Gabriel's Moon, page 12
‘No.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Sure as shit.’
‘She works in MI6. I’m working for her.’
‘So, you are a player.’
‘In an ad hoc, temporary, provisional way, yes, I suppose I am.’
‘What’s Faith Green got to do with this?’
‘She was in Léopoldville when I interviewed Lumumba.’
Gabriel really scrutinized Queneau. If he was any judge of human character, Gabriel thought, then this information came as no surprise.
‘So?’
‘So I have to talk to her,’ Gabriel said. ‘About this situation. About you.’
‘Why?’
‘Because she’s implicated. Just like Hillcrest, Sykes and Dupetit.’
Gabriel lit another cigarette to disguise his excitement. This was the proverbial shot in the dark – but it was a kind of revelation that had just come to him as they were speaking. This was the problem. Lumumba was dead – gruesomely eliminated by a firing squad, his bodily remains disappeared – and a whole lot of people who had been actively plotting his death, and subsequent regime change, were suddenly running for cover in case they got the blame. Especially war hero General President Dwight D. Eisenhower . . .
Queneau drained his glass. Spread his palms on the table, scrutinized the backs of his hands for a few seconds and then looked up.
‘All right. We’ll do it your way. Have a word with your Miss Green and then we’ll speak later.’
He stood up.
‘Thanks for the wine.’
‘My pleasure.’
‘A bientôt.’ He pronounced the final ‘t’. Gabriel exhaled as the man wandered out of the café. How did Queneau know she was ‘Miss’ Green? Everybody was lying. Of course Raymond Queneau had instructed Nancy-Jo to give him those drugs and of course he was meant to be arrested at Madrid airport. He remembered what Nancy-Jo had said. Ray will get you out of jail, then you’ll owe him one. Plan A had failed. Plan B was a little harder to orchestrate in London – hence the unusual candour, Gabriel supposed. Now he knew what was at stake. It was time to talk to Faith Green again.
‘We can’t go on meeting like this,’ Faith Green said, her voice heavy with irony.
They were sitting outside his flat in her Mercedes 190. Gabriel had gone to Long Acre and had posted a letter to her through the letter box. It was a very terse communication: ‘We need to talk. Gabriel’. And there she was in her silver sports car, twenty-four hours later.
She looked at him, screwing her eyes up.
‘You’ve had your hair cut. Makes you look younger.’
‘I wasn’t concentrating, talking too much. He went a bit mad.’
‘No, it sort of suits you, shorter like that.’
‘There’s a pub round the corner,’ Gabriel said, keen to get off the subject of his barbering. ‘The Goat and Crow. Very nice. We could have a drink as we continue our interesting chat.’
‘All right, you win.’
The Goat was on Smith Street. A rather old-fashioned-looking place with bare floorboards and ancient block-printed wallpaper. There was a snug bar and a public one, but the snug was full so he took Faith into the public bar and found them a table in the corner. She asked for a gin and tonic. He ordered a double whisky and water for himself – he needed some fuel.
They sat down opposite each other. As if they were on a date, he thought, foolishly. She was wearing a cowl-neck Lincoln green jumper under a black coat that seemed to frame her pale face as if it were a portrait bust. She was not an expressive person, Gabriel thought. You had to second- or third-guess every minute shift of facial muscles as you talked to Faith Green. Amusement? Disdain? Incomprehension? She was like a very clever older sister tolerating her young brother. Or a young aunt obliged to take her nephew out for a meal. Sod it, he thought: I’ll shake her up.
‘A man sort of threatened – obliquely, I admit – to kill me yesterday. Which is why I needed to speak to you.’
‘What had you done to him?’ She seemed completely unperturbed.
‘It was about the Lumumba tapes.’
She closed her eyes. Sipped her gin.
‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ Gabriel asked.
‘Everybody else is smoking in here – why should I mind?’
Gabriel lit his cigarette.
‘It was this Raymond Queneau fellow who issued the covert threat. CIA, I assume,’ he said.
‘I told you – I’ve never come across him.’
‘You must deal with the CIA.’
