tower blocks, two-storey houses invested the spaces between the chimneys and the factories. His eyes were open as they passed the circle of a concrete stadium, preyed upon by its floodlights.
He dozed again, to be woken by the coughing of the taxi's engine. It faded, caught again, then died and the taxi began to slow down. The driver steered it to the kerb, then turned to Massinger apologetically, shrugging his meaning rather than speaking. Massinger pursed his features and nodded impatiently. The driver got out and went to the taxi's boot. Massinger saw him waving a petrol can at the window, nodded again, and then watched him in the mirror as he began to trudge back the way they had come. Massinger had no idea when they had last passed a garage.
Massinger sighed. He had no desire to be left to his own devices in the back of a taxi in the suburbs of Helsinki. He was suddenly hungry, and he needed the satisfying narcotic of alcohol — half a bottle of good wine, if his hotel stocked any. He wanted something to stifle the procession of speculations regarding Phillipson that had paraded through his fitful dreams.
The driver had left his radio on after reporting his whereabouts and his delayed return. Its splutter of incomprehensible Finnish grated on his nerves at first, but he found a superficial reassurance in it after a while. It was normal; utterly normal. He settled further in his seat, pulling his overcoat closer around him. The car was growing cold without the heater.
There were houses and bungalows set back from the quiet road; mere slabs of darkness without feature, pricked or squared by lights. Occasionally, a car passed him. His body continued to register the rapid drop in temperature inside the car. The windscreen and the windows began to steam over. He almost dozed again.
A bleep from the radio and another burst of Finnish woke him. He stretched his eyes, and saw the car, parked without lights across the quiet road from him. A pale Mercedes. He could see nothing behind the dark windscreen, but he sensed people inside. It was parked on the main road, not in the service road, and he knew it belonged to neither resident nor visitor.
Then the voice on the radio began speaking in heavily-accented English. It did not seem addressed to him — he knew it was but the voice never made that clear— but it referred to him by name. It referred to the taxi, to the taxi's delay, to the American passenger of the taxi. It was the despatcher at the company office informing someone of the temporary fate of the taxi Massinger had hired. Nothing more or less than that. But the voice spoke in English which he knew he was meant to understand and fear. Involuntarily, he glanced across the road at the parked car. No lights, but then the flare of a lighter or match. Then nothing again.
There was another scratch of static from the radio, followed by mumbled messages, replies from the despatcher, all once more in Finnish; incomprehensible. He fumbled with the handle, opened the door and climbed out of the taxi. The air chilled him. He stood with his hand still gripping the handle; whether for security or support he was uncertain. The darkened Mercedes remained still and lifeless, gathering menace. Two cars passed in quick succession, and then the road was silent and empty once more. Massinger was aware of the tiny distance that separated him from the Mercedes.
He stood there for minutes which had no precise shape or division. Then the headlights of the Mercedes flicked on and off three times, and the engine fired. The car pulled out and away, heading north. Massinger was gripped by a fear that it meant to make a U-turn and come back for him, but its tail-lights eventually disappeared over a slight rise in the straight road.
Massinger realised he was shivering uncontrollably, with relief and with the lingering sense of menace. Someone was trying very seriously to frighten him — had frightened him. He opened the door of the taxi and slumped like a boneless old man into the back seat. His heart was racing. He felt nauseous, weak and unwell, and pressed his hand against his thumping chest as if to quiet it. He felt perspiration growing chill on his forehead and around the collar of his shirt. He no longer wanted to go on with it or have anything at all to do with the fate of Kenneth Aubrey.
CHAPTER SEVEN:
The Zone of Occupation
If she kept her eyes closed, tightly closed for just one more moment, her father would walk out of that bright, wet haze where her tears refracted the sunlight through the branches of the old tree. It wouldn't just be Simmonds in the Bentley, or even Mummy sitting in the deep rear seat — it would be her father, smiling…
Margaret Massinger snapped upright in her chair, lifting her head, shaking it to remove the insidious past. Present, she reminded herself. Her attitude was still childlike, unevolved since the age of six, since times like the one she had just remembered, the end of the 1947 summer term at school. Even many months later, she still believed he would come. Mummy had made certain of that.
The body in the ruins that had been identified as that of Robert Castleford, in 1951, had been as much of a shock as if he had been murdered that day or the previous one. She had never been allowed to imagine that her father was dead or would not return — not for a single moment in five years. And he had indeed come back — as a hideous skeleton whose grinning, broken skull she had seen in grainy monochrome in a newspaper photograph. The placards had borne his name for days, the teachers and some of the older girls at school had reminded her by their looks and words for many weeks. Mummy had never coped with it. She had shut it out. To her, he would always, one philandering or amnesiac day, return to her; as he always had done.
After the sanatorium, the hospital, the mortuary, and finally the cemetery, her mother was buried next to the grinning skull of her husband. Margaret went to live with her paternal grandmother, where her relatives had, by degrees, explained her father to her. A warm man. Unfaithful, often. Everyone had assumed, without voicing the thought, that it had been a woman in Berlin who had been instrumental in his disappearance. Even after 1951, that assumption had continued. He had been killed by a jealous husband, another lover, by an enraged or abandoned woman.
It was her mother's image of him, however, that indelibly remained; the fictitious, idealised portrait of husband and father that so suited her years and her sense of loss. And it still continued plaguing and paining her.
Throughout her adult life, she had been able to comprehend her attitude to her father, explain it rationally to herself. Like stunted growth. Yet, like dwarfism, it was impossible to grow out of or beyond. She had only her child's veneration, nurtured in the hothouse atmosphere of her mother's quiet madness. Mummy had never admitted him to be less than a saint, a minor god. Never permitted any other view of Robert Castleford as her reason slipped beneath dark water.
And, after Mummy's death, grandmother had taken Robert Castleford up like a beacon with which to lead her granddaughter. Her memories of her father formed an enchanted circle from which she could not escape. Had never wanted to.
Handel was being played on the radio. There were crumbs of toast on the front page of The Sunday Times and on the lap of her dressing-gown. And the remains of a Valium sleep in her head, squeezing like a closing vice. She had never needed Valium since her marriage to Paul, and had only taken to it originally in the aftermath of a previous affair, when the pain and blackness of the first weeks had seemed like an echo of her mother's quiet madness. It was late. Almost midday.
The Insight article, a Sunday Times exclusive, became smudgy print once more. There was a damp spot where a tear had fallen. She still felt the first moment of shock at her father's picture, at Aubrey's picture, at an unidentified silhouette between the two snapshots, and at the headline, Menage a trois? Beneath that, even more pompously, The meaning of treason?
A warm man. Her grandmother had ignored her questions. Her beloved and only son's sexual peccadilloes were of no significance, and obviously allowable in such an able, brilliant, ambitious man. But, like dark jewels, sly and covert pieces of gossip had decorated her adolescence. His name had been associated with an abortion, an almost-expulsion from one school, desperate, ineffectual blackmail by one married woman, affairs…
Robert Castleford had attracted sexual indiscretion, and had always charmed it into harmlessness.
There was something else on the front page, too — something concerning 1974 and Germany, under the headline, Who else has been betrayed? She had begun to read it as a distraction — World Cup, Olympic massacre, advisory role for Aubrey, investigation, Gunther Guillaume… she could make little sense of it, and it possessed no
