found out about the Contingencies Memorandum. It’s keeping Carver and a few others in the American delegation awake at night. No one will give me chapter and verse, but I gather it’s a document in which President Wilson sets out variations to be made to his supposedly inviolable Fourteen Points – his much-vaunted programme for world peace – if certain contingencies arise during the peace conference. Some of those variations wouldn’t paint him in an honourable light. If it reached the press, there’d be hell to pay. So, if your father got hold of an authentic copy …’

  ‘It would have fetched a high price at auction, so to speak.’

  ‘It would. And if it was in that safe-deposit box of his …’

  ‘It might already be in Lemmer’s possession.’

  ‘Indeed it might.’

  ‘Doesn’t that possibility worry you?’

  ‘Personally, no. Why should I care if he throws a spanner in the conference works? Departmentally, I should probably hope he does. American embarrassment equals British advantage.’ Appleby shrugged and topped up his glass. ‘Peace is almost as dirty a business as war.’

  ‘You should drink Scotch more often, Appleby. It mellows you.’

  Appleby grunted, apparently considering mellowness an accusation bordering on the insulting. ‘Have you found out what your father was raising money for yet?’

  ‘Corinne Dombreux and a comfortable life with her, probably in Brazil. He planned to invest the money in a business venture of Ribeiro’s.’

  ‘Ah.’ Appleby looked almost disappointed. ‘So that was all it was.’

  Or was it? After Appleby had gone, Max turned out the light and lay watching raindrops forming at intervals on the uncurtained window of his room. The sky beyond the window was black, the rain falling from clouds he could not see. The truth, it struck him, was like that, revealing itself, if at all, only by its effect on something else. He had the sense that there was a greater, darker truth beyond all that he had so far learnt. Why had his father appointed him his executor if not to discover what
that was? Had the safe-deposit box hidden the secret? Or was it hidden somewhere else, still waiting to be found? If Max gave up now, he would never know for certain, never quite be able to dismiss from his mind the fear that he had turned his back on what his father had died for. And that, he knew, he could not bear.

  MAX HAD PERSUADED Appleby it would be best if they went to Scotland Yard together the following morning. The doctor who had treated him on his admission raised no more than a token objection to discharging him and conjectured that Brigham would be fit enough to leave within a few days as well. ‘You should go gently, though, Mr Maxted. You have youth on your side, of course, but the body takes its own sweet time to recover from the sort of thing you’ve put it through lately, young or not.’

  Max assured the doctor he would lead a quiet life for the next few weeks, which he had no intention of doing. He headed for the flat first, for a change of clothes, where he was intercepted by the head porter, anxious for a word about the events of the night before last. Max brushed the poor fellow off with an assurance that there would be no further visits from the police, then hurried on to Scotland Yard.

  Appleby was waiting for him at the bottom of Whitehall, puffing contentedly at his pipe. He led Max into Metropolitan Police headquarters with the air of a man returning to his natural domain. Several people they passed greeted him cheerfully. Their destination was the office of Chief Superintendent Mappin, a genial fellow with a booming voice who also seemed pleased to see Appleby – and Max, to judge by his warm handshake and prompt assurance that his force were not about to cause problems for a young gentleman who had saved the life of a senior civil servant and despatched a foreign assassin into the bargain. ‘Tarn, you think his name was? Well, we’ll ask our French colleagues if they know him. Then the Belgians, if they don’t. Then … Well, maybe someone will claim him, maybe they won’t. I take it we can agree, Horace, that we’re all better off without him?’

  ‘Very much so, Bill. We think he was responsible for several murders in Paris. A nasty piece of work in every way.’

  ‘And the fewer of those we have on the streets of London, the happier I am. The coroner will have the final say, of course, Mr Maxted, but we’ll tell him we’re satisfied you killed Tarn in self-defence. We’ll need a signed statement from you before you leave and you’ll be required to give evidence at the inquest in due course. Oh, and we’ll have to hang on to the gun until then. Strictly speaking, you don’t have a licence for it, but we’ll overlook that, shall we? Forgot to hand it in when you were demobbed, I dare say, like a lot of you chaps.’

  ‘I was certainly glad of it on Tuesday night, Chief Superintendent,’ said Max.

  ‘I’m sure you were, Mr Maxted. Glad and no mistake.’

  Accommodating as Mappin was, Max was not able to leave Scotland Yard before the morning had stretched into the afternoon. The dictating, typing and signing of a statement absorbed a laborious couple of hours and he was also fingerprinted – ‘for the purposes of elimination’, according to Denslow.

  Appleby left while Max was waiting for his statement to be typed. They exchanged parting words in a corridor.

  ‘If you decide not to go back to Paris, Max, I’ll understand.’ It was as close as Appleby seemed able to come to repeating his advice of the night before.

  ‘I’ll be on tonight’s sleeper,’ said Max. He wanted no misunderstanding on the point.

  ‘Then you’ll be ahead of me by twenty-fours hours. As a personal favour, try not to get into any more trouble before I catch up with you.’

  Max smiled. ‘I will try.’

  He returned to Mount Street to pack his bag, only to encounter the head porter again. Mrs Harrison had been and gone, considerably put out by the state she had found the flat in and alarmed in particular by the bloodstains in the bathroom.