‘All the time.’
‘Could you enquire, then?’
‘No.’
She put her glass down and carefully printed some condensation rings with its base on the tabletop as she reflected.
‘The Lumumba tapes are your problem, Gabriel,’ she said, a little wearily, he thought. Nice touch. ‘Nothing to do with me or the Institute. You interviewed Lumumba for your newspaper. Nothing to do with me or the Institute, I repeat. If this man wants the tapes – for whatever reason – then why not just give them to him? What use are they to you?’
Right, Gabriel thought: all very impressively indifferent. He would try a different approach.
‘Just so you know,’ he said. ‘Maybe you could inform the CIA. The tapes are in a safety deposit box in my bank. If anything happens to me – anything – then the tapes, and my analysis of them, will be sent by my lawyer to The Times, the Telegraph, the Manchester Guardian and the Observer.’
‘Goodness!’ She was being sarcastic.
‘There’s a link – a massively embarrassing, key link between the assassination of Lumumba and ex-President Eisenhower,’ Gabriel went on. ‘That’s why it’s such an issue, such a “hot potato” for the CIA. Queneau told me himself. I know what they’re worried about. Actual people’s names are mentioned by Lumumba on the tape. Lumumba had his own intelligence, he knew what was going on. And these are individuals who could be identified.’ He paused. ‘Hillcrest and Sykes and Dupetit.’
This did provoke a reaction from her. She stiffened, cocked her head. Gabriel was pleased.
‘Are you absolutely sure?’ she said.
‘I listened. Again and again. I wrote the names down.’
She exhaled. Sipped at her gin, face set, thinking. This had registered with her in some more serious way, he realized.
‘Queneau told me that these names,’ he continued, ‘lead directly to the door of former President Eisenhower.’ He was feeling pleased at his eloquence. ‘There was a plan – authorized by Eisenhower himself – to assassinate a legitimately elected head of state. Patrice Lumumba. Get rid of him. Kill him. “Élimination définitive ” – that’s what Lumumba told me. Hence all the mayhem. That’s why I’m being followed, threatened, my flat broken into, searched. It’s got to stop, Faith. I did my job for you. You said you were happy. Call off the dogs.’
‘They’re not my dogs! Give the man the tapes, for heaven’s sake. Problem solved.’
It was very odd to see her so disturbed.
‘No,’ he said.
‘Why not? Why do you care?’
‘Because the tapes are my life insurance,’ Gabriel said, noting an annoying tremor in his voice. ‘I saw what happened to Nancy-Jo Berndlinger. I now know too much. What happened to her is not going to happen to me.’
‘Pure fantasy, Gabriel. She was a drug addict. A walking disaster area, clearly. You’re a travel writer. An excellent one, highly regarded. Nobody’s going to come after you, for God’s sweet sake. Be realistic.’
‘Then just let them know, Faith. That’s all I ask. Pass on the message.’
They looked at each other. Tick-tock, seconds went by. She said nothing.
‘One for the road?’ Gabriel asked.
12.
Serenital
Manley Dryden replied, thanking Gabriel for his most interesting book and adding that he would be more than delighted to talk about the fire at Yeomanswood Farm as he remembered it extremely well. There was a telephone number on his letterhead and Gabriel called him and they made a date for the visit.
Tyrone said that the price for a day’s hire of his car was now £15. Gabriel laughed. Keep it, he said. There are cars I could buy for £15. In the event his rented Morris Minor carried him safely to Claverleigh, East Sussex – a pretty village near Lewes boasting a wide main street full of Georgian houses with an ancient church at one end and a market square with a rather impressive corn exchange.
Dryden lived off the High Street in a row of terraced nineteenth-century cottages. It was a chilly day, a presaging of autumn in the air. Gabriel stepped out of the Morris and inhaled, feeling the cold sharpness hit his lungs. He breathed deeply, head clearing – it had been a surprisingly long drive from London. East Sussex sounded close but, looking around him at the soft green swells of the South Downs beyond the village’s flinty roofscape, he felt far away, suddenly, in another country. He opened the front garden gate, walked up the laid-brick path and knocked on the door.
