intellectual arrogance he was not even aware of. It sprang from an effortless intelligence, and yet he had untiring patience for those he perceived as genuinely limited. He treated the old, the poor, the unlearned with dignity. To him the great sin was unkindness.” He seemed to retreat further into memory, revisiting the past before his quarrel with John Reavley had bled the pleasure from it.
Matthew took the risk of probing. “I remember him as being completely without guile. Was that true, or just what I wanted to think?”
Chetwin gave a sharp little laugh. “Oh, that was true! He couldn’t tell a lie to save himself, and he wasn’t about to change what he was to please anyone, or to deceive them, even to gain his own ends.” His face became shadowed again, but his dark eyes were unreadable. “That was his weakness as well as his strength. He was incapable of deviousness, and
Matthew hesitated, wondering if he should admit to being in the intelligence services, and knowing that Chetwin was also. It might be a shortcut to gaining confidences. It would save time, take him nearer the truth. Or should he guard the little ammunition he had? Where were Chetwin’s loyalties? He was easy to like, and the ties of the past were strong. But perhaps that was exactly what had cost John Reavley his life.
“He was very worried about the present situation in the Balkans,” Matthew said. “Even though he died the day of the assassination, so he didn’t hear of it.”
“Yes,” Chetwin agreed. “I know he used to have a considerable interest in German affairs and had many German friends. He climbed in the Austrian Tyrol now and then when he was younger. He enjoyed Vienna, its music and its culture, and he read German, of course.”
“He discussed it with you?”
“Oh, yes. We had many friends in common in those days.” There was sadness in his voice and a gentleness that seemed entirely human and vulnerable. But if he was clever, it would do!
“Did he keep up with them, do you know?” Matthew asked. He was going to trail a faint thread of the truth in front of Chetwin, to see if he picked it up, or if he even noticed.
There was nothing guarded in Chetwin’s clever face. “I should imagine so. He was a man who kept his friends.” He gave a little grimace. “Except in my case, of course. But that was because he did not approve of my change in career. He felt it was immoral—deceitful, if you like.”
Matthew drew in his breath. It was like jumping into melted ice. “The intelligence services . . . yes, I know.” He saw Chetwin flinch so minutely it was no more than a shadow. Had he not been looking for it, he might not have recognized it as such. “I think it was because of you that he was so disappointed when I joined them as well,” he went on, and this time there was no mistaking the surprise. “You didn’t know?” he added.
Chetwin breathed out very slowly. “No . . . I didn’t.”
Matthew was in the presence of a master at guile, and he knew it. But he could play the game, too. “Yes. He didn’t approve of it, of course,” he said, smiling ruefully. “But he knew that we have our uses. Sometimes there is no one else to turn to.”
This time Chetwin hesitated.
Matthew smiled.
“Then he’d changed,” Chetwin said slowly. “He used to think there was always a better way. But I suppose you know that, also?”
“Something like that,” Matthew said noncommittally. He struggled for something else to pursue. He could not leave Chetwin, possibly the best source of hidden information about his father, without trying every conceivable avenue. “Actually, I think he had changed,” he said suddenly. “Something he said to me not long ago made me think he had begun to appreciate the value of discreet information.”
Chetwin’s eyebrows rose. “Oh?” He did not conceal the interest in his face.
Matthew hesitated, acutely aware of the potential danger of revealing too much to Chetwin. “Just the value of information,” he said finally, leaning back a little in his chair. “I never heard the rest of it. I thought it might matter. Whom would he have taken it to?”
“Information about what?” Chetwin asked.
Matthew was very careful. “I’m not sure. Possibly the situation in Germany.” That was probably far enough from the troubles in either Ireland or the Balkans to be safe.
Chetwin thought for a moment or two. “Best to go to the man at the top,” he said finally. “If it was important, it would reach Dermot Sandwell eventually.”
“Sandwell!” Matthew was surprised. Dermot Sandwell was a highly respected minister in the Foreign Office —an outstanding linguist, well traveled, a classicist and scholar. “Yes, I suppose it would. That is excellent advice.Thank you.”
Matthew stayed a little longer. Conversation moved from one thing to another: politics, memories, small gossip about Cambridgeshire. Chetwin had a vivid and individual turn of phrase describing people, and a sharp wit. Matthew could see very clearly why his father had liked him.
Half an hour later he rose to go, still uncertain whether his father had confided anything about the document to Chetwin or not, and if he had, whether doing so had been the catalyst for his death.
Matthew drove back to London that evening in heavy, thundery weather, wishing the storm would break and release the gray, choking air into rain to wash it clear.
Thunder rolled menacingly around the western rim of the clouds at about half past six as he was twenty miles south of Cambridge, gliding between deep hedges in full leaf. Then ten minutes later the lightning forked down to the ground and the rain dashed torrentially, bouncing up again from the smooth black road till he felt as if he were drowning under a waterfall. He slowed up, almost blinded by the downpour.
When it was gone, steam rose from the shimmering surface, a silver haze in the sun, and it all smelled like a Turkish bath.
On Monday morning the newspapers told the public that the king had reviewed 260 ships of the Royal Navy at the Spithead base, and that the naval reserves had been called up on orders from the first lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, and the first sea lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg. There was no word whatever of Austria’s ultimatum to Serbia on the reparations demanded for the death of the archduke.
Calder Shearing sat at his desk staring grimly ahead of him into the distance. Matthew stood, not yet given permission to sit.
“Means nothing,” Shearing said to Matthew darkly. “I’m told there was a secret meeting in Vienna yesterday. I wouldn’t be surprised if they push it to the limit. Austria can’t be seen to back down. If they did, then all their territories would think they could assassinate people. That’s the damn shame of it.” He muttered something else under his breath, and Matthew did not ask him to repeat it. “Sit down!” he said impatiently. “Don’t hover like that as if you were about to go. You aren’t! We’ve all these reports to go through.” He indicated a pile of papers on his desk.
It was a comfortable room, but there were no family photographs, nothing to indicate where he had been born or grown up. Even its functionality was anonymous, clever rather than personal. The Arabic brass dish and bowl were beautiful but of no meaning. Matthew had asked him about them once. Similarly the watercolor paintings of a storm blowing up over the South Downs, and another of dying winter light over the London Docks, the black spars of a clipper sharp and straight against the sky; neither carried any personal significance.
The conversation moved to Ireland and the situation in the Curragh, which was still a cause of anxiety. It was far from resolved.
Shearing swore softly and imaginatively, more to himself than for Matthew’s benefit. “How could we be so bloody stupid as to get ourselves into this mess!” he said, his jaw so tight the muscles stood out in his neck. “The Protestants were never going to let themselves be absorbed by the Catholic south. They were bound to resort to violence, and our men would never have fired on them. Any damn fool knows they’ll not shoot their own—and so you’ve got a mutiny!” His dark face was flushed. “And we can’t let mutiny go unpunished, so we’ve painted ourselves into an impossible corner! How stupid do you have to be not to see that coming? It’s like being caught by surprise when it snows in January!”
“I thought the government was consulting the king,” Matthew replied.
Shearing looked up at him. “Oh, they are! They have! And what happens if the king sides with the Ulster Loyalists? Has anybody thought of that?”
Matthew clenched inside. He had been too consumed with the murder of his father, and the question of the
