The Madness of July (32 page)

They poured a drink, and when Gwilym excused himself for a moment, Paul took the chance to zoom in on Abel. ‘You must ask your brother directly. There’s no alternative. I have no idea where this corpse is leading us, if you don’t mind my putting it like that. And I have to know quickly.’

For the first time, Flemyng realized how shaken Paul was, as he ran through the difficulties. ‘There’s the law, apart from anything else…’ He was white and downcast. ‘Imagine where this might lead, God save us.’

Flemyng had taken a place by the fireplace, standing where Paul had on the first night, and commanded the room for the first time. ‘I’ll have to ask something of you, Paul, in return. You know that Abel’s position here is sensitive almost beyond my capacity to describe it. You know – Gwilym doesn’t, and almost nobody else does – and even you, I’d suggest, don’t know as much as you think. If you want me to break this open for benefits that I agree with you are valuable, I’ve got to be able to ask some awkward questions of you in return.’

They were both on their feet, Paul over by the window, drawing the curtains. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘What about?’ A deal. The nature of their business.

‘I’ll come back to what I need from you in a moment,’ Flemyng said. ‘First, Abel. He did help a little. Manson angered Maria Cooney’ – he raised his eyebrows to Paul, who nodded in return – ‘by coming over here. It was his own thing, and she knew it was personal. Off limits. Something that may have involved a confrontation with someone, but I don’t know why. She doesn’t know who that person was and nor does Abel, so he tells me.

‘The problem is that Maria thought Manson might have talked about something else while he was here, and that’s what’s got her into such a state. That’s where I want your help.’

Alongside Flemyng’s hand on the mantelpiece, the clock struck one chime for the half-hour and broke the tension. ‘I’ve just thought of something,’ he said, looking up and smiling. ‘The Inverness train will be on its way in a few minutes.’

Paul’s brow was creased. ‘Inverness?’

‘Mungo, my other brother, is on his way to Pitlochry, and then south from there.’ Flemyng drew the scene – Babble carrying the leather suitcase up to the platform, his hunter’s watch in hand, the sleeper from the north leaning round the long bend, with all the folk who got on at Aviemore and Kingussie settling into their bunks or sliding along to the bar. The night train still rolled into the dark with some remnants of style. There were even kippers in the morning, if someone had remembered to load them at Inverness. ‘And tomorrow,’ he said, ‘we’ll all be together in London.’

Paul smiled. ‘I like your brother Mungo, and I know how close you all are.’ He exchanged a look with Flemyng that caused them both to linger on that thought. Gwilym still hadn’t returned.

They could both see humour in the plight of a family caught in a story that was tying two brothers in painful knots, but energized by the knowledge that the participants were flocking together, drawn by forces whose origin they couldn’t know. They enjoyed the moment and sat down again. Gwilym hadn’t returned.

‘Answer me this,’ Flemyng said. ‘Why were you happy for me to be in Scotland?’

Paul smiled. He toyed with the file and kept his eyes on it. ‘What I prize in you is the talent for feeling out the connections we can’t prove. They’re there, and we know it. You’re someone who watches the way people behave. That’s how you were trained – to watch, and to know that it’s sometimes more important than listening. Correct?’

‘And?’ said Flemyng.

‘I assumed that Abel would go home,’ Paul said. ‘Wouldn’t you?’

Flemyng raised a hand in acknowledgement. Retaining his calm, he said, ‘Somewhere in the middle of this mess is a political game for high stakes. A price that’s too much for someone, and a lot of hurt pride. I want to know if that stuff on your desk can help us.’ He gestured to the newspaper cutting lying in the open file on the desk. ‘I’m glad you put that in my box.’

‘We can take it that Manson’s target was in there somewhere, can’t we?’ said Paul. ‘It’s obvious.’ He pointed to the rings round the heads of Ruskin, Forbes, Brieve, Sorley and Flemyng himself. ‘Which brings me,’ he said, reaching across the desk, ‘to the notebook and the message I copied for you.
Friend Flemyng knows.

‘You see my problem.’

Manson had written in an old-fashioned hand, with generous loops and each
F
carefully formed. ‘It could only have been written by an American,’ said Flemyng, reading it again. ‘That’s obvious. But there’s a trap here. What’s the question it raises in your mind?’

