Closed Circle (29 page)

"And you took him up on the offer?"

"Certainly I did. It was about the only one I was likely to get. Fleet Street wasn't going to roll out the red carpet to welcome me back. The Alnwick Advertiser was the best I could do. So, I buried myself here, in rural obscurity, and tried to forget. What was the point of remembering? The war had happened. Nothing could change that."

"What about Brosch?"

"It took a lot of letters to the Austrian Embassy to find out what had happened to him. But I succeeded in the end. He'd done what he'd said he would. At the outbreak of war, he'd taken command of a field regiment on the Galician front. He was killed in action during the Battle of Rava Russka on the sixth of September, 1914. A mercifully early exit, I suppose, although I can't help wondering whether he was hit by enemy fire or .. ."

"A bullet in the back?"

"Something like that. I never named him, even to Grey, but if they had known .. . they'd have killed him for certain."

"They didn't kill you."

"Dead journalists are more difficult to explain away. If they knew I'd got to Grey, they might have thought my sudden quietus would make him think twice. A liaison with a sailor-boy on Clapham Common discredited the message as well as the messenger. Altogether more effective."

"And they've left you alone ever since?"

"I've left them alone. I've kept my head down for twelve years. I've been no trouble to anyone."

"Until now. Why take the risk of contacting me?"

"Because Charnwood's death meant I didn't have so much to fear. And because the circumstances of his death gave me a glimmer of hope that I might still be able to nail the bastards." He stared at me defiantly, as if the rum were at last bolstering his confidence. "Well, why not? Since the war, I've rumbled them. Why they did it. What they got out of it. Money, Mr. Horton. You've seen how it flowed into the pockets of arms dealers, munitions manufacturers, military and naval suppliers.. . You've seen the war make millionaires as well as widows. Here. And all over Europe. They reaped the profit. Just as they meant to."

"It doesn't prove they had a hand in Franz Ferdinand's assassination."

"No. No more than it proves they killed Charnwood. But I'm certain they did."

"Why? Why should they turn on one of their own?"

"Who knows? Because he knew too much? Because he was putting pressure on them? Maybe his financial problems had forced him to try and call in some old debts. Whatever the reason, I think he was killed by the organization he'd created, leaving your friend to take the blame. In fact, I'm sure of it." So was I now. No other explanation made sense. But if the Concentric Alliance did exist, it was too powerful for either of us to defeat. Perhaps Charnwood's death demonstrated its ability to crush any individual, however clever, however important. If so, Max was simply an incidental victim who could never be avenged or exonerated. Just as the truth of what Charnwood had done could never be exposed. "Got what you wanted, Mr. Horton? Had all your questions answered?"

"Yes," I murmured.

"Good. And what are you going to do now you know it all?" Duggan's stare hardened. His eyes focused on me more closely. I gazed back helplessly, unable to disguise my inadequacy that was merely a mirror of his own. "As I thought," he said. "Just like me. Not a damn thing."

CHAPTER

ELEVEN

It was almost dark when I dropped Duggan near his lodgings in Alnwick. After all the revelations that had spilled from his lips, I think we were both eager to part. Neither of us relished the strange intimacy the sharing of such a secret gave rise to. It was too late to draw back, of course. We could not unlearn what we knew. But we could at least be rid of each other.

I left Duggan with the impression that I was starting back for London straightaway. But I required one last confirmation of what he had said before I accepted it as wholly true and accepted also my powerlessness to clear Max's name. I required the clinching word of an Old Wykehamist. So I drove north, not south. Seven miles north, through drab and ever darkening countryside to the village of Christon Bank. According to Duggan, Lord Grey lived nearby. And so he did. The post mistress told me Fallodon Hall lay half a mile further on.

There was hardly any light left when I arrived and none at all beneath the thickly planted trees surrounding the house. It was a solid unpretentious country gentleman's residence, with so few signs of life that I feared its master might be absent. But not so. The maid who answered the door said Lord Grey was at home and, when I asked if an Old Wykehamist might pay his respects, the message soon came back that he was more than welcome.

