House of the Hanged, page 18
He spun the steering wheel hard to the left and the Renault slewed across the road towards a narrow dirt track that struck off obliquely into the scrub and trees. Too close to its prey to abandon the chase, the sedan instinctively followed. They weren’t to know where he was leading them; he barely knew himself. All he had to go on was an unwelcome memory of once trying to work his way north to the main road from the remote beaches around Brégançon and swearing never to attempt such a thing again. He had found himself hopelessly lost in the rugged landscape just back from the coast, and it had taken detailed directions from two old men stripping cork from an oak to see him out of the labyrinth of winding valleys shut in by high, ridged hills.
His pursuers must have doubted the wisdom of following him, finding themselves smothered in a dense pall of dust thrown up by the speeding Renault. Chickens scattered as a farmhouse whistled past on Tom’s right, after which the track noticeably deteriorated before plunging down the side of a narrow valley – the gateway to the violent tumble of hills which lay like a choppy sea across his path. He knew he had little chance of making it through to the coast. Given the speed at which he was travelling, the guts would be ripped out of the Renault long before then. Whatever was going to happen was going to have to happen soon.
The Renault danced and leapt over the ruts, grounding its belly every so often. He had no way of determining if the sedan had abandoned the chase; all he could make out in the rear-view mirror was a billowing cloud in his wake, talcum-powder white in the blazing sunshine. Only when he slowed to negotiate a T-junction at the foot of the valley did he glimpse the vehicle over his shoulder. It had dropped back, content to pursue from a distance. This wasn’t what he wanted. He needed it tight in, close on his tail, if his plan was to work. He also needed to gain height.
He bore left at the junction, barrelling along on loose gravel, the trees thickening around him, his eyes scanning ahead, searching for a turning which would lead him back up the hillside. Twice he slowed, only to reject the side-tracks as too steep to negotiate. At last he saw it: a slender thread working its way diagonally up the side of the escarpment on his left.
Winter rains had scored deep runnels in it, and for a moment it seemed that the Renault wasn’t up to the task. But the tyres finally bit, spitting dust and stones, and he regained speed on the ascent. By the time he soared over a bald crest into the adjacent valley, the needle was nudging one hundred kilometres per hour on the dial.
The track dipped sharply before levelling off and worming around a deep bowl in the hills, a vast corrugated amphitheatre, like a Japanese fan, which fell away to his right. The track had been crudely hacked out of the slope – sheer rock on his left side, an unparapetted drop on the other. It was almost perfect, certainly close enough to what he had envisaged, and it would have to do. The Renault was beginning to suffer, one of the rear wheels thumping in protest, its suspension gone.
He checked to confirm that the sedan was still on his tail, estimating that it was four or five seconds behind him, and when the track veered to the left, unsighting him beyond an outcrop, he hit the brakes as hard as he dared. The Renault skidded and shuddered to a halt, the rear end swinging out and blocking the track. For a foolish moment, he imagined fleeing the vehicle, but he rapidly calculated that the best he could hope for was to recover the Beretta which had long since bounced off his lap on to the floor, staying low and preparing himself for the impact.
He saw nothing. He heard almost nothing; the blood was beating so loudly in his ears. There was a dim whistle, followed by a brief silence, then a more distinct sound of shattering wood. He saw it in his mind’s eye: the sedan tearing around the bend, the driver finding his path blocked and yanking the steering wheel to the right. He couldn’t go left, into solid rock. It had to be right, into the void. In the immediacy of the moment, what kind of man would have chosen the third way: straight ahead, into the Renault? A madman. It was inconceivable.
This is exactly what Tom had imagined, and yet he stepped from the car a little stunned that he had managed to turn the tables on his pursuers so suddenly, so completely. They were down there somewhere, lost in the thick tangle of oaks and underbrush blanketing the slope. He could make out the spot where the sedan had left the track, shearing off a young tree close to its roots and gouging a path through the undergrowth. The sun beat down with a biblical heat and the cicadas kept up their pulsating chorus, undaunted. The rest was silence.
Tom checked the Beretta and set off down the slope. One whole side of an oak tree had been stripped clean of its bark by a glancing blow, but there was still no sign of the sedan. For a moment, he saw the driver expertly working the wheel, picking a path through the trees, the persistent tug of the dense undergrowth gradually slowing the car’s passage until it drew to a halt. In which case, the two men were out there and on the move. They might even have him in their sights right now. A sudden fear felled him, dropping him into a crouch, and it was a good minute or so before he was confident enough to continue on his way.
He needn’t have worried. The sedan had indeed come to a halt, but with its front end concertinaed against the trunk of a large and gnarled oak. The tree seemed to have lost none of its grip on the thin soil with the impact. It rose straight and proud and defiant. The two men, by contrast, lay twisted in their seats.
The driver was dead, impaled on the steering column, his hands still clasping the snapped-off wheel. The passenger was slumped to one side, his face a crimson mask. Whether he had forced open his door or whether it had burst open on impact was hard to say. Either way, he was alive and struggling to come to his senses, like some collapsed drunk in the street. Aside from the deep gash on his forehead, he appeared to be intact, and Tom was figuring out how best to remove the bulky figure from the crippled vehicle when the petrol ignited, sending a carpet of blue flames dancing through the sandy soil beneath the engine.
