The Madness of July (43 page)

All colour had left Paul’s face. ‘I’m afraid there’s a note. It has your name on it, Will. They’re bringing it here now.’ There was agony in his expression. ‘God save us. This is probably the best way for it to end, and that’s the most horrible truth of all.’ Abel took the news as if he had been waiting for it, and Flemyng said quietly, ‘He was once a friend, and often a good one.’

Twenty minutes dragged. Mungo stayed away. He must have found somewhere where he could sit quietly, probably alone. A messenger arrived, and a letter was put on the table, Flemyng’s name underlined on the envelope in Ruskin’s green ink. Together they heard his confession.

It was jumpy and nerve-ridden. Flemyng read it quickly and again more slowly in silence, and then gave them some passages aloud. He opened by saying that his colleague’s style, Ruskin’s care with words, had deserted him at the end, a snake’s skin discarded at the last.

‘You now know that I was a man in perpetual panic. Total torment. Went to a shrink. Chester tried, and failed. Did you know that? He’ll talk now. I couldn’t break it.’

There was a pathetic addendum.
‘I did try.’

‘
You’ll have guessed what happened with the American. When did you know? He rang me on Wednesday and he was cunning. Didn’t get into personal stuff on the phone, it was very quick, but dropped a name that he thought would hook me. He was right, of course. Bill Bendo, our own American.’

Flemyng stopped for a few seconds. He heard Abel sigh.

‘I’m assuming you didn’t know, Will, but I did – the biggest secret I’d ever learned. Got it by accident and treasured it. I was proud of the trophy on my mantelpiece that no one else was allowed to see. Do you think that’s sad? I do, now.’

At this point, Flemyng stopped again, as if to let the horror sink in, and watched Abel. Nothing. He didn’t ask about Bendo. Back to the letter.

‘
The American came to the House
–
it must have been nearly eleven o’clock
–
and changed tack. Dropped Bendo like a stone, poor sod. He knew something of me, and revealed what he’d got from his woman, about the past. I agreed to take him to the terrace, and we went to the far end where we could be alone in the dark. He confronted me – told me what she might do, spoke of my son. I told you that.’

Flemyng paused at this point and looked around. No one met his eye.

‘Will, my life dissolved in that instant.’

The intimacy cut through his concentration, and touched the frailty they shared. Flemyng’s voice was low as he spoke to Paul. ‘Remember – we were there, on the terrace, you and I, soon afterwards. An hour earlier and we’d have seen them together.’ Back to the letter.

‘That was our first time, on Wednesday evening. I told the truth about leaving him after that awful drink on the terrace. But he rang again the next morning, very early. I was on my exercise bike.’

Flemyng was pained by a flashing image, rich in pathos, of the long thin legs pedalling fast, trying to carry him through the crisis and away.

‘I’d had a very bad night. It’s when the demons come. I picked him up in the central lobby when he arrived, and while we were walking down the back stairs from the corridor near the library he started making threats. He was jumpy as hell, staring at me. I was taking him that way to go outside; the terrace is the best place in the mornings, as you know. I couldn’t believe that we were having this conversation in public. Sparger passed us on the stairs. I was panicking. The American said he knew I was bound for Washington, warned me off. Said I’d be ruined if I went. She’d go public and make me the scandal of the decade. Me! But I’d decided I wanted the embassy. A different field of glory. Thought it was mine, and would have it this week. Snapped.

‘I pushed him against the wall. He pushed back and kicked me away. We were wrestling on the stairs like kids, and more or less fell into that damned cupboard. We shut the door. He went straight for me; no messing about.

‘I should tell you something about myself on top of today’s confessions. I use a syringe. Need it, and more often than anybody realizes. He was full of stuff from the night before – I could almost see it swilling around behind his eyes
–
even told me all about it, because he’d found out that I was one of Archie’s boys. I don’t know how he knew that.’

At this, Flemyng looked at Abel, who shook his head.

‘He thought that was his triumph; but it was the end of him. I was angry... cornered. I lost all control. Please understand.’
The tone of the letter was childlike now.

‘I wept. I went mad. Violent. The bloody statue fell over. You showed me that broken bit of marble, and that’s when I knew that you might work it out.’

