'I know! I know! It is all in that book you gave me, the one with the big coloured pictures.'
'Good—so you liked my book?' Narva set the boy down.
'Now there are many other books in your bedroom for you to see. Your brother and sister are there already, and there is a tall glass of fizzy orange for you, but if you don't hurry the fizz will have all fizzed away. So off you go and I will come dummy2
and see you tucked up in bed and we will discuss pirates—'
'—And how to blow them out of the water?'
'Exactly!' Narva watched Manfred scuttle away, his eyes warm. Nor did their warmth diminish as he raised them to Manfred's mother, Richardson noted. What had once been a debt of guilt and honour was something more than that now, evidently.
Sophie von Hotzendorff's glance shuttled uneasily between Audley and Narva. 'There is trouble, Eugenio—for you to want me to bring the children—?'
Narva nodded. 'But you will be safe here, Sophie.'
'Safe?' She looked at Audley.
'It concerns your husband, Frau von Hotzendorff,' said Audley. 'It is to do with what he was doing when— before he died.'
'But I do not—did not—know in detail what he was doing. He would never tell me, apart from his work for the business. I told you so when we met, Dr. Audley—and it was the truth.'
'Yet you did not tell me everything that was the truth—there were things you didn't tell me.'
The blue eyes turned in doubt to Narva.
'It's all right, Sophie my dear,' Narva's voice was reassuring.
'He knows about Westphal.'
'Then there is nothing else to know. I didn't lie to you, or to the man I saw in London, except in that.'
dummy2
'Your husband told you what to say if . . . if he didn't come out?'
Sophie nodded. 'Yes, Dr. Audley. If a man named Westphal—
or giving that name—came to me I was to go at once with him, with the children. He said we were to take nothing with us, just to lock the door and go as though we were visiting the neighbours next door.'
That was the Westphal trademark. For every client everything was laid on, everything prepared. And paid for.
'But not to tell us?'
The delicate hair shook the answer.
'He sent that message to you?'
'No. He told me before he left ... for the last time.'
'So you knew he was doing something very dangerous?'
'I knew he was risking his life for us.' Sophie swallowed and her neck muscles tightened momentarily. 'But I'd known that for some time, Dr. Audley.'
'How did you know—if he didn't tell you about it?'
'How does a wife know anything?' Sophie swallowed again.
'The man—the man in London—he said Richard was a good agent, that he was always very careful. But I know even better that ... he was a good man . . . that he was a good husband and a good father. Although he was older he never seemed like it to us—he used to say we had given him a second lease of life. And it was true. . . .'
dummy2
The emotions beneath the simple words were on a cruelly tight rein. But what was clear from both (unless she was a marvellously accomplished liar even when there was no need for lies) was that the little carrier of second- class mail, the limping salesman of agricultural machinery, had been a big man to his Rhinemaiden, and that he had impressed her every bit as much as he had impressed Eugenio Narva. And if that didn't fit the pictures in the file it was the pictures that deceived: like the poet said, it was all in the eye of the beholder— the cornflower-blue eye.
'But then he was different. . . .'
No one seemed to want to ask the next question, in the hope that the answer would come unasked.
'He was worried; he was terribly worried each time he went on a sales trip. And when he came back he was so tired—
instead of taking the children out he pretended he was still getting over the flu—he'd just had a nasty bout of it in Moscow—'
'He pretended?' Audley repeated gently.
'He pretended he'd been to the doctor and got some little white pills he took, but he hadn't been at all—when I went to the doctor about Lotte's tonsils I asked him, and he said Richard hadn't been near him in ages. ... He was sick—he wouldn't eat and so he lost weight—but it was worry he was sick with. And I knew it wasn't the business because Frau Krauss told me how well they were doing, and how pleased they were with Richard—she is the sales director's secretary dummy2
—'
