"They knew he was going to head the review committee; we don't know if they know about Luxembourg."
"If Bonn's involved, then they know." There had just been a new eruption of security scandals in West Germany, with lonely secretaries to important officials getting seduced by trained gigolos from East Germany. It was an old story, but to Box 500 it didn't get any better in the constant retelling.
"Maybe, maybe." There was another rumble of laughter and applause from the drawing rooms. "At least I'm missing the speechifying… So – it seems as if we'd better talk to this de Carette, once we know where he lives. I'm not farming it out to Six; Harry, can you do it, the soldier to soldier approach?"
"I can try."
"Also try not to take a flick-knife this time."
Back down in the Private Secretaries' room, George checked through the tray of paperwork that had arrived in the last two hours. Agnes sat on the edge of his desk, listening to the guests clumping down the stairs outside in seven languages.
"Would you have thought of simply burning that houseboat?" George asked.
She considered. "I hope so."
"You hope so?"
"He might have destroyed the letter, and I assume that's what we want. Especially now we know whatever it says is true."
"Yees." George made it a long, unleavened word.
"And if he hadn't had that flick-knife, he could be dead, the way he told it. I assume that's something we don't want: British Army officer attached to Number 10 found dead on Irish houseboat of woman murdered in-"
"Yes, yes, yes." George glared at a paper in his hand. "Why don't they write to the AUC? The Headmaster isn't responsible for the ice at Heathrow… You don't think Harry blew that bloody woman up himself, as well?"
"Why should he? And the funny thing is… I think he'd have told us if he had."
George let the letter drift back into the tray but went on staring at it, unseeing. Then he said quietly: "I hope you won't tell Harry, but I advised the Headmaster to pick somebody else. I think he chose Harry not because he's going somewhere in the Army, since he's quite likely not, but because he doesn't care where he's going any more. I still don't know if we did the right thing, but yes, I think he'd have told us. So who did it?"
"There was a certain Major Azarov also in the cast."
"If he lit the fuse, wouldn't that suggest that Muscovy already has the letter? They wouldn't want to kill her before they got it." George shivered. "But if they'd got the letter, what was Azarov doing on the houseboat?"
"Setting up our Major Maxim for a nice Anglo-Irish scandal? He could have tailed Harry from Limerick. He's a good soldier, but…"
"Yes… Will you go with him to France, once we've located this de Carette?"
"I'd love to watch him in action." Agnes grinned mischievously. "Perhaps we'll get ourselves into another war with France and see Britain restored to her former glory."
"Agnes, do not say these things."
Opening the door to his flat, Maxim knew immediately there was something wrong. A smell? A draught? The way the lock had turned? He stayed very still and carefully took the revolver from his briefcase. For once he had it when he might need it.
But he didn't. There was nobody there – not any longer. They seemed to have taken nothing and done nothing like vandalise the place. There were just tiny things like a few books upside down in the bookshelf, the tea and sugar jars switched around in the kitchen cupboard, his usual chair moved out of line with the TV set. Little things that said: we could have done big things, and next time…
He threw out the tea and sugar, just in case, and took a can of beer from the fridge – left with its door slightly open. It had all been nicely done, because the local police would give you one of those ay-ay-he's-one-of-those looks if you complained that someone had broken in just to change your tea and sugar jars around, then relocked the door on the way out.
Nicely done, perhaps too nicely. It was frightening how easily they had got in, but no more than frightening. Maxim couldn't share Barbara Masson's feeling of being despoiled by strangers picking over her property, because he had no property to be picked over. The flat was just the ninth – or was it tenth? – place he had rented since his marriage.
Both the gas fire and the record player seemed to be working. He put on the first side of Ralph Kirkpatrick playing 'The Well-tempered Clavier' – Jenny had given him the album, to show there was more to the keyboard than Ellington and Basic – and sat down yet again with The Gates of the Grave. The twenty-year-old paperback was coming unbound in lumps, but he knew which lump he wanted.
The patrol started from Zella oasis, the new headquarters of LRDG, about 200 miles south of the coast road…
24
Nice airport was swarming with would-be skiers off some cancelled or diverted flight. The floors were piled with tartan-coloured luggage and skis in long red plastic cases, the desks surrounded by suntanned men in short fur jackets of the sort women wore to the 1953 Coronation.
Maxim and Agnes hired a Citroлn Deux-Chevaux and, after a few mistakes, untangled themselves from the complex of fast new coast roads and began weaving up into the hills behind the city. For the first twenty miles the land was all used up, busy and untidy with olive groves on every slope, red-tiled villas, garages, souvenir shops and pylons. But after that it thinned out, and the rock bones of the hillsides showed through.
"The French," Agnes said, as they passed a very old farmhouse, "let their buildings flourish but keep the trees very much pruned and in their place. In Britain it's the other way round: it's an offence to enlarge your house or cut down your trees. What a basis for entente."
Maxim smiled and went on winding the bouncy little can of a car around the sharpening bends. Above, the sky was a hard cold blue, and against it they could suddenly see the place they had come to visit. And miles before they got there, it could see them.
The Chateau de Carette had always been small, by castle standards. Now it was just the tall square keep, a shaft of grainy honey-coloured stone rising firmly out of a rabble of extra buildings and wings that had been built on down the years. There was almost no sign of the curtain wall and its gatehouse that had originally defined the boundaries, but Maxim could see just where it must have led around the subtle curves and advantages of the hilltop. A soldier's eye is the same, whether he's positioning a laser target designator or a frightened peasant with a crossbow.
The rough driveway – the French don't take gravel seriously – led around to a small door set in one corner of a newish wing. A worn Citroen Safari was parked untidily by the edge of a bank of rough grass that slid down towards the valley. Maxim put the Deux-Chevaux in beside it.
"He's watching us," Agnes said suddenly.
"Yes."
"Do you feel it, too?"
"Not particularly. But he would be; it's what the place was built for." The keep reared above them, its narrow top windows still holding an all-round view: down the valley, up the valley, across the hills to either side.
The arched door, criss-crossed with ironwork, opened just before they knocked on it. A dour old man-servant poked his head out and grunted at them.
"Nous sommes M'mselle Algar et Major de Chasseurs Maxim" Maxim said in a very flat accent. He had already learnt that Agnes spoke the language almost perfectly, but she was letting him lead.
"Vous avez des cartes de visite, M'sieur, M'mselle?" The old boy had wet blue eyes and the look of a Dracula with indigestion.
Solemnly, they both handed him calling-cards. What on earth does Agnes put on hers? Maxim wondered. They were led down a stone corridor into a wide reception room, and motioned to stay there.