House of the Hanged

Chapter Four

Tom was familiar with the sound. Lying in bed at night, the creak of the big old vine that coiled its way up the front of the villa would often carry through the open French windows into his room when the wind was up.

But there wasn’t any wind tonight, not a breath of it.

He rarely slept the sleep of the innocent, lost to the world, and he shrugged off his liminal state in an instant, alert now, ears straining.

Maybe he’d been mistaken. All he could hear was the beat of the waves on the rocks below the villa, the ocean’s blind purpose to make all things sea.

No. There it was again. And a faint rustle of leaves.

Someone was climbing the vine, and there was only one reason why they would be doing that: in order to reach the large terrace which served the master bedroom where he slept.

He cursed himself for his complacency. He hadn’t slept with his gun to hand for almost a year. The old Beretta 418 was locked away in a drawer in the study, a symbol of a time when his life had been ruled by fear and suspicion. He prided himself on having finally mastered that debilitating state of mind. As if in affirmation of this, a harmless explanation came to him quite suddenly, taking the edge off his building panic.

Barnaby.

Barnaby wasn’t due until tomorrow evening, but he was quite capable of changing his plans on a whim, especially if he’d landed himself in trouble while motoring down through France, which was quite probable. Trouble and Barnaby had always gone together, and Tom could picture him having to flee some tricky situation entirely of his own making. Turning up un announced in the middle of night and then pouncing on Tom while he slept was exactly the sort of infantile prank that would appeal to Barnaby’s sense of humour.

The moonlight flooding through the French windows and painting the wall beside the bed would allow Tom to see the shadow-play of anyone entering from the terrace. Well, he would turn the tables on Barnaby, waiting until the last moment before scaring the living daylights out of him.

Then again, maybe he was stretching the realms of possibility, even by the preposterous standards of his old friend. Maybe it wasn’t Barnaby, but a burglar. A small band of Spaniards, professional housebreakers from Barcelona, had passed this way two summers back. Some were still serving time in Toulon prison.

Whoever it was, the person had now cleared the stone balustrade and was creeping across the terrace. Their soft footfalls ceased, replaced by another sound. It was hard to make out, but it sounded like someone un screwing the cap of a bottle.

Tom exaggerated his breathing to convey the impression of someone deep in slumber, and moments later the visitor slipped silently into the bedroom.

He knew immediately that it wasn’t Barnaby, not unless he had shrunk by half a head since April. Everything about the shadow on the wall was wrong. Most worryingly, it moved with a professional stealth, confident, unhurried. It was definitely a man, and as he stole towards the bed it became clear that he was carrying something in his hand, not a weapon – not a gun or a knife or even a cudgel – but something else.

Face down on the mattress, his head turned to the wall, Tom knew he was at a serious disadvantage. The only thing in his favour was that the intruder seemed set on drawing closer, levelling the odds with every step, bringing himself within range.

It was the familiar, sweet-smelling odour that spurred Tom into action. He exploded from the mattress, twisting and hurling himself at the figure looming beside the bed. Caught off guard, the man was sent crashing to the floor with Tom on top of him, gripping his wrists.

Stay close in, but keep his hands where you can see them. Then finish him off.

He drove his forehead into the man’s face. Twice. He was going for a third when the man bellowed and twisted away, slipping Tom’s clutches, not big, but surprisingly strong, and with the natural agility of youth on his side. Tom was after him in an instant. He wasn’t expecting the leg to lash out, catching him in the midriff, upending him.

Winded, he just managed to suck in a lungful of air before the chloroform-drenched rag was clamped over his nose and mouth. The man held him tight in an embrace from behind, wrapping his legs around him, locking his ankles. Tom knew he only had a matter of moments before the world went black, and he reached back and dug his thumbs deep into his assailant’s eyes, threatening to scoop them out of their sockets.

It was an old lesson, long-forgotten, but it came back easily enough. It also worked.

The man screamed, and as he released his grip Tom rolled to his right, instinct telling him he needed a weapon.

Springing to his feet, he seized the African carving from the chest of drawers. The naïf wooden figure of a woman had cost him a small fortune from a dealer in Paris, and it now saved his life.

Spinning back, he swung her blindly like a club just as the man was bringing a pistol to bear on him. The carving broke off at the knees and the gun skittered across the floor, beneath the bed. Strangely, Tom found himself thinking that it was a clean break, and could be repaired seamlessly enough by the right restorer.

This momentary loss of concentration bought the man enough time to pull a knife from his pocket. Tom hurled himself at his young adversary. Welded together, they landed briefly on the mattress before crashing to the floor, jammed in between the bed and the wall.