His instinct was to extinguish the fire immediately. No man, whoever he was, however evil his intentions, deserved to die such a hideous death – immolated alive. Dropping to his knees, he scooped handfuls of soil on to the licking flames. Sensing that he was losing the battle, and fearing that an explosion was imminent, he turned his attention back to the passenger, who was regarding him with vacant, pleading eyes. Tom scrambled to his feet and wrestled the man out of the car as best he could, falling back, winded, under the dead weight. He hooked his hands beneath the man’s armpits and hauled him as far from the vehicle as his strength permitted, propping him up against the base of a tree.
A deep-rooted pragmatism kicked in. What if the dead driver was in possession of identity documents? What if the car contained other essential evidence? He had to prevent the vehicle going up in flames, if only because the plume of smoke would act as an unwelcome summons to all who saw it. He still needed to contain the situation as best he could.
Hurrying back to the sedan, he yanked open the crumpled bonnet cover. There were flames playing around the engine block, but he extinguished them swiftly enough with handfuls of soil. A branch was brought into action to break up the spread of fire beneath the sedan towards the fuel tank at the rear. He then scrabbled round the vehicle on all fours, sweeping more dirt beneath it, and when finally satisfied that he’d doused the blaze, he stamped out a few smouldering shrubs before they could ignite in earnest.
Only then did he turn his attention back to the passenger. He hadn’t moved from the base of the tree, but he now had his arm raised, a pistol levelled straight at Tom. He was blinking the blood from his eyes, but the hand holding the weapon was surprisingly steady. There was certainly no question of Tom making a move for the Beretta in his hip pocket.
He was dead meat.
‘Go in peace,’ said the man in Russian.
Tom stared, disbelieving. It was a phrase layered deep into the beaten gold leaf of his memory. He saw a baby-faced priest in a side chapel in Petrograd, and he saw himself, gun in hand, uttering the same words to a terrified young agent of the Cheka with whom he had collided after fleeing the cathedral. The intervening years had filled out his frame considerably, but the same lean and handsome face lay beneath the gore. It had to be the same man he had spared all those years ago.
‘I won’t say it again.’ The man spoke in French now, and he wagged the barrel of his pistol up the slope to make his point.
‘You need a doctor.’
The man snorted dismissively. ‘I need a priest.’
He wasn’t dying, but he obviously believed he was as good as dead. And he was probably right. The NKVD, as the Soviet intelligence organization was now known, didn’t look kindly on failure. They’d pin the Order of the Red Banner on your chest one day then shoot you in the same chest the next as an enemy of the people.
Tom could have walked away, maybe he should have, but he found himself saying, ‘I know a place with both – a place where they won’t ask questions and no one will ever find you.’
The man wiped the blood from his eyes with the back of his forearm. The gun remained trained on Tom. ‘Where is this place?’
‘Up in the hills.’
The man hesitated before replying. ‘Why should I trust you?’
‘I don’t know,’ shrugged Tom. ‘Because you don’t have a choice?’
The man placed the muzzle of the pistol against his own temple and regarded Tom enquiringly.
‘That’s not a choice – that’s cowardice.’
‘It’s a better death than the one waiting for me.’
‘I got out.’
‘Really?’ replied the man, sceptically. ‘So what am I doing here?’
‘Maybe you should ask yourself that same question.’
It was a few moments before the man lowered the pistol and said, ‘Help me up.’
Tom approached warily and hauled him to his feet. ‘Can you walk?’
‘I think so.’
‘Put your arm round my shoulder.’
‘Is it a bad wound?’
Tom peered at the man’s forehead. It was a T-shaped wound just below the hairline, deep, and pulsing blood.
‘Not as bad as the one you were about to inflict upon yourself,’ he said.
The man laughed weakly.
They didn’t speak again until they had struggled back up the slope to the Renault and were on the move, wending their way slowly back through the hills towards the main road.
‘Who was your friend?’ Tom asked.
‘He wasn’t my friend. I only just met him.’
He said he had been summoned from Paris with instructions to take a room at the Grand Hôtel in Le Lavandou, where he was to wait until contacted. That contact had occurred less than an hour ago, when the man now skewered on the sedan’s steering column had knocked on the door of his hotel room. They had sat in a parked car and they had waited and watched a building. He claimed to have recognized Tom immediately, despite the passage of the years, and when Tom had emerged from the building and driven off in his car, they had followed him.
Tom knew better than to take this account at face value, but now wasn’t the time to dig out the exact truth. He did, however, need to establish one thing which hadn’t been made perfectly clear.
‘You saw me enter the building?’
‘Yes. And we followed you when you came out and got into your car.’ He turned and looked at Tom with a groggy, unfocused gaze. ‘They’ll send others. You know that, don’t you?’
‘How long do I have?’
‘They’ll come from Paris, like me. Maybe twenty-four hours.’
‘You live in Paris?’ Tom asked.
‘For a few years now.’
‘Hunting down White Guards and Trotskyists?’
