"D'you notice anything about the house?" Agnes asked. "Taking everything together?"
Maxim stopped and looked around and tried to remember. Overall, the house was rather dark and worn; the furniture wasn't expensive, the central heating radiators were the heavy old-fashioned kind you found in barracks and schools – big enough to sit on (it was supposed to give you piles or chilblains, he couldn't remember which). But the clothes…
"He spent his money on things he could take with him," he decided. "Not on the house. What car did he have?"
"A five-year-old Renault 12. She had an eight-year-old Mini. That's right: he was always going home to Moscow in the end."
"I suppose they always have to."
"Sometimes faster than they expect," Agnes said grimly. "Those bastards are not going to like the Moscow clothing shops."
In fact, the house did have a front door, but as it was set at ninety degrees to the sensible, it was invisible from the drive. And since the uniformed policeman wasn't guarding the house in any serious sense, Mrs Barbara Masson walked up to the door and let herself in on her key before anybody had seen her.
She stood in a tiny hallway, lined with coats, between the two big rooms and asked loudly: "And just who on earth are all of you?"
Agnes came quickly across the dining-room. "Hello, Barbara. We're us. Plus Special Branch, of course."
"I do hope, Agnes Algar, that at least you've got a search warrant."
"Oh yes, we're all being very legal. We even brought our own tea and sugar and milk. That's standard procedure on occasions like this."
Mrs Masson put down the suitcase she had in one hand and the airline bag she had in the other and slowly knelt down between them and began to cry and cry and cry.
16
"He said we were going on just a short trip to Vienna and the service had said I could go. I've been on these things before. It's something about a couple looking less suspicious than a single person. That's right, isn't it, Agnes?"
"That's right." Agnes spoke very gently.
"He said he wouldn't have time to get home, it had all been arranged at the last minute and that I should pack for both of us. He told me some special things he wanted." She was lying flat on her bed, staring at the ceiling. The room was darkening as evening crept in, but nobody moved to turn on a light. Maxim had found her a drink and Agnes had rummaged out a packet of tranquilisers from the bottom of her vast handbag, and Inspector Ferris had been chased back to his mouseholing. Now they just listened.
Barbara Masson had a very English elegance and the face you see in society magazines: lean, high cheekbones, a slightly large mouth and very good teeth. That sort ages well, and the silver in her long fair hair suited her. She could have worn pearls to hose out the pig-sty and not look overdressed.
"What special things?" Agnes prompted.
"Oh, two of his newest suits and his favourite ties – quite a lot of them, I thought, and his new shoes and to be sure to bring his best cuff-links. And he wanted the two little cameras. It all sounded rather grand for a two-day jaunt, but I didn't suspect anything." Her voice was a Knightsbridge flute that frequently hit awoid fortissimo.
"Two cameras?" Agnes asked. But of course Masson would need two, no professional dared trust only one. And he had certainly been a professional photographer.
"Yes, one of them was mine, he gave me it. But I never really liked it. It was too small and fiddly. He borrowed it sometimes."
"So you took both."
"That's right. Well, when I got to Heathrow, he gave me a new passport. It had my picture in it, I don't know where he got that, and it said I was Margaret Franklin. I'd never seen it before, of course, but it had quite a lot of stamps and visas in it as if I'd got to all these places." She lifted her head to stare at Agnes. "I thought it was the service who'd done it, but it must have really been them? "
"They're good at their job."
"Yes." It was a sigh. Mrs Masson let her head fall back. "Actually, I was quite excited, being somebody else, somebody unreal. A bit like taking over from Sarah Bernhardt and making an absolute wow of it." She giggled and waved an arm in a gesture slightly unstrung by vermouth and tranquilisers and probably lack of sleep. An empty glass thumped onto the carpet but didn't break. Nobody moved.
"We put up at a hotel down in the old city, but it was a modern hotel. We didn't get there until after dinner but it didn't really matter because we'd had one of those ucky airline meals. You have to eat them because there's nothing else to do on an aeroplane except get sloshed. Rex said he had to go out just to make a contact. He was gone, oh, about three-quarters of an hour when he came back he said he'd arranged a chauffeur-driven car for us to go sight-seeing the next morning. I thought that was a bit odd because Vienna was full of snow so heaven knows what it would be like outside. But at least we wouldn't be doing the driving and the service was paying, so… In the morning he told me."
"Before you got in the car?"
"This was before the car even came. He told me to pack, and then he said we weren't going back to Britain, not ever again. We were going to Moscow instead. I just didn't believe him. I thought he was making some terrible joke. Then I realised we were only about thirty miles from Moscow – if you see what I mean."
Agnes nodded. "The Czech frontier at Bratislava. That's probably where you'd have gone over. Did he say.. why you were going?"
"He talked about half-baked socialism mixed with half-baked capitalism and governments that didn't dare take any decisions so that Britain was run by the civil service and the unions. I must say it's funny he was blaming the unions and here we were on our way to Moscow." Her voice was suddenly strained and bitter.
Agnes said softly: "They don't have strikes in Moscow, Barbara."
"I suppose not… But I wasn't really listening. It was all as if he'd said he'd been sleeping with somebody else for years… No, I really think it was worse. If he'd been sleeping around there would have been just part of him I hadn't understood. But this was all of him."
Treachery, Maxim thought, is a balloon. It has to be complete or it's nothing.
"And what did you do?" Agnes asked.
"It's quite terrible how you fall back on clichйs. I just said: 'I'm leaving you, Rex. Good-bye.' And I picked up my bags and I walked out."
"He didn't try to stop you?"
"No. Nobody did. But why do you think he didn't wait until we were actually in the car before he told me where we were going?"
"Maybe," Maxim said, "that after all the years when you didn't have a choice, he owed you one at the end."
Mrs Masson lifted herself on one elbow and peered through the gloom at him. "Yes. Yes, I suppose you could be right. He wasn't an unkind man."
Agnes said: "Also you couldn't have been dragged unwillingly through the Austrian frontier post. And so you flew back home?"
"It wasn't that easy," Mrs Masson said reproachfully. "This is yesterday I'm talking about." She had done a slow frightening journey quite alone – more alone than she'd ever been before – and now, perhaps, she wanted to blunt the memory by doing it again in company.
When she reached the airport, she realised she hadn't even any Austrian money for the taxi and had to overpay heavily in sterling. And then there wasn't a flight to Britain for another three hours. She began to worry.