It wasn’t a knife. It was a syringe, and its slender needle glistened in the moonlight as they fought for possession of it.

Tom was dimly aware of the blood from the other man’s shattered nose splashing his face, then he found the purchase he was looking for and broke the man’s wrist with an audible crack.

The syringe clattered to the floor.

Tom lunged for it.

The man didn’t. He took the opportunity to flee.

Tom groped frantically beneath the bed for the gun, but his scuttling fingers turned up nothing. No time to search further. The man was already gone, out through the bedroom door. If he didn’t follow now, it would be too late.

He breasted the main staircase in time to see the shadowy figure throw the latch on the front door and disappear into the night. Trusting to instinct, Tom took the stone steps three at a time in the darkness, trying to narrow the lead.

Barefoot, bare-chested, and with his pyjama bottoms flapping about his legs, he burst outside into the moonlight. His moonlight. It served the hunter, not the hunted.

The man had made straight for the shadows, eschewing the driveway for the thick vegetation on the right. Tom glimpsed him just as the trees swallowed him up.

He set off in pursuit, immune to the sharp gravel tearing at the soles of his feet.

The man was fast, faster than Tom, and he had obviously done his homework. He knew the pathways criss-crossing the gardens and he knew not to head south towards the sea, where he ran the risk of being cornered. Thankfully, he was less sure of himself the further they travelled from the house. As they skirted the head of the gulley his sense of direction seemed to abandon him completely.

Rather than sticking to the path, which would have seen him safely away, he bore left up the slope, into the trees, crashing through the underbrush. It was a bad mistake, and Tom seized the opportunity to bring the foot chase to an abrupt and brutal conclusion. Something had to happen soon. His legs were all but spent, his bare feet scratched and bleeding.

Suddenly, there was silence ahead of him. The man had gone to ground. Tom dropped into a crouch, falling utterly still.

He won the waiting game. After a few minutes, he heard movement. He crept to his right as noiselessly as possible until he judged himself to be directly down the slope from the man.

Knowing that his adversary was young as well as wounded, he was banking on him being scared.

With a wild scream, Tom burst from his hiding place and charged up the slope.

The man broke cover ahead of him, turning tail and weaving blindly through the trees. He gave a surprised gasp as the ground disappeared beneath his feet, and a second or two later, Tom heard a dull thud.

He hurried to the edge of the railway cutting and peered down into the void.

He couldn’t make out much in the darkness, but he heard the sounds of a badly wounded beast below. The man was still alive. He had feared the fall might kill him.

It took him a while to work his way round to a point where he could safely drop on to the tracks. He approached cautiously, stepping from sleeper to sleeper to spare his bare feet, brandishing a branch he’d snapped from a tree.

He needn’t have worried; the man lay like a heap of rags where he’d fallen. One leg was grotesquely twisted beneath him.

Tom came and stood over him. ‘Where’s my dog?’

‘Per piacere . . .’ implored the man weakly, raising a hand.

‘Where’s my dog?’ Tom repeated in the same flat tone, switching to Italian.

‘The well . . .’

‘Where? In the well?’

‘Buried nearby.’

He only just resisted the urge to swing the branch and administer the coup de grâce.

‘Are you alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who sent you?’ he asked.

‘Alfiero.’

‘Who’s Alfiero?’

‘I can’t move my legs. Am I dying?’

‘Maybe.’

The young man emitted a deep sob. ‘I don’t want to die.’

‘Nobody wants to die.’

Tom struggled to feel any sympathy. The pathetic, broken figure before him had killed Hector, his companion, and only minutes earlier had tried to send him the same way.

‘Tell my mother I love her,’ pleaded the man pathetically.

Tom crouched so that they were almost face-to-face.

‘I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to find your mother and I’m going to kill her very, very slowly . . . unless you tell me who Alfiero is.’

The young man struck out at him weakly. ‘Don’t you touch my mother . . .’

Tom batted the arm aside and seized him by the throat, throttling him. ‘You obviously don’t know who I am,’ he hissed, ‘or you’d answer the question.’

He allowed time for the words to sink in before releasing his grip. ‘Who’s Alfiero?’

‘Alfiero is . . . Alfiero.’

The man wasn’t being evasive; he was teetering on the brink of unconsciousness now, not thinking straight. Tom slapped his face to bring him around.

‘Why does he want me dead?’

‘I don’t know. He never tells me why.’

‘Where is he?’

‘Rome . . . Viterbo . . . Pescara. He moves around . . .’

The words trailed off, replaced by a deep and tremulous groan, unlike anything Tom had ever heard before.

‘What’s his surname?’

The man started to slip away. Tom slapped his face again to bring him back. ‘What’s his surname?’

