‘Come now, there’s no need to be modest. You’re a qualified engineer: a chemical engineer. I’m well aware that you’ve been instrumental in helping one of our largest firms to supply Iraq with quantities of Zyklon B, for instance. The cleansing process of which I spoke depends upon the free circulation of such commodities, and yet our own laws, placed under absurd international constraints, prohibit us from exporting them. And so, ironically, it’s left to men like you – bounty hunters – to keep our ideals alive.’ He watched for Mark’s response, but saw none. ‘You do know where Zyklon B is manufactured, don’t you?’
‘Of course,’ said Mark, who had visited the plant many times.
‘I wonder if you are familiar with the history of that factory. It narrowly escaped being destroyed by allied bombers in 1942. A British plane was sent out on a secret mission to reconnoitre the area, but the Luftwaffe were alerted and the unfortunate pilot and his crew were shot down. Does any of this mean anything to you?’
‘I’m afraid not. You forget that it happened a long time ago. Before I was even born.’
The old man held his gaze for a moment and then pulled on the bell-rope beside the door.
‘Quite true, Mr Winshaw. But as I say, you remain a puzzle.’ As Mark left, he added: ‘My daughter, if you wish to see her, is in the library.’
∗
December 1961
To his mother, Mark had long ago become a puzzle which there was nothing to be gained from solving, and so she had offered no protest when he told her – several weeks after the event – that he had decided to give up his law degree and enrol as a student of chemical engineering. The letter in which he communicated this news was one of the last he ever sent her. It had become pointless to maintain the pretence that mother and son still had anything to say to each other: and in another couple of years there would be physical distance between them to compound the gulf of incomprehension and indifference.
Her invitation to Mortimer’s fiftieth birthday party had provided Mildred with a rare glimpse into the Winshaws’ prosperous lives. For most of her long years of widowhood the family seemed to have forgotten her, and offered little in the way of financial help beyond the paying of Mark’s school and university fees. As she neared the age of fifty, she was still struggling to subsist on her modest income as secretary to an American wine merchant based in London. One day he announced his intention of winding up the business and moving back to Florida, and she was about to resign herself to the prospect of several gloomy weeks haunting the employment agencies, when he astonished her by asking if she would come to America with him, in the capacity not of his secretary, but his wife. It took her three days to recover from the shock; at which point she accepted.
They lived comfortably in a beach house outside Sarasota until their peaceful deaths, within two months of one another, in the winter of 1986. Mildred never spoke to her son again after leaving England. Their last conversation was over lunch one afternoon in Oxford, and they had both found it difficult to remain civil even then. She had ended up accusing Mark of despising her.
‘ “Despise” is putting it rather strongly,’ he said. ‘I just can’t really see the point of the sort of life you’re leading.’
It was a remark which came back to her every so often: perhaps as she sat with her husband on the verandah after dinner, looking out over the ocean and trying hard to think of any place she would rather be.
∗
1976
Although Mark never spoke to his mother after she had left for America, he did see her once. This was during the early days of his dealings with Iraq, when he was first introduced to a curt, bearlike man called Hussein who represented the ‘Ministry of Industry’ and seemed in a hurry to procure specialized equipment for the building of a large pesticides factory. Mark discussed his requirements and recognized at once that several of the compounds he intended to manufacture – including Demeton, Paraoxon and Parathion – could easily be transformed into nerve gas. None the less he saw no reason why the project shouldn’t be represented to potential clients as part of an agricultural programme, and he promised to put Hussein in touch with an American firm which would be able to supply him with the huge corrosion-resistant vats necessary for the mixing of the chemicals.
Representatives of the company were flown to Baghdad and fed a convincing story about the plight of Iraqi farmers who could not protect their crops from desert locusts. They returned to Miami and set about preparing blueprints for a pilot plant which would enable the local workforce – which had no experience of work in this dangerous field – to be trained in the handling of toxic chemicals. But before they had time to complete the designs they were informed, via Mark, that Hussein had no interest in building a pilot plant. He wished to embark upon full-scale production immediately. This was not acceptable to the safety-conscious Americans, and Mark, who expected to make some six million dollars in commission on the deal, was forced to intervene and set up a meeting between the two sides in a conference room at the Miami Hilton.
It was not a success. Mark stood at a window overlooking the beach and listened in silence as the negotiations broke down amid accusations of hidden agendas on the one hand and over-regulation on the other. Never once taking his eyes from the strip of silver sand, he heard the Americans snap their cases shut and walk out. He heard Hussein grunt and complain that ‘Those guys need their brains examining. They just threw away the chance to become rich.’ Mark didn’t answer. He was the only person in the room not to have lost his temper. The money would have been useful, but he would make it up. He’d try the Germans next.
The day before, he had driven out through the Everglades to the Gulf Coast. A morning’s drive took him to Naples, along the Tamiami Trail with its Indian villages reconstituted as tourist attractions, its airboat rides and roadside cafés offering frogs’ legs and gator-burgers. From there he took the freeway north through Bonita Springs and Fort Myers, and arrived outside Sarasota late in the afternoon. His mother’s address, although he had never used it on any letter, was committed to memory. But Mark did not want to speak to her even now. He didn’t even ask himself why he had come. Once he had found the house, he drove another half a mile down the ocean road and turned off down a dirt track which led to the beach. When he parked at the end of this track, he had a good view of the house.
Her husband was shopping in town that afternoon, but as chance would have it Mildred herself was in the garden. She’d meant just to sit out and read a magazine, maybe start a letter to her stepdaughter in Vancouver, but she could see that the gardener had made a poor job of weeding the lawn, as usual, and was soon down on her knees pulling the more obstinate specimens up by the root. Almost at once she noticed the man leaning against the bonnet of his car and staring at her. She stood up and looked at him, shielding her eyes against the sun. She recognized him now, but didn’t move, didn’t wave, didn’t call out his name; just returned his impassive gaze. There were hollow spaces where his eyes should have been. At closer quarters, she would have realized that he was wearing mirror sunglasses which reflected nothing but the sky’s deep blue. But Mildred stayed where she was, and after a minute or two she knelt down again and resumed her weeding. The next time she looked up, the man was gone.
∗
September 1988
As Graham’s researches progressed, he began to feel that it would be useful to know something about Mark’s family background, and he remembered that there was someone who could probably help him. Michael Owen’s name had disappeared from the arts pages of the newspapers over the last few years, his novels were no longer to be found anywhere in the shops, and his book about the Winshaws was yet to be published. Perhaps the whole project had never come to anything; but it was just possible, Graham reasoned, that he would still be working on it, and if this was the case, he might have gained access to any amount of valuable inside information (not that he would know what to do with it, since the depth of his political naívety had been made fairly clear even from their few conversations). It was, at the very least, worth making a few phone calls.