Sir Edward, Viscount Grey of Fallodon, politician, statesman, ornithologist and fly-fisherman of repute, was a lean gaunt man of about seventy, who greeted me with quavering courtesy beside a roaring fire. The maid had forewarned me of his virtual blindness, which I might not otherwise have guessed at, for he hid it well. There was only a single missed button on his cardigan to give the game away.

"I have few passing visitors in this remote spot, Mr. Horton," he said after ordering tea and showing me to an armchair. "It was good of you to think of calling. I still manage to get down to Winchester at least once a year. Do you're-visit the old place often?"

"Not as often as I should like, sir. When I was last there, I took a look at War Cloister. A most tasteful memorial. I believe you laid the foundation stone." (Not in vain had I perused the copies of The Wykehamist so stubbornly sent to Max and me over the years.)

"I did, yes."

"All too many of my contemporaries are listed there."

"Are they? My condolences, Horton. Yours was an unfortunate generation."

"Indeed we were. As has become apparent to me only recently."

"Recently? I don't quite..."

"Following the death in August this year of the financier, Fabian Charnwood."

"Charnwood, you say? I don't think I .. ."

"You remember, sir. I'm sure you do. You see, I've been speaking to George Duggan. And he's been telling me the most extraordinary story. I gather you lent him a helping hand some years ago."

"I may have. But as to any yarn he's been spinning you, well, I'm sure you know how imaginative journalists can be."

"Yes, sir. But I believe this particular yarn. And so, I rather think, do you."

Grey frowned. "If Duggan has told you what it seems he has, I confess myself surprised. I had understood his lips to be sealed on the subject."

"Only while Charnwood lived."

"And your interest in this matter is .. . ?"

"Personal. The man charged with Charnwood's murder who's also since died was a friend of mine. A Wykehamist too, by the name of Max Wingate. We fought together. In the war. As you said, ours was an unfortunate generation." Grey winced, as if pained by guilty remembrance. I knew then, as he passed a hand across his face and thought perhaps of how much harder he should have striven in 1914 to stem the tide, that he would tell me as much as he could. No secrets would be allowed to stand between one Wykehamist and another.

Tea had long since come and gone by the time I finished explaining what had brought me to Lord Grey's door. He listened patiently, nodding sympathetically at intervals, with his eyes closed more often than they were open. He did not once interrupt, but sat forward in his chair, hunched in concentration. And then, before I could put to him the questions I had in mind, he answered them.

"You will want to know if Duggan's account of our meeting is accurate. Well, it is. I used the cottage at Itchen Abbas as a week-end retreat from the cares of Whitehall. It meant I could fish the Itchen, as I had at Winchester. And the reach by the cottage was .. . quite sublime. But it was not much of a retreat that week-end in July 1914. Not with Nicolson on the telephone from the office every five minutes. And then Duggan appearing in the garden. Perhaps I should have stayed in London. He would not have been able to pour out his allegations to me then. Which might have saved him from a prison sentence and me ... well, a deal of heart-searching, shall we say? And I might have discovered that my mediation proposal had not been passed on to Vienna until after the expiry of their dead-line. Duggan was quite right in one sense. There was treachery everywhere. I had no idea how much. If I had understood the full extent of it, I would have.. . But what use are regrets now? I did my best. I was not to know others were doing their worst. Nevertheless, in the long cold watches of the night, I do sometimes wonder what would have happened .. . whether it might all have turned out differently ... if I had listened to Duggan.

"You will also want to know if I think there really was a Concentric Alliance. Well, I do not know. Obviously, I did not think so at the time. But, since the war ended, so much that is ambiguous and contradictory about the events in Sarajevo has emerged that I am no longer certain of anything. I looked into the matter in some detail when I composed my memoirs a few years ago. And I came across some very disturbing facts. For instance, one of Princip's accomplices, a boy called Cabrinovitch, was known to the Sarajevo police. He had been expelled from the country in 1912. Two days before the assassination, he was seen and recognized. But the Chief of Police ordered that he be left alone. One cannot help wondering why. Then there is the question of the prussic acid. Why would the Black Hand have wanted its agents to live long enough to confess, given that Serbia could not possibly hope to win a war against Austria-Hungary or even survive it intact? It is incomprehensible. Certainly they paid a heavy price, whatever the reason. The officer who trained Princip and Cabrinovitch and gave them their phials of unreliable poison, Major Tankositch, was killed in action in 1915. And the leader of the Black Hand, Colonel Dimitrievitch, was executed in 1917 for plotting to assassinate the Serbian Prince Regent. The evidence against him was flimsy to say the very least. Oddly enough, one of his co-defendants was a youth named Mehmedbasitch, the only one of the Sarajevo assassins who escaped. Although sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment, he was released before he had served much more than one. Treachery everywhere, Horton. Do you see what I mean? But to what end? At whose behest? I do not know. And I do not see how it would be possible to know. The most I can say is what I wrote in my memoirs. Have you by any chance read them?"