‘Tosti . . .’ It came out as a low croak. The man then fell slack and silent.

Tom felt for a pulse at his neck. It was there, but weak. He might well be bleeding internally.

Tom glanced up and down the cutting. He remembered the drill: remain focused and deal with the immediate situation. There would be time enough later to weigh the bigger questions.

He had to move the man; he couldn’t leave him lying there. But what if he had lied? What if he had an accomplice? What if the accomplice was waiting out there somewhere in the shadows for Tom to show himself? He went with his gut, taking the man at his word. Everything about him suggested a lone operator.

He checked the man’s trouser pockets so that nothing would be lost in transit. He turned up a key. It was attached to an oval metal fob familiar to his touch, even if he couldn’t see it properly in the darkness.

Shouldering the man proved easy enough, and he tried his best to ignore the unnatural geometry of the shattered limbs bumping against him as he bore the burden back to the villa. For much of the way, he stuck to the level ground afforded by the railway tracks, bearing left into the vegetation just before the crossing that led to the gates of the villa.

Somewhere along the route the man died. Tom couldn’t say when exactly – he had sensed no change in the inert weight – but when he laid his load as gently as possible beside the yew hedge fringing the terrace and felt once more for a pulse, he detected nothing.

So be it, he told himself. It’s probably for the best.

He glanced up at the twisted old vine. Probably no more than twenty minutes had elapsed since the dead man beside him had set about scaling the plant, but he knew in his bones that everything had changed in that brief time, everything he had built here.

He had just heard the first resounding trumpet blast against the walls of his private Jericho.

He smoked two cigarettes in quick succession while the bath was running, and he topped up his brandy glass before climbing into the water. His feet stung like Satan, but there were no deep cuts, just lacerations. His penis – he noted, with a mixture of curiosity and alarm – had shrunk to the size of an acorn.

He dressed in dark clothing then made a methodical tour of the bedroom, first recovering the pistol from beneath the bed. It was a Browning 1922 with a full clip. Common sense dictated that he dispose of it, but a second weapon was a welcome addition to his limited armoury, especially one with more stopping power than his Beretta.

The floor was spattered with blood from the man’s smashed nose, as were the sheets and blue twill counter-pane, but he could use those to wrap the body in. The person he feared most was Paulette, his housekeeper. She might not say anything about the missing counter-pane and African carving, but she would certainly register their absence. Nothing in the house escaped her eagle-eyed notice, and it would be wise to have explanations ready.

The broken carving upset him, for symbolic reasons as much as anything. It was a spirit figure from the Baule people of the Ivory Coast, a woman shaped from wood as black as coal, her skin polished to a silky patina except where it was marked by intricate scarification. She stood on short, flexed legs – now broken off at the knees – her hands resting gently on her protruding belly. Her breasts were full and pointed, and there was something ineffably serene about the gaze of her almond eyes. Even now, they seemed to carry in them the knowledge of what she – his spirit wife, his protectress – had done on his behalf.

She had given her legs for him, and she had taken those of the man outside in payment of her sacrifice.

He pressed the two parts of her together. He would take her to Paris and see her made whole once more, but for now, he carried her downstairs and locked her away in a cabinet in his study, along with the syringe and the small bottle of chloroform which the Italian had left outside on the bedroom terrace. Returning upstairs with a mop and pail, he sluiced the bedroom floor. It was best to do it now, while the blood was still wet. It would be dried and encrusted by the time he returned.

The Italian was definitely dead; his body had noticeably cooled. Tom rolled him in the sheets and the counter-pane, heaved him over his shoulder and set off down the path to the cove.

He felt painfully exposed as he emerged from the treeline into the moonlit glare of the beach, but a few seconds later he was in the boathouse, safe from prying eyes.

He worked by the light of a lone hurricane lamp. First he took a length of rope and trussed up the bedcover bundle. This he then rolled on to a sheet of heavy-duty tarpaulin and laid an anchor on top of it. For good measure, he headed outside, returning with two large rocks which he also placed on the body. Folding over the tarpaulin, he bound it tightly in place with more rope – round and round, and also lengthways – until the finished product looked like some monumental Italian salami.

It was a struggle, but he managed to carry it in his arms to the rowboat, staggering across the sand and dropping it into the bottom of the boat. He kicked off his shoes, rolled up his trousers, and hauled the rowboat towards the water.

The Albatross was the obvious choice but he decided against it, not wishing to curse the sloop by bringing a corpse aboard. This consideration came at a hefty price. He almost capsized his dinghy while trying to haul the package aboard, receiving a crack on the head from the boom for good measure, which almost blacked him out.

