‘My goodness, Mr Shanklin,’ Anna said, looking up from her glass of whisky, ‘should I go down on my knees and kiss your hand?’
Shanklin looked serene. ‘A most charming and worthy sentiment, my dear. But unnecessary. No, I persuaded my colleagues at ABCO to pursue a different course of action — one favoured, incidentally, by our Intelligence circles. I decided to let you both run free, financed by Pol, in order to find out just how far you would get. I wanted to find out just how strong, or how weak, ABCO’s wartime secrets were. I reckoned — I hope, justly — that as a journalist of above-average ability, you’d prove an excellent probe. If you couldn’t get at the full story — given your original inspiration, combined with the various helps and leads you had been given — then ABCO could be considered reasonably safe.
‘However, I still had to reckon with Pol. As I was careful to say, while some of our motives were similar, his methods have been rather different.’
‘He was in it for revenge,’ said Hawn.
‘That may have played a part, but only a small part. Pol’s motive was still to protect ABCO — it was simply that his method of doing so was to eliminate, one by one, the main protagonists and potential witnesses in the “Bettina” conspiracy.’
‘But why!’ said Anna. ‘Pol may be a rogue, but he’s no worse than the rest of you. And one thing is certain — he hates ABCO’s guts.’
Toby Shanklin looked down at her, chin on his chest, hands cupped together. ‘With respect, my dear girl, the people Pol never hates are those who bring him money. And Pol has — or had — a thriving little petroleum enterprise going in France which he wanted to expand. He was negotiating a deal with ABCO when I met you both. One of the further prices for that deal was that Pol share a hand in snuffing out this “Bettina” business. His job was to liquidate every witness down the line. He simply used both of you, as two apparent innocents, to lead the way down that line. And you — and he — were very successful. Except that you all made your own mistake.
‘You, Hawn, made the mistake of contacting me — on the prompting of the late lamented Prince Grotti Savoia. Admittedly, you would not have thought of getting on to Norman French, and without French your whole idea would probably have withered on the bough. No matter. I was alerted, and under the circumstances I knew what to do. But Pol’s mistake was more mysterious. He killed Rice.
‘Now here, apart from your fortuitous meeting with Pol and Robak in Venice, we come to the second and last real coincidence in this story. It was something which Pol should have checked out — or at least, which ABCO should have told him, if he hadn’t insisted on working entirely on his own. Six months ago, ABCO signed a deal with the East German Ministry of Trade to build a complex of petroleum-gas that will supply most of the Comecon countries. Because the deal is highly controversial, it has been kept secret. Rice was to be in charge of the German side of the deal.’
‘Rice doesn’t entirely make sense,’ said Hawn. ‘First I hear of him studying in a pre-war German University, with a British passport, then he’s working with one of the Nazis’ big industrial firms, and next he pops up as a so-called political refugee in the Caribbean, where he gets a top job working for ABCO. And it’s about this time that you come into the picture. The files show that you knew Rice — knew him well enough to have been travelling in the same car with him when a certain young British diplomat was killed, run over by you.’
‘It was Rice’s car, and he was driving. We must get that straight. As for the rest, I am not here to prove my innocence. Far from it. I simply want to get matters in perspective — so you don’t go running around with any other funny ideas. All right?’
Anna sucked in her breath; otherwise there was silence.
Shanklin stared into the fire. ‘Rice was a scientist. One of the best. And as a petroleum expert, he understood the workings — the political workings — of the oil industry backwards. In the war that became almost as important to the Germans as his scientific knowledge. He was also half English and bilingual, and could therefore pass himself off as a refugee. He had started by helping to co-ordinate the Middle East operation, by way of Istanbul — making the right contacts through certain British diplomatic circles there and in Ankara — and went on to recruit his own men, the chief of whom was Salak. He did so well that the Germans decided to sacrifice his services as a scientist and ship him over to the Caribbean, when the Mediterranean was becoming too hot for the Germans. So Rice was put in charge of the Mexico-Venezuela end — and I’ll hand it to him, he did it damn well.’
‘Hardly a very alluring personality,’ Hawn said, ‘if I’m to judge from what I saw of him this morning. It was Rice that Pol killed this morning, I suppose, and not some grotesque decoy-duck put up for shooting practice by the Vopos?’
‘No — it was Rice all right. That’s why the East Germans are so annoyed.’
‘So the East Germans are annoyed, are they? And what was their role in all this — apart from playing footsy with ABCO on some big petro-chemical deal? Hell, what was their moral stand? Rice’s knowledge has presented them with conclusive evidence of a massive war crime by the