‘Whose friend?’ said Paul.

‘Of course,’ said Flemyng. ‘But where?’

‘In Washington, I assume,’ said Paul.

That, said Flemyng, was where he was wrong. Having thrown Paul for a moment, he seized the conversation. ‘I’ll come back to that, but I have something else I have to raise, which may be just as serious.

‘There are rumours.’

Paul’s expression didn’t change.

‘About me.’ Flemyng paused to invite a reaction. None came.

‘They are worrying, because they touch on loyalty, or seem to.’

Still nothing.

‘Paul, I can’t put it more bluntly than this. Am I being watched?’

He moved his head to look at Flemyng from a different angle, as if he wanted to hear the question repeated in another way. His mouth was open, grey eyes wider than ever. He didn’t speak for a few moments. Then, ‘Are you serious?’

Flemyng turned away. ‘I’ve never been more serious in my life. Is it true?’ He was speaking over his shoulder. ‘I haven’t seen any signs. But that may just mean I’ve lost my touch.’

Paul moved back to his desk, to speak from a place of safety. He sat down behind it. ‘You force me to confront something rather disturbing.’

‘That I am being spied on?’

Paul hit the desk with his fist. ‘No.’ He was bending forward so that he spoke towards the papers in front of him, avoiding Flemyng’s gaze. ‘For me, something even worse. That I may not know what’s going on; that your assumption – and mine – about this office, these files, all this paraphernalia, the bloody red light on this phone, is wrong. They’re illusions. Or delusions, I should say. Telling a story that’s not true. A fiction. You understand what I mean. It’s not a question of whether this rumour you’ve heard is true or not – and God help us, I can’t believe you think for a moment it might be – so much as the fact that I can’t tell you one way or the other. D’you see what that means for me?’

The confession had cost him his balance, and the relaxation with which he had convened the gathering had turned quickly to dishevelment. He flopped back in his chair. When he looked up, he seemed to be pleading.

Flemyng pressed on. He asked, calmly, whether Paul had ever heard such talk.

‘No. Not a whisper. Nothing. But you must have something to go on. A reliable person? A friend?’

Flemyng shook his head. There was no point in going further, he said. Paul’s bewilderment was convincing. If something was happening it was without his sanction, and cause for a different kind of fear. Perhaps in them both. ‘Let’s put it down to gossip. A crossed wire.’ Paul said nothing more.

In a tone that betrayed none of the disturbance he felt, Flemyng returned to the question of friendship. ‘Manson thought I could help because I was someone’s friend.’

So it seemed, Paul agreed.

‘And you assumed that friend to be in Washington,’ Flemyng went on. Paul said that seemed the logical conclusion because it was a friendship that Manson thought might help him and it was surely on his patch.

‘I disagree,’ Flemyng said, shaking his head. ‘Look at it from the other end of the telescope. Then we might find ourselves getting somewhere in this whole business, for the first time.’ Lifting the atmosphere that had sapped their spirits in the last few minutes, he smiled. ‘That would make a change, wouldn’t it?’

Paul leaned back. ‘I’m waiting.’

‘Manson thought I might help because of a friendship of mine. One here, in London. That’s my conclusion.’ He approached the desk and came close to Paul. ‘I have many friends, you among them. But one of them can get us to the heart of this business.

‘Who it is I have no idea. A political friendship – one of the men with a ring round his head in that cutting on your desk, or someone else in government? Maybe someone closer to me in another way? Who knows? But whoever it is knows something that can explain this madness.’

Their exchange seemed to have drained Paul of energy. ‘Another bloody secret,’ he said in a voice that was not far above a whisper.

‘Of course,’ said Flemyng. ‘There’s always one more.’

19

As the train pulled out of Pitlochry, Babble let the whisky in his glass on the tabletop pick up the swaying of the coach and watched his drink slide from side to side. That satisfying motion marked the happy start of a journey he always loved, slipping and rattling into the night. They watched the dying light on the hills, the last of the sun lending life to the colours for a few minutes before the landscape became a shadow and no more. He said to Mungo, without looking away from the darkening window, ‘All right?’