He short-tacked into the warm breeze blowing in from the southwest, relaxing a little as he cleared the bay. The sail still gleamed unnaturally white in the moonlight and the dinghy only made sluggish headway, but he was in open water now, the seabed dropping sharply away below the boat. He knew that it plunged to eight hundred metres or more in the channel between the coast and the islands, six or so nautical miles off, but he would have to content himself with maybe half that if he didn’t want to run into the fishing fleet. He could see their lights sparkling on the horizon like a swarm of fireflies.

When he was ready he lowered the mainsail, removed the tiller and the rudder then heaved the body up on to the transom. After his close call back in the cove, he knew that if he put it over the side the weight of it might cause the Scylla to heel over and capsize.

He eased the package off the aft. It didn’t sink at first, buoyed up by the pockets of air inside the tightly bound tarpaulin. However, these slowly filled with seawater and it finally dipped beneath the waves. Convention dictated that he mark the moment with some words, a token tribute, but he struggled to find the will. The Italian had gambled and lost. If he didn’t know the rules of the game he should never have taken to the field of play.

Raising the mainsail, Tom set a course for home.

Sleep was out of the question. His body was weary, aching, clamouring for rest, but his brain danced wildly in open rebellion. He wound up the gramophone and found himself reaching for the Goldberg Variations. The rigid, almost mathematical, structure of Bach’s masterpiece might help lend some order to his thoughts.

It didn’t. He knew the piece so well that every cadence ran ahead of the needle in his mind, and he sat hunched at the table on the terrace in stunned immobility. The coffee he had made for himself was cold by the time he even looked at the key in his hand.

It was a hotel key, and the oval metal fob was engraved with a room number: 312. The name of the hotel wasn’t marked. It didn’t need to be; he’d placed enough surplus guests at the Hôtel de la Réserve over the years to recognize the fob. The hotel was a grand affair that towered over the narrow beach. When alone in Le Rayol, which was most of the time, he would often wander down there of an evening for a cocktail and a bite to eat. He was known to most of the staff, and he could even count Olivier, the manager, as a friend. He certainly shouldn’t have any difficulty gaining access to Room 312. He was in possession of the key, and his presence in the hotel was unlikely to arouse too much suspicion.

This wasn’t what bothered him, though, and it was a while before he isolated just what it was that jarred at the back of his thoughts.

The man, the Italian sent to kill him, had known exactly where he slept. Moreover, when fleeing the bedroom he had reached unswervingly for the correct door. The door immediately to its right, also shut at the time, would have led him into the blind-alley of the bathroom. How had the Italian known which door to select? Surely a man in desperation would have tried both handles at the same time before making his choice. And how had he managed to negotiate the darkened corridors and staircases of the villa with such speed and confidence when making his escape?

Maybe Tom was underestimating the aptitude of his would-be assassin, but he was left with the uneasy feeling that the Italian had come armed with more knowledge than was natural. It didn’t make sense, not unless he had somehow managed to scout the inside of the villa before making his move, or he had been briefed by someone who knew the internal layout of the building. The first seemed unlikely; Tom had always been a stickler for security, much to Paulette’s amusement and annoyance. The second possibility implied that a friend or close associate was a party to the attempt on his life.

He shrugged this unwelcome thought aside, turning his mind to the larger issues. Who wanted him dead? And why? Unfortunately, there were a fair number of options. He had done some bad things in the name of King and Country over the years, and although that murky world was well behind him now, there was no reason why others should have been as eager as he to forget and move on with their lives.

Whoever they were, he had to assume they still wanted him dead, and the moment they realized they’d failed in their mission they would gather themselves to strike again. This gave him a small window of opportunity, maybe half a day in which to steal the initiative.

He hated them for leaving him no other choice. He hated them for the fear that had returned to his life. He hated them for what they had made him do. He had killed a man, not with his bare hands, admittedly, but as good as, driving him to his certain doom.

This, he realized, was what he really despised them for – for showing him that he was still the same man.

After more than five years, and despite his best efforts to improve on himself, he had barely changed.

Chapter Five

Lucy woke with a start. She was lying on top of the covers, still in her clothes, and her face was damp against the pillow.

Then she remembered. She remembered why she was dressed, why she had been crying.

She reached for the travel clock on the bedside table. It was early, not yet seven o’clock, but someone was already moving around downstairs, clattering about in the kitchen. It couldn’t possibly be Mother; she rarely rose before nine, not even for guests.

Mr Chittenden, most likely. He had announced over dinner that he was always up with the lark. These were some of the few words he had spoken all evening. For much of the time he had sat hunched in his chair, a look of benign befuddlement on his face, chortling every so often while his wife held forth.