Flemyng said,‘I could see that it had split off recently. All it told me was that there had probably been a struggle, and therefore it was likely that Manson hadn’t been alone in there. It pointed the way.’

Back to the letter.

‘The American was so fragile, still quivering from the night before. A sad sight. I must so often have looked like that. Did I? I’ve always tried so hard to hide it.

‘I had thought I might need some stuff and I had the syringe primed. It was heavy stuff, and of course I knew where to put it. More than enough. And the worst kind. Twice, three times... I don’t know, I was holding him down. He passed out and I filled it up and did it again, I suppose to finish him off. Mad. Wiped the syringe, and the door handles and everything afterwards. Put his hand round the thing, quickly. Did it work? But I cried afterwards. Do you believe that? I hope so.’

Flemyng paused. He had nearly come to the end.

‘I went to cabinet at ten. Paul saw me there, and I can take some pride from the fact that I showed nothing in the whole hour and a half. Even spoke, tried to be kind to Sorley about his bloody bill. I suppose that was an achievement of sorts. I wonder now how I managed. Most of all what I thought it was worth.

‘Then today you had me in Paul’s office. I couldn’t hold it together when I saw what you had. I copied the letter – don’t ask me why – like all the others. All my scribbles. Had to keep the words. They’re part of me, my other self. I sometimes read them aloud. You’ll find them all in the flat, in one of my old red boxes. I’ve left it unlocked. It terrified me that they were there, but I needed the danger, more and more. You’ll understand.

‘Everything’s there. The other letters, a terrible diary that I’d like you to read and then destroy. Please, Will, for me. I’m remembering our old friendship now. I’ve been looking at some of the letters again. It’s as if they were written by someone else, but you’ll understand. A rival has destroyed me without knowing it. I used him to kill myself. Say sorry to him. You’ll know who he is.
’

He gave no name.

Paul waited, and Flemyng said, ‘Brieve, of course. Jonathan couldn’t bear his own freedom to roam being challenged, curtailed. He wanted it all, and it drove him over the edge.’

He didn’t wait for an invitation to go on, being ready to tell his story. ‘I came to believe – though I was slow to get there – that somewhere in the middle of this were wild emotions that had been let loose. The letter told me that, and I was scared. But who? If I’d been quicker I’d have seen the light on Thursday. Ruskin told Francesca at the opera that he knew I’d been seeing an old friend, gave a name. I won’t say who it was, but I’d seen him that morning for the first time for a long time. A panic call. We were outside a psychiatrist’s office, and I had a suspicion I was seen. So it was Ruskin who was inside.

‘Everything follows from that, doesn’t it?’

He shook his head. ‘Poor Joe Manson. Two governments worrying about what he knew about Berlin – but that didn’t kill him. It was Ruskin’s secret that finished him off, not ours.’

He said that after he’d concluded that Ruskin was consumed by jealousy and fear, guessed that he was visiting Archie Chester, he’d realized who the object of his rage must be, who must be the target of the letter. The man who was stalking Ruskin on his own territory, treading the same paths with his own favours to sell, maybe getting ahead of him. Threatening his rise. ‘I felt sorry for Tom Brieve for the first time. He must have cried, had long dark nights.’

He described his surprise summons from Brieve on Thursday, and their stilted conversation in the cellar bar before the opera. Wondered aloud if events would have taken a different course if he’d given Brieve time, and some encouragement. But he had denied him that chance. ‘Might it have saved Jonathan’s life?’ he said into the silence. ‘Forget Manson, I shouldn’t push that question away and I won’t forget it.’

Paul shook his head. ‘No. It was a collision of events that was unstoppable. The simplest of emotions, let loose in one man, and powerful enough to affect us all, nearly bring us down. And to kill Jonathan.’

Flemyng said there were other references in the letter to his own relationship with Ruskin which, if they didn’t mind, he would not read out. ‘That would be a kindness to him. I should just say that they are warm, apologetic, sad.’

He looked at the last page. He had reached the end.

‘I am so very sorry that it is over.’

Then the wobbly signature, touchingly formal –
‘Jonathan Ruskin’.

Everyone stayed quiet.