Dryden was a slim man, neatly dressed in a tweed jacket and corduroy trousers, grey-haired, bespectacled, clean-shaven, with an unlit pipe clenched in his mouth. Gabriel noticed that his shoes were highly polished. He led Gabriel through his house and down to a substantial shed at the end of his garden. There was no sign of a Mrs Dryden, Gabriel noted.
‘This is where I keep my archive,’ he said. ‘All my files of all my adjusts.’
Gabriel gave silent thanks for the neurotic mind of a retired loss adjuster as he sat down on a rather battered Lloyd Loom chair. There was a row of ten identical wooden filing cabinets set back by the rear wall and Dryden went straight to one of them, slid open a drawer and returned with a file. There was a desk in the shed and Dryden sat behind it. He opened the file, took his pipe out of his mouth and placed it on the desktop.
‘I have to say, Mr Dax – I should warn you – this is one of the cases that still troubles me. It was cut and dried but I was overruled by the fire service. I believe Blackhill & Broadstairs paid the claim in full.’
‘Yes, so I was told. There seemed no . . .’ Gabriel searched for a word. ‘Equivocation.’
‘But there should have been equivocation,’ Dryden said with some fierceness. He put his pipe back in his mouth again. He seemed to suck on it like a teat, Gabriel thought. Why didn’t he just fill it with tobacco and smoke it?
‘There were two immediate aspects of the case that alerted me,’ Dryden said, consulting his files. ‘Did you know there was a 999 call made?’
‘I was six years old, Mr Dryden. Who was going to tell me these things? I assume a neighbour saw the flames and smoke and called the fire brigade.’
‘Wrong. The call was made from Yeomanswood Farm itself.’
‘What? How?’
Gabriel couldn’t really come to terms with this fact. He thought hard – a 999 call from the farm . . .
‘So it must have been—’
‘Yes. We must assume that the call was made by your late mother. Very sad.’
‘You mean she saw the house was on fire and made the 999 call.’
‘That’s a valid interpretation. But not the only interpretation.’
Gabriel saw that Dryden’s zeal hadn’t diminished even after twenty-five years. Now was his moment in court.
‘Did you know that, in your family home, you had a refrigerator?’ Dryden asked.
‘No. Or at least I don’t remember.’
‘Very unusual, I must say, in the 1930s, in a British household,’ Dryden said. ‘It therefore caught my eye during my inspection. It was an American model. General Electric.’
‘Perhaps my father – who worked abroad a great deal – had seen one of them and bought one. I repeat, I was—’
‘Yes, you were six years old, Mr Dax. Point taken.’
Dryden stood up now and began to pace about slowly, up and down his shed, gesturing with one hand as if giving a lecture.
‘The amazing aspect of refrigerators is that not only do they keep food cold but they can also withstand great heat,’ he said, patiently, as if his notional students were not very intelligent. ‘Did you know that, at the Hiroshima bomb site, there was a blackened refrigerator close to ground zero and all its contents, including half a dozen eggs and a lettuce, were perfectly preserved?’
‘I did not know that. How amazing.’
‘Your family refrigerator also survived the terrible fire at Yeomanswood Farm.’ Dryden went back to his desk and put his cold pipe in his mouth again. He seemed a little tense. ‘In the refrigerator – I opened it myself – I found there were three empty pill bottles of Serenital.’
‘And what is Serenital?’
‘It’s a brand name for a phenobarbital. It’s a drug. It’s still in common use – used to treat anxiety and depression.’
Gabriel now stood up himself, thinking hard.
‘What exactly are you trying to tell me, Mr Dryden?’
‘I take no professional satisfaction in this, Mr Dax. My conclusions were overruled and my report rejected. The case was closed, the insurance money paid. Now you’ve reopened it, as it were. I can only tell you, now, what was obvious to me, then.’
‘Namely?’
