I met Munro at noon by the north-east lion at the foot of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. It was a grey, cold day of intermittent rain and drizzle and we were both wearing rubberized trenchcoats, like a couple of tourists. A heavy shower had passed through ten minutes before and the paving stones were glossy and lacquered, the wet smoky façades of the surrounding buildings – the Royal College of Physicians, the National Gallery, St Martin’s – almost a velvety black. The brief sun was trying vainly to break through the thick grey clouds, managing only to illumine some breeze-blown interstices, and this, coupled with the gloomy effect of the heavy purpley mass of more rain coming up the Thames estuary, cast a curious gold-leaden light on the scene, making the vistas down Pall Mall, Whitehall and Northumberland Avenue seem lit by arc-lights, artificial and strange, as if the city blocks could be struck like stage scenery and re-assembled elsewhere. I felt uncomfortable and edgy, troubled by the weather and the curious light, almost as if I were in a theatre, acting.
MUNRO: Why are we meeting like this, Rief? All very melodramatic.
LYSANDER: Indulge me. I like public spaces at the moment.
MUNRO: We found ‘Andromeda’, of course, up on the heath, with your note on him. The police called us . . . Everything tidied up nicely. We’re grateful, I must say.
LYSANDER: He was very clever, Vandenbrook. Very.
MUNRO: Not clever enough. You caught him and dealt with him. I read your deposition – very thorough.
LYSANDER: Good. He was never being blackmailed, you see. That was the first of his clever ideas. He had everything prepared in case he was ever found out. There was no ten-year old girl, no genuine statement, no pearls. It gave him an excuse – and it might have saved him the hangman if he hadn’t shot himself.
MUNRO: Yes . . . How did you know it was him – in the end?
LYSANDER: I admit – I’d been completely convinced by his blackmail story. Then he gave himself away – just a little slip up. Even I didn’t notice it when he said it – it was something I remembered a few hours later as I was trying to get to sleep.
MUNRO: You’re going to tell me what it was, I’m sure.
LYSANDER: That night we all met at the theatre, Vandenbrook made a reference to the cover of
Andromeda und Perseus
.
MUNRO: Glockner’s source-text –
LYSANDER: Exactly. I mentioned it – the opera – and he said he had heard it was a ‘saucy’ opera. How could he know? He’d never seen it. But he had seen the libretto with its provocative cover because he’d stolen it from my mother’s office and used it as the master-text for the Glockner code.
MUNRO [thinking]: Yes . . . What was that meeting in the variety theatre all about?
LYSANDER: I wanted Vandenbrook to look you over – you, Fyfe-Miller and Massinger. See if he could identify you. I still believed he was being blackmailed at that stage.
MUNRO: Are you saying you suspected one of us?
LYSANDER: I’m afraid so. It seemed the obvious conclusion at the time. I was convinced it was one of you three – that one of you was the real Andromeda. Until he made his slip-up.
MUNRO: I don’t understand –
LYSANDER: When I was in Vienna I knew this Austrian army officer who had been accused of stealing from the officers’ mess. I’m sure now that he was guilty but there were eleven other suspects. So he hid behind a screen of other suspects and manipulated them very adroitly – just like Vandenbrook. And he got away with it. When there are many suspects the inclination is to suspect anyone and everybody – which means you probably never find the real suspect. It’s a very clever ruse. But I had this strong feeling that the whole business was connected to Vienna in some way. You had been in Vienna, Fyfe-Miller as well – and so had Massinger, apparently.
MUNRO: Yes, Massinger came to Vienna. And you were in Vienna, also.
LYSANDER: So I was. And Hettie Bull. And Dr John Bensimon. The only person who hadn’t been there was Vandenbrook. And that’s what gave him away. He hadn’t been there, yet he knew about
Andromeda und Perseus
. And, most importantly, what was on the cover of the Viennese libretto. Glockner’s Dresden libretto had no ‘saucy’ cover. Just plain black lettering on white. A tiny, fatal, error. But I was the only person who knew that. The only one.
Munro looked thoughtful, stroking his neat moustache with his middle finger in his habitual gesture. I sensed that he was desperate to find something wrong with my reasoning, some flaw in the logic – almost as a matter of intellectual pride and self-esteem, as if he was annoyed by the case I had built and wanted to bring it down, somehow.
MUNRO: All of the Glockner letters were posted in London.
LYSANDER: Yes.
MUNRO: So you’re saying Vandenbrook took them to a south-coast hotel. Left them there. Then had them picked up the next day by a railway porter and brought back to him in London. He then encoded them and sent them on to Geneva.
LYSANDER: It was part of his cover. He was unbelievably thorough. Everything was thought through. Everything had to fit his essential blackmail story – that there was another person controlling him. Another Andromeda, if you like. A more important one.
MUNRO: He certainly took pains.
LYSANDER: And they nearly paid off for him. By the way, how did you know the Glockner letters had London postmarks?
MUNRO: You told me.
LYSANDER: Did I? I don’t remember.
MUNRO: Then it must have been Madame Duchesne.
LYSANDER: Must have been . . .
MUNRO: How can you be sure that Vandenbrook was Andromeda?
LYSANDER: How can you be sure about anything? It’s my best guess. My most considered deduction. My most cogitated interpretation. Vandenbrook was very shrewd – and an exceptional actor, incidentally, far superior to me. I wish I had half his talent. And he had established an invisible layer of power above him that made him look like a victim, a dupe, a pawn. Don’t look at me, I’m small fry, he was saying – the real control lies elsewhere. I believed it for a while but it was a total fabrication.
MUNRO: Then why did he try to deliver the last letter?
LYSANDER: That was the beginning of the ruse. He saw I had come into the Directorate and he knew exactly what I was looking for – and that I might very well narrow the suspects down to him – so he put his escape plan into operation. Of course he encoded the Glockner letters himself. He had the master-text. But he had to cover himself in case I found him out. And of course I might never have come upon the last letter, but he couldn’t risk it.
MUNRO: Isn’t that a bit too subtle? Over-subtle? Even for Vandenbrook?
LYSANDER: This is your world, Munro, not mine. I think ‘too subtle’ or ‘over-subtle’ are its defining features, don’t you? The triple-bluff? The quadruple-bluff? The third-guess? The tenth-guess? Normal currency in my limited experience. Why don’t you ask an expert like Madame Duchesne? Ask yourself, come to that.
Munro frowned. He looked like a man who was still not convinced by the argument.
LYSANDER: You don’t look convinced.
MUNRO: Well, next summer’s offensives will give us a final answer, I suppose, as to whether the leak is staunched or not.
LYSANDER: I suggest you go and spend a few days in the Directorate of Movements and its associated departments. It’s all there. Mountains upon mountains of hard fact – so easy to read. It’s too big, Munro. The war machine is too gigantic and gigantically obvious – you can’t hide anything when it’s on that massive scale and when you’re as close as I was. Anyone could have been Andromeda – it just happened to be Vandenbrook.