‘If I’d known I was going to get a lecture, I would have shot you. I still might.’
‘What’s your name?’ asked Tom.
‘Pyotr.’
‘Well, in case you hadn’t noticed, Pyotr, you no longer have your pistol – I do.’
Pyotr grunted distractedly, beginning to display the symptoms of a serious concussion.
Chapter Thirteen
The moment Hélène opened the door, her face fell. ‘My God,’ she gasped. ‘What happened to you?’
Tom gave a furtive check over his shoulder and slipped inside, pushing the door shut behind him and bolting it.
‘It’s a long story,’ he said. ‘Although I don’t have long to tell it.’
He had parked the car in Place Massillon, Hyères’ main square, travelling the rest of the way on foot, taking a circuitous route through the streets, doubling back on himself every so often to ensure that he wasn’t being followed. He had also scoured Hélène’s street thoroughly, checking each of the parked cars in turn to establish that the house wasn’t under surveillance. Only then had he mounted the front steps of her stolid late-Victorian villa.
He had been so distracted by the events of the past two hours that it didn’t occur to him until he tugged on the bell-pull that the new man in Hélène’s life, the Polish count whom Benoît had mentioned, might actually be inside.
He wasn’t; Hélène was on her own, and looking more beautiful than ever. A month in Greece had darkened her skin to the colour of light mahogany and her hair, pinned back behind her dainty little ears, had the lustre of black silk about it. He searched for signs in her appearance of the news she was about to break to him, but her pale lemon summer frock was tight and alluring, cut low at the front to reveal the necklace he had bought her during their trip to Saint-Jean-de-Luz. She was also wearing the perfume she knew he loved.
Maybe she was intending to sleep with him one more time, a courtesy to their long and slightly bizarre relationship. The devil on his shoulder told him to take what was on offer; after brushing with death twice in the past few days, the urge to lunge at anything life-affirming was almost overwhelming. He repressed the impulse, though. He wanted her gone, far away, as soon as possible, until the storm tossing his life had blown itself out.
He had drained the tall glass of water she gave him long before his story was finished. Hélène sat in stunned silence while he spoke, perched demurely on the divan in the drawing room, and for the first time he told her the truth of his past, of his involvement with the Secret Intelligence Service, Britain’s equivalent of her own country’s Deuxième Bureau. He left out the more sordid details, but he couldn’t hold everything back, not if he was to convince her of the seriousness of the situation, of the very real danger in which he had unwittingly placed her. He had to make clear there was a strong likelihood that the people bent on killing him knew of her existence, and that they might well use her to get to him.
When he was finished, she rose silently and approached the overstuffed armchair in which he was seated, a look of compassion in her eyes. The notion that she might be about to stoop down and hug him was swiftly dispelled by the stinging slap across his cheek.
She walked to the window, crossing her arms in front of her and staring outside. Without turning, she said, ‘You should have told me before.’
‘All this has only just happened.’
She turned now. ‘You should still have told me before.’
‘I know. I understand.’
‘No, you don’t,’ she fired back firmly. ‘How can you possibly know what’s in my mind? I don’t care that you lied to me. I don’t even care that you’ve placed me in this situation. I care,’ she said with a bitter emphasis, ‘that things could have been very different between us if I’d only known who you really were.’ She paused. ‘It explains so much about you. About us.’
Benoît would suffer for it, but he had to say it. ‘I know you’ve met someone – someone important to you – and I understand.’
It took her a moment to process his words. ‘Oh, such magnanimity!’
Tom felt his own anger rising. It even carried him to his feet. ‘What do you want? You want me to fight for you? Is that what you want? Believe me, you’re far better off with your Polish count.’
‘I don’t doubt it. At least he’s a man who wouldn’t tell me what’s best for me, a man who might allow me to make up my own mind.’
‘I’m not sure you’ve quite grasped what’s happening here. Your life is in danger. You have to pack a suitcase and you have to disappear – immediately.’
‘I’m not sure you’ve quite grasped that I find that idea rather thrilling.’
Tom heaved a conciliatory sigh and took a couple of steps towards her. ‘Hélène, listen, I haven’t been entirely honest with you.’
He held up his hands, the hands which had held her, caressed her, wiped the tears from her cheeks, pulled the splinter from her foot in Avignon . . .
‘These hands have taken the lives of two men in the past two days. They’ve also killed before that. They are soiled, defiled. They will always be defiled. That may not bother you now, but one day it will. And I would think less of you if it didn’t.’
He could see that his words had struck home. Fear clouded her expression.
‘I thought I’d buried the man I used to be, but others have dug him up again . . . and I’m going to have to call on his services if I’m to get through this.’
Hélène stepped close, took his hands in hers and raised them to her lips, kissing each of his palms in turn, anointing them. It was such a tender and unexpected gesture, but there was also something final in it.
‘I’m so sorry.’
She shook her head, dismissing the apology. ‘Where shall I go?’
‘Somewhere obscure.’
She thought on it for a moment. ‘My sister has a friend who’s a painter. She lives in the Corrèze. Saillac. It’s a small village in the middle of nowhere.’