After a while, Paul said, ‘It will be handled discreetly. A personal tragedy, which, of course, it is.’ He looked around for reassurance.

‘There will be obsequies, and proper mourning. Maybe even’ – his mouth twitched – ‘a burst of sympathy for the government. And no more deaths.’ It might have been an order.

‘Then,’ he said, ‘it will truly be over.’

The room was silent. Each of them would remember afterwards the feeling of release at the moment of death, and the atmosphere infected them all. Ruskin might be gone, but family troubles were being calmed and, with Paul’s command and his announcement that the denouement had come, they began the slow settling of accounts.

Abel leaned back in his chair as if to speak, but gazed ahead. Flemyng saw in his mind the scenes from six days flickering before him, with the faces of Ruskin and Forbes, Joe, Osterly, Sam and Chester, and behind them Maria, dark and tall and wearing a wide smile, appearing before his eyes as a chorus line of ghoulish clowns. They were out of control, disappearing in turn and materializing again, leaping up and zooming towards him like the chaos of another dream. Painted in lurid colours, their faces dazzled him for a few seconds, almost made him cry out. Then the images faded, as if the lights had gone out, and there was blankness. He heard Francesca’s voice. Shaking himself, he felt as if he had known a seizure and survived.

He spoke to Abel. ‘Could you join Mungo for a minute or two? Sorry. I need to talk to Paul alone. You understand.’ His brother looked darker than ever as he rose, the shadows shrouding him and his eyes losing their light. ‘Of course,’ Abel said. ‘Your game.’

*

All was still except for the candlelight playing on the club silver, and flickering over an incongruous snuff horn shaped as a bulbous ram’s head. There was no ticking from the clock on the mantelpiece. They were alone. Flemyng got up and began to walk slowly round the table, as if performing a ritual dance to bring things to a close, moving in and out of the patches of light cast towards the table. ‘I said earlier there was another secret to unlock. As one of my old friends says, there’s always one more.’

Paul waited.

‘I’m sorry that it must be now, with blood flowing around. I thought this might have been in Ruskin’s letter but it seems Joe Manson didn’t tell him what the Americans feared he might, the secret they’ve been trying to protect all along. Thanks, Joe.’

His hands were clasped together in front of him. ‘I’ve been puzzled from the start by Washington’s panic over Manson. Why did they think he could screw everything up? It would obviously be awkward with Ruskin, or whoever it turned out to be, if he were named ambassador and Manson blundered in. But it wouldn’t destroy their Berlin operation, because that was no-win for us – we were stuck and couldn’t pull out of the deal without a backlash. They knew about Bendo, and they wanted their pound of flesh in the form of our prize asset. Or else they’d blow him: and probably told us how they’d do it, in excruciating detail. We had no choice.

‘But there was something else, and they didn’t want us to know it.

‘I think I know what it was.’

Paul stood up to join in Flemyng’s stately progress round the table. They speeded up gently as they went, getting energy from each other.

‘Abel avoided an important question that I put to him in your office today when we were alone after Ruskin left. When did they start to suspect that Bendo was ours?’

Flemyng was surprised when Paul smiled, despite everything, and said, ‘I asked him the same thing, out there a moment ago. He just shook his head.’

‘Think it through,’ said Flemyng. ‘There’s a good reason. Manson made several trips to Europe in the last two years – Abel let that slip – and I’m willing to bet we could find his tracks all over Berlin. They’ve known about Bendo for longer than we think. Much longer. Manson was doing Maria’s business there.’

‘And…’ said Paul, softly and encouragingly.

‘They’d turned Bendo back to work against us,’ said Flemyng. ‘My guess is that they used him to poison the well without his knowing the whole story. It’s the only explanation. For a long time he’s been laying false trails, an agent we thought was our own. I’d say he was all over the place, didn’t know who was really running him, panicking. I’ve seen it before, believe me. A fish struggling in the net. But it’s we who’ve been played for suckers in Berlin.

‘And now they’ve got formal access to the best source we’ve ever had there – and for all I know on the whole sodding continent of Europe since the beginning of time – all because we’ve had to admit that we recruited Bendo, which it turns out they knew. Nice one, Maria. A corker.’