"I'm afraid not, sir."

"No matter. I remember the exact words I used. They still seem apposite. "The world will presumably never be told all that was behind the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Probably there is not, and never was, any one person who knew all there was to know." '

"Unless it was Fabian Charnwood."

"As you say. Unless it was Fabian Charnwood. But, if so, he too has since paid the price."

"Do you think he really was responsible for all of it?"

"To be frank, no. Not because I doubt Duggan's word. He is a well-meaning fellow and believes what he was told. Nor because the facts rule out such a possibility. Clearly, they do not."

"Why, then?"

"Because any man clever and far-sighted enough to calculate the consequences of Franz Ferdinand's assassination could also have anticipated the horrific and destructive course the war was to take. And surely no man would have deliberately set such mayhem in motion. It would have been .. ." Words seemed to fail him for the moment. Then he composed himself and said: "Monstrous. Diabolical. Quite simply inconceivable."

We had talked well into the evening, and when Grey invited me to dine with him and stay the night I did not resist. He was a charming and lonely relic of a bygone age, eager to forget the painful subject I had raised and dwell instead on Winchester as he remembered it more than fifty years ago, serene and reassuring beneath the cloudless skies of his youth. And I was happy to indulge his nostalgic mood, not because he was my host, but because I too felt weighed down by my discoveries. For once, the recondite recesses of Wykehamical recollection were preferable to anything else.

I slept more soundly than I had expected and woke refreshed, the unanswerable questions and impenetrable complexities surrounding Fabian Charnwood's past refined in my mind to an extent that almost rendered them manageable. Breakfast was waiting for me downstairs, but his lordship, the maid informed me, was already out and about; he was not one to lie abed.

I found him by a pond in the grounds, seated on a bench in threadbare tweeds and a Norfolk hat, tossing bread to a quacking retinue of ducks. For all their noise, however, he heard me approach and bade me a courteous good morning.

"I must be getting off, sir," I explained. "It's a long way back to London."

"Of course, of course, it's been a pleasure meeting you, Horton." He rose and we shook hands; his was as cold as marble. "I hope you didn't find my company last night too boring."

"Not at all."

"As to that other matter we discussed... Loyalty to one's friends is an admirable quality. But sometimes it is necessary to let go of the past. And to let those who are gone rest in peace. I think, if you will permit me to say so, that you have done all you can -and all you prudently should to clear your friend's name."

"But it hasn't been cleared, has it?"

"No. Except in your own estimation. Which is really all that matters. Take an old man's word for it." He smiled. "You have done enough."

Grey's parting benison lingered in my thoughts as I drove south through the fleeting daylight of a November Sunday. Charnwood was dead. And so was Max. To condemn one was as futile as to exonerate the other. I believed every word Duggan had told me, especially when it came to the circumstances of Charnwood's death. I could not construct an adequate account of them, but that the Concentric Alliance whatever it was, whoever its members were had played some part in bringing him down I did not doubt. Poor Max had been their fall guy.

But to prove it was impossible. My faith in his innocence, as Grey had implied, would have to be enough. Even Diana would have to go on believing him guilty. She knew nothing of the Concentric Alliance. Her reaction to their secret symbol demonstrated that, just as Vita's reaction betrayed at least awareness of her brother's activities, if not complicity in them. But Diana was different. To vindicate Max in her eyes would be to brand her father a mass murderer. With her mother among his victims. The sinking of the Lusitania was one consequence of Franz Ferdinand's assassination Charnwood could not have anticipated, for if he had .. .