‘That your mother had taken far too many tablets of Serenital. She was not in control of herself.’ Dryden waved his arms around, vaguely. ‘In fact, she was probably profoundly out of control. Somehow, a fire was started, one way or another. Inadvertently, accidentally, perhaps. That was one theory. In the kitchen? A gas burner left on? An attempt to light a candle? A match falling on a carpet? The fire caught hold. However, she was sufficiently compos mentis to call the fire brigade and then, through the effects of all the drugs she had taken, collapsed.’
Anamnesis, Gabriel thought, and repeated the word to himself. Facts, blessed facts. He felt his eyes suddenly moist with tears and turned away from Dryden so he wouldn’t see. He took a deep breath, trying to comprehend this new scenario. He turned back. He knew what Dryden was implying.
‘One of my few vivid memories – of the few I retain – is that my mother was dead when I discovered her.’
‘That was probably a result of her overdose of Serenital.’
‘Is it feasible, in your opinion, Mr Dryden, that my mother deliberately set fire to the house?’
‘That speculation is beyond my remit, Mr Dax.’
Gabriel forced himself to confront this new logic.
‘She was fighting depression with this drug, Serenital,’ Gabriel said. ‘She took an overdose and set fire to the house. A kind of act of madness, an act of suicide, in other words.’
‘Except,’ Dryden interjected, ‘you, her young child, six years old, were upstairs in your bedroom, asleep.’
Gabriel nodded. Trying to think of his mother – this amorphous, mythic being – in her misery, her profound unhappiness, half-realizing the consequences of her desperate actions.
‘Maybe, in her confusion, she remembered that – that I was upstairs – and that’s why she made the 999 call,’ he said. ‘She wanted me to be saved.’
‘Maybe. We can never know. All we have is the 999 call and the empty bottles of Serenital. My job was to analyse. To make sure two plus two added up to four.’ He sighed, and suddenly the efficient functionary with his rows of immaculate filing cabinets was replaced by a human being. ‘It must all be terribly, terribly upsetting for you, Mr Dax.’
‘It is, of course it is, yes. But I need to confront the events of that night. Try to establish the facts. Face up to the reality. You’ve already told me things I had never known.’ For some reason Gabriel felt he could open up to this punctilious man. ‘You see, I have my own difficulties, Mr Dryden – pretty much lifelong mental problems. They’re all caused by the events of that night. I won’t be cured, myself, unless I understand, or can come to some sort of understanding – or arrive at some sort of hypothesis – about what took place when Yeomanswood Farm burnt down.’
Suddenly Gabriel knew that he had to go back to London, to Frognal Way, and talk to Katerina Haas.
‘Yes. She was always taking pills,’ Sefton said. ‘I do remember that.’
It was late afternoon but already dark in Highgate, the night drawing in as winter neared. Gabriel looked out of the window at the shadowy garden, the trees and bushes indistinct and massy in the gloom, individual leaves dissolved into general leafiness. He was en route to an evening appointment with Dr Haas in Frognal Way and had decided to drop in on Sefton, on the off chance he was at home.
‘Do you think she was . . .’ Gabriel thought how best to put it. ‘Of sound mind?’
Sefton looked at him a little suspiciously.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘I now think – wisdom of hindsight, of course – that she was something of a hysteric. Always flying into rages with me. But, you know, rages that were out of proportion for my little sins, whatever they were.’ He stood up and went to pour himself another whisky at the substantial drinks cabinet the sitting room possessed. Gabriel was drinking a tonic water – he didn’t want to breathe fumes over Dr Haas – though he was apprehensive about the forthcoming encounter. Somehow bridges had to be rebuilt after his peremptory, angry exit. Still, she hadn’t refused him an appointment. He could do with some alcohol.
‘Have you got any vodka?’
‘Yes, of course. I’ve got everything here.’
‘Add a slug to that, would you?’
He went to join Sefton and Sefton added a generous measure of vodka to his tonic.
‘Why all these questions?’
‘I’ve been investigating the fire. Our fire. I have more information.’
He gave Sefton a brief summary of Dryden’s rejected report.
‘Bloody hell,’ Sefton said. ‘I was always told the fire was caused by your night light. That moony light you had.’