They were together in a bar in which every place at the tables, and the two banquettes at the end of the carriage, was occupied. The regulars knew that the last part of the journey before darkness was precious – and on a summer’s night, a golden hour – so they had come for a nightcap before settling down in their berths. The steward was an amiable and twinkle-toed host, though his face shone with the purple polish of a lifelong whisky man and the fiery red of his Royal Stewart tartan jacket had long since faded to dusky maroon. His hair was oiled down, and glistened. The company rolled along happily, with Mungo and Babble as comfortable and secure as they might feel at home, together on the rowing boat on their loch or on the hillside. They had been keeping a contented silence since they sat down, broken by Babble’s question.

He spoke again. ‘All right? After last night.’ The question, repeated, demanded an answer.

‘Fine, surprisingly. I’m wondering why.’

Mungo’s wistful air had gone and the boisterous spirit was back, the one that had been evident during the preparations at home. His previous mood of introspection, which had visited him so often in recent weeks, had lifted. Now he turned to Babble, as if to make the point.

‘We’re going to have a grand time delving around. But I’d be telling fibs if I didn’t admit that your contribution to the story has come as a bit of a shaker. There has been pain. No doubt about it. You saw Will.’ This held enough weight to hang in the air for a little, and to draw Babble’s eyes towards his old friend’s.

‘Uncertainty for you,’ he said, with a directness that made a point about their friendship. ‘But Will has taken it harder.’

‘That’s true,’ Mungo said, taking a sip. ‘You know him so well.’ Behind Flemyng’s mask of confidence there was emotional tenderness, a vulnerability, that would surprise those who thought he skated through his public life with the ease of a chosen one. ‘You know the truth as well as I do,’ Mungo said. ‘Will takes things to heart. You’d think his trade might have changed that – not just politics, but the other one in days gone by.’

Babble didn’t wait for the next question that he’d known would come after the revelations at dinner. From Mungo it would be polite and considerate, but would still need an answer. ‘I’ll tell you as much as I know,’ he said. ‘The first thing to say is, I never met him. You’re right – he never came north. But your mother spoke about him. She trusted me, I suppose. Sometimes when we were alone in the boat, or in the car – the old Rover that saw us through the fifties – she’d pick up the story, say a little about what he meant to her. I remember when she first told me.’

Mungo said nothing, determined not to stop the flow.

‘It was after the war. Maybe a year or two. Your father was away on business. She took me into the drawing room – I remember sitting with the orrery on an autumn night – and out it came, all in a rush. She was in love with a man, though she still adored your father, and had been for years. There was nothing to be done – she would never leave home, but she loved the other man too. Nothing to be done, except to tell someone. And it was me. I saw some of the letters, looked after them when they arrived and kept them for her. Organized a few deceptions, I suppose, though they seemed innocent enough. At the end he sent back her letters – it was what she wanted – and I helped with them too.’

Mungo said that he had to ask a question on the brothers’ behalf. ‘Did she ever indicate to you that there was anything different about any of us?’ His face was turned to the window, and Babble watched the reflection on the glass.

He said, ‘No. Never. I didn’t ask, and she didn’t say. I’m sure she would have, if there was anything to tell.’

‘Do you think so?’ said Mungo.

‘Probably,’ Babble said, placing a limit on his certainty.

And they sat for a while in silence, Mungo remembering days on the hill and the smell of paint and turpentine in the room where she painted, the picnics at the lochside and the bramble-picking along the side of the burn. The letters in the deed box could take none of that away. When they both thought it was time to speak again, he said to Babble, ‘You’re part of the journey we’re all going to take. But I don’t find it a frightening one. Not at all.

‘Whatever lies ahead – I suppose there might be blood tests or something, God help me, to settle our minds if it gets that far – there’s no darkness attached, only a mystery. What Will calls a veil. It needn’t be destructive. There’s no way of avoiding the question, though. Are we who we seem, the people we have always imagined ourselves to be?’

For the first time out loud, he put it another way. ‘Are we Flemyngs, after all?’

Babble said that seemed to him to be just about the biggest question you could ask.

‘It may be for Will above all. He’s depended on a certain kind of confidence all his life – to help him through difficult things – and he must feel it threatened,’ said Mungo. ‘His underpinning gone. That’s not true, of course, but he can’t see it. Remember, I’ve known him all his life.’