Nerves took hold of Zimmermann, unformed but gathering fears. He should have provided the man with an escort, with protection.
Margaret Massinger was speaking.
'What—?' he asked abruptly.
'I didn't realise that Andrew Babbington was in Bonn during that period,' she repeated, undisturbed by his tone.
'Oh — yes, he headed the team of interrogating officers that MI5 sent over, a few days after Guillaume was arrested,' Zimmermann replied absently, watching the barge, flying its signals of colourful washing, move upriver towards the Kennedybrucke.
'No, he was here before that,' Margaret continued. 'Some internal investigation in the Chancery section of the British embassy — misappropriation of funds, it says here.'
Zimmermann turned from the window. 'That is not unusual…' he began with heavy humour.
The door opened, and Paul appeared.
'Well?' Margaret asked breathlessly, almost at once. Zimmermann saw the certainty on Massinger's face, and quailed inwardly. He doubted he could help save Aubrey by helping them. Massinger believed in Aubrey's guilt, that much was evident; just as it was evident he wished to conceal that conviction from his wife. 'What did you find out?' she asked ominously.
Massinger laid his raincoat across the back of a chair and sat beside her. The man seemed to have no masks left; Zimmermann could see that any effort at deception would fail miserably.
'It's no more than speculation,' he began.
'What is?' Margaret snapped.
'Your father — it's a crazy, wild guess — Aubrey was wrong, I'm certain of it…'
'What?' Her tone was icy.
Zimmermann turned once more to the window. The barge with its hoisted washing was slipping beneath the Kennedybrucke now, bereft of colour. No more than another black slug on grey.
It had begun to snow once more. He remembered that Massinger's grey hair had sparkled with wetness when he came through the door. Zimmermann wished to excuse himself, he was inwardly hunched against Massinger's reply. He refused to listen to it, nonsense that it was… a fate deserved. If true, Aubrey had known, would have been sure.
'No—!' Margaret almost screamed. 'No, no, no, no!' The stain was too great, the smear. What Zimmermann had divined from his own conversation with Disch had become clear to Massinger, too. Perhaps Disch himself, on reflection, had also come to believe it. Now, Margaret Massinger was trying to reject the suspicion they all shared. Not that — above all, not that… Her father could not be at one with the mass-murderers of the six million, the maniacs, the slaughterers, the deformed, the misfits, the thugs and torturers — not
She was sobbing now, he was murmuring useless comforts, having caused her distress. Zimmermann had hoped Disch might have concealed what he suspected, but had not believed he would.
'No, no, no, no…' she was murmuring.
Stop, he thought. Stop it. It was useless to suspect, more pointless to believe, most futile to know. It was almost forty years ago. She had to shake it off — both of them had to exorcise her father's ghost. It might be a matter of life and death — theirs…
Snow, snail-tracks once more on the window, long slow barges, the steely river — the barge with the washing, and her words at that point, just before the barge slipped out of sight beneath and beyond the bridge…?
Babbington. Sir Andrew Babbington. The Director-General of MI5.
Read the will, he thought. When the body is discovered in the library and the rich old lady is pronounced murdered, read the will— Who has most to gain? Who benefits? Who becomes rich?
He smiled. Margaret's sobs and the soft, coaxing words of her husband no longer impinged upon him. He felt only an impatience to study the files.
Babbington… read the will, Inspector, read the will…
Sir Kenneth Aubrey could think of nothing other than the destruction of the journal in Clara Elsenreith's possession. The idea of its continued existence was frightening and painful to him, but all other thought frightened and pained him more. Beyond the destruction of his confession to Castleford's murder lay nothing. An empty landscape. Perhaps he could hide with Clara for days, even weeks. After that, however, there was nothing. Only his disappearance, an act of willed disguise, anonymity, denial of his former self. He would have to find somewhere to skulk as Herr Jones, or Monsieur Smith or Signer Smith or Senor Jones for the rest of his life. He could never be Kenneth Aubrey again.
One of the Frenchmen who shared his compartment had removed his shoes and stretched his legs. His socks smelt in the over-warm, dry atmosphere. The sleeping child in the farthest corner of the compartment murmured, shifted. Her mother adjusted her arms about her. The express was less than an hour from Strasbourg. He would be in Vienna the following day.
The French newspapers carried nothing concerning his disappearance from England. Evidently, it had not been made public. There were stories, of course; peculiar and witty Gallic cruelties regarding himself, British Intelligence, Britain itself. But nothing of his current whereabouts. The secrecy did not comfort him. Instead, he saw it as a signpost on the road towards his inevitable disappearance into another identity. Already, the press had lost sight of him, and that was only the beginning. Unlike the traitors, for him there wasn't even a Moscow where he could arrive in safety and remain himself.
All he was able to do was to destroy the written evidence of his guilt. There was nothing better or more or greater to hope for. The early edition of
Now, he would never do that again.
He did not love power — no, he resisted that insinuating accusation that popped out of the darkness at the back of his mind. No… but it had been forty-five years since he had begun to serve his country, since he had begun to be the person he thought himself to be. Now, he had to relinquish that country, that person.
Brainwashing experiments, he thought suddenly in an irrational, unnerving way. Suspension of the body from buoyant slings in tepid water. In no more than days, one was left with a clean sheet. The utter absence of physical sensation completely erased the personality. No memory, no opinions, no person. It had begun to happen to him.
The express rattled over points, swayed, then clicked on into the winter night. The lights of another country station. A railway employee — some guard or porter or station-master or signalman — had watched the train pass. Aubrey recognised that he might become that anonymous man past whom the world would rush and disappear into the distance.
Tears pricked his tired eyes. Sleep would not come. The odour of the Frenchman's socks mingled with that of half-melted sweets from the opposite corner of the compartment.
Petrunin's eyes opened. They seemed, impossibly, to fall open rather than be revealed by the raising of the eyelids. The man's face was drawn and grey, but the only visible blood on his face was old and dry. Hyde's breath escaped in a ragged, elongated moan of relief. The noise of the helicopter had returned and then had faded once more as he had sat hunched against the man he thought was dead, his head listening for some betraying heartbeat against the wetness of Petrunin's blouse. It had almost stopped snowing. Hyde could see the black sticks of the nearest stunted trees against the whiteness of the ground. But Petrunin was alive — just.
'Why?' Hyde said at once, seeing that the Russian's eyes remained unfocused, inward-staring. 'What was the reason for it?'
