‘Any sign of Andromeda? Any news?’ he asked abruptly.
‘Ah, no. But I think I’m getting close.’
‘Getting close, eh?’ he smiled. ‘Hard on Andromeda’s trail.’
Not for the first time I wondered if Fyfe-Miller were entirely sane.
‘It’s a question of narrowing the investigation down,’ I said, playing for time. ‘Analysing exactly who had access to that particular information.’
‘Don’t take too long, Rief, or your precious Andromeda may fly the coop.’ At which point he took his hat off, gave me a mocking theatrical bow and then turned back the way we had come, shouting at me, over his shoulder, ‘Boot polish under the fingernails, I’ll remember that!’
I wandered back to The White Palace thinking about what he had said. It was a fair point, actually – I couldn’t take my own sweet time – Vandenbrook could easily grow suspicious. Was this some kind of a warning I’d been given? Had Munro and Massinger ordered Fyfe-Miller to turn up the pressure on me? . . . I bought the Evening News and read that Blanche Blondel had opened at the Lyceum the previous night in The Conscience of the King to triumphant acclaim. Blanche – perhaps I’d pop in a note at the stage door . . . Fyfe-Miller had inadvertently reminded me of her and I thought it might be a good moment to see her again.
10. The History of Unintended Consequences
Lysander did some quick research on Christian Vandenbrook’s life and background. Vandenbrook had been caught up in the mass retreat from Mons in the first hectic weeks of the war and had been knocked unconscious by an artillery explosion that left him in a coma for three days. He suffered thereafter from periodic bleeding from the ears and his sense of balance left him for some months. He was declared unfit for active service and joined the General Staff in London. Lysander wondered how this agreeable move had come about, then he discovered that Vandenbrook’s father-in-law was Brigadier-General Walter McIvor, the Earl of Ballatar, hero of the Battle of Waitara River in the Maori Wars in New Zealand. Vandenbrook was married to the earl’s younger child, his daughter, Lady Emmeline, and they had two daughters themselves, Amabel and Cecilia. A very well-connected man, then, married into wealth and prestige. That explained how he achieved the grand house in Knightsbridge and the other quietly munificent trappings of his life on a captain’s pay. But did it explain why he should choose to betray his country? Or why he was having an affair with Anna, now the dowager Lady Faulkner? Obviously the sooner he confronted Vandenbrook the sooner answers to these questions might ensue.
But he felt a kind of inertia seize him as he wondered what the outcome of these next actions and investigations would be – and felt the near-irresistible urge to procrastinate. He knew that the moment he laid out his evidence in front of Vandenbrook everything would change – not just for Vandenbrook but for himself, also. And, perhaps, for his mother. But all history is the history of unintended consequences, he said to himself – there’s nothing you can do about it.
At the end of the day Lysander strolled along the Directorate’s corridors towards Vandenbrook’s office, feeling more than somewhat nervous and on edge. Vandenbrook was dictating a letter to his secretary and waved him to a chair. There was a green plant in a worked brass pot in one corner, a Persian rug on the floor, and on the wall, hung a nineteenth-century portrait of a whiskered dragoon with his hand on the pommel of his mighty sabre.
‘– Whereupon,’ Vandenbrook was saying, ‘we would be most grateful for your prompt and detailed responses. I have the honour to remain, obedient servant, etcetera, etcetera. Thank you, Miss Whitgift.’ His secretary left.
‘Applying leather boot to lazy arse,’ he said to Lysander with a wink. ‘What can I do for you, Rief?’
‘I wonder if we might have a discreet word, in private.’
‘“Discreet”? “Private”? Don’t like the sound of that, oh, no,’ he said with a chuckle, taking his overcoat off the back of the door. ‘I’m heading home – why don’t you come with me? That way we can have a proper drink and still be “private”.’
They took a taxi back to Knightsbridge, Vandenbrook explaining that his wife and daughters had gone to the country – ‘to Inverswaven,’ he said, as an aside, as if Lysander should know where and of what he was talking. Lysander nodded and safely said, ‘Lovely time of year.’ He was feeling surprisingly tense but was acting very calm, and he thanked his profession once again for the trained ability to feign this sort of ease and confidence even when he was suffering from its opposite. He offered Vandenbrook a cigarette, lit his and his own with a flourish, flicked the match out of the window and kept up – in a loud, sure voice – a banal flow of conversation about London, the weather, the traffic, the last Zeppelin raid, how the blackout was a risible farce – ‘What’s the point of painting the tops of street lights black? It’s the pool of light they cast that you see from up in the air. Farcical. Risible.’ Vandenbrook picked up the mood and the two of them bantered their way west across London. Vandenbrook asked him what he recommended at the theatre. Lysander said he simply had to see Blanche Blondel in The Conscience of the King. Vandenbrook said he would pay good money to hear Blanche Blondel read an infantry training manual – and so the two of them chatted on until they found themselves in Knightsbridge in no time at all.
Vandenbrook’s butler served them both brandy and sodas and they settled down in the large drawing room on the first floor. It was a little over-furnished, Lysander thought, a grand piano taking up rather too much of one corner of the room and thereby making the rest of the furniture seem jammed together. There were many vases filled with flowers, he saw, as if someone were seriously ill upstairs, and heavy gilt-framed paintings on the walls of Highland scenes in various seasons – perhaps painted around Inverswaven, he surmised.
‘I think you’d better have your discreet word with me,’ Vandenbrook said, not smiling for once. ‘The suspense is affecting my liver.’
‘Of course,’ Lysander said, standing and taking the envelope out of his inside pocket, unfolding it and handing it to Vandenbrook. ‘This was yours – “Capt. C. Vandenbrook – To be collected.”’
He could see his shock, suddenly visibly present. His lips pursed, the tendons on his neck flexed, his Adam’s apple bobbing above the knot of his tie.
‘There are some sheets of paper inside,’ Lysander added.
Vandebrook drew the pages half out, glanced at them and shoved them back in again. His eyes turned, to fix themselves on the painting above the fireplace – a stag on some moorland hill, mists swirling.
‘Where did you get this?’ he asked, his voice suddenly a little shrill.
‘Where you left it – the Dene Hotel, Hythe.’
Vandenbrook hung his head and began to sob – a low keening sound, like an animal’s pain. Then he began to shake and rock back and forward. Lysander saw his tears fall on to the manila envelope on his lap, staining it. Then Vandenbrook toppled off his chair, slowly, and fell face forward, pressing his brow into the pile of the carpet, making a grinding, moaning noise as if some deep agonizing internal ache were forcing the sound from between his clenched teeth.