  But Mrs Harrison had not been the only caller. A Daily Mail reporter had been there, asking questions. ‘We had a lot of trouble getting rid of him, Mr Maxted, I don’t mind telling you. I shouldn’t be surprised if he came back.’ Max proffered an apology and decided to spend most of his time elsewhere before boarding the sleeper.

  The reporter was not the end of it, however. ‘Your solicitor’s been looking for you as well.’ Of course. Mellish was still expecting to be given some kind of instructions about the estate. It was predictable – though Max had failed to predict it – that he would come to London. Unfortunately, as the head porter revealed, Mellish had met Mrs Harrison. He therefore knew everything that had happened. He might easily take it into his head to inform Ashley, a complication Max could do without.

  He hastened up to the flat and telephoned the solicitor’s office in Epsom, hoping Mellish had returned there by now. But he had not. Max left a message, asking him to take no action until they had spoken. He could only hope that would cover it.

  He went to Victoria station and bought a ticket for the eight o’clock sleeper, then took himself off to the Tate Gallery, where he spent more time in the tea-room than he did admiring the art, a commodity for which he had never had much use. Rain forced him on to a bus for the return journey to Victoria. The Londoners he was jammed in with grumbled about the weather and the coal shortage and the incompetence of the government – concerns that seemed a million miles away to Max.

  The concourse at Victoria was bustling with commuters and luggage-laden Continental travellers. Max bought some cigarettes for the journey – though, oddly, he had still not quite recovered his taste for them – and headed for the departures board.

  ‘James!’

  He recognized George Clissold’s voice with some surprise and turned to see his uncle approaching through the crowd. ‘Uncle George? What are you doing here?’

  ‘Looking for you, my lad, at your mother’s bidding. She wants to speak to you.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘She’s waiting for us in the station hotel. And she’s already waited long enough to test her temper.’

  ‘I have a train to catch.’

  ‘I know. But it doesn’t leave for half an hour yet. Shall we?’

  Max had no choice but to walk with George in the direction of the hotel entrance. He was not ready to face his mother, but it seemed he was going to have to.

  ‘How did you find me?’ he asked as they steered as straight a course as they could contrive through the streams of arriving and departing passengers.

  ‘Mellish alerted your mother to your latest brush with death.’ Damn the fellow, thought Max. Why had he had to go and do that? ‘He mentioned you got yourself shot in Paris as well. Win’s a phlegmatic character, but it’s fair to say she’s worried about you. You should have kept her informed, James, you really should.’

  ‘I was trying not to worry her.’

  ‘Well, you failed, I’m afraid. She’s been to Mount Street and extracted all the details from the porters. She’s also visited Brigham.’

  ‘She has?’

  ‘Let’s not pretend we don’t both know about Win and that blighter. I can only hope she doesn’t start seeing him again now he’s done something vaguely heroic. You were the one who saved the day, though, weren’t you?’

  ‘Well, I—’

  ‘Yet here you are, scuttling off back to Paris without a by-your-leave. Win guessed that’s what you’d do. It was her idea to come here. You’re a far bigger mystery to me than you are to her. Have you found out what got Henry killed?’

  ‘Yes. And Mother won’t enjoy hearing about it. I suppose I …’

  ‘Wanted to spare her the truth?’

  ‘As long as I could, yes.’

  ‘Well, my lad, the time’s come. You’re just going to have to spit it out.’

  Lady Maxted was waiting, with tea set before her, in a quiet, palm-dotted lounge of the hotel. She greeted Max with a frown that blended pride at his derring-do with bafflement at his eagerness to slip back to France without telling her what he had learnt. But there was something else in her gaze as well: relief.

  ‘You
look better than I’d feared, James. Mr Mellish said you’d been shot.’

  ‘That makes it sound worse than it was. I’m fine.’

  ‘And this appalling attack you and Mr Brigham were so lucky to survive?’

  ‘We were lucky, yes. But survive we did, with nothing worse than a few bruises to show for it.’

  ‘You’ve uncovered the truth about Henry’s death, haven’t you?’

  Denial was pointless. ‘Yes, Mother, I have.’

  ‘When you left Gresscombe Place last month, you promised to tell me what you learnt before you told anyone else.’

  ‘I still don’t know everything. I didn’t want to …’

  ‘Shock me?’

  Max forced himself to look her in the eye. ‘It’s not an altogether pretty story.’

  ‘I never thought it would be.’

  ‘Even so …’

  ‘I think I’d better hear it, James. Ashley doesn’t know I’m here, by the way. I didn’t alert him to Mr Mellish’s call. So, I’ll be free to decide whether to disclose any information you give me to him and Lydia – or not. Don’t imagine I’m unappreciative of the efforts you’ve made and the risks you’ve taken. But I’m entitled, as your mother, as your father’s widow, to be told what led Henry to his death. And don’t worry about missing your train either. George and I will be travelling with you to Dover. That should give us all the time we need.’

  PROMISING THE WHOLE truth was easier than delivering it. Even as Max recounted to his mother what he had discovered in Paris, he was aware of omitting almost as much as he revealed. Lady Maxted seemed to be aware of this as well. She did not press for information about the woman Sir Henry had planned to spend his retirement with. Nor did she ask for details of his scheme to raise money to fund their life together. It was enough, apparently, for her to know why he had been murdered and by whom – that his murderer was dead and that the man who had commissioned his murder was also dead. Justice, after a fashion, had been served. And of that she was glad in her own sombre, reflective way.