Death in Focus Read online

  “Of course,” said Margot. What else could she say?

  CHAPTER

  2

  Margot walked across the dining-room floor toward the far side with its exquisite view of the sea. Walter Mann was charming, and he did not attempt to hide his admiration for her. She was not overwhelmed by this; it happened quite often.

  They reached their reserved table and while Ian drew out a chair for Elena, Walter Mann asked Margot if she would rather face the sea or the room.

  “Oh, the room, please,” she replied. “I love the sea, but it doesn’t change very much. The people are always changing.”

  “You’re a people watcher?” He smiled as she took her place, and then sat beside her.

  Margot laughed. “That’s more my sister. She’s a professional photographer. Half her attention is on expressions, light and shadow, and framing a picture.”

  “And she’s good?” He seemed interested.

  Margot saw Elena and Ian Newton were deep in conversation already. “How honest do you want me to be?”

  “Ah, have I stepped into a riptide?” Walter Mann was too polite to laugh, but it was there in his eyes.

  “Yes. Actually, she’s on the edge of being very good indeed, if she’d just let the emotions keep up with her technical skill,” she replied. That was the truth.

  When dinner was served, Margot ate with pleasure, but part of her attention was on Elena, lost in the moment with Ian Newton. She seemed happier and more alive than Margot could remember seeing her in ages. It was the way she used to be, before Aiden’s betrayal of his country and, more personal, of Elena herself. She was so afraid of being hurt again. Who wasn’t? And yet, to deny feeling was to kill part of yourself.

  Margot had thought that she would find someone else to love, after a reasonable time of mourning Paul. But how long was “reasonable”? For her, even fifteen years after his death, nothing was more than casual. She had idiotically hoped that there might be another love out there for her and yet she felt guilty at even the possibility. How could she go on, when Paul was gone? But there had, however, never been anyone else who mattered. Perhaps half of Europe was like that, if you could see beneath the wine and the laughter.

  But for Elena it was different. There were no perfect memories with Aiden. They were all painful and needed to be obliterated, replaced by something that was at least honest.

  While paying surface attention to Walter Mann, Margot watched Ian Newton. Even from the little she had overheard she learned he had been at Cambridge. So many of her family had been there, too. Her grandfather, Lucas Standish, although she didn’t know what he had studied. It was probably history and classics, or something like that. Her father, Charles Standish, had studied languages and modern history, obvious really, for someone who was going into the Foreign Office. Mike, her brother, had been going to read classics but war had interrupted all of that.

  And Elena had gone to Cambridge, too, and taken classics for the love of studying. Margot could imagine her sister sitting elegantly in one of the flat-bottomed punts, with Ian standing in the back, a pole in his hand as they glided smoothly along the shining river. Maybe they knew each other, at least by sight? She must remember to ask Elena.

  Margot had not gone to Cambridge, or anywhere else. She had been a bride at eighteen, and a widow a week later.

  Walter Mann was watching her. Was that compassion in his eyes? Damn it, she had no need of his pity! She smiled as if she were happy, and she was good at that. She had had sufficient practice.

  There was a band playing gently and the music was hypnotic, exquisitely rhythmic, American. On the small dance floor young people moved as if lost in its embrace. She could see their faces, so many of them beautiful in their own ways.

  Why was she watching instead of joining in? Everyone had finished dining; it was time for her to enjoy herself.

  As if reading her thoughts, Walter stood up. He smiled at her, meeting her eyes. “Will you dance with me? That gown is marvelous. It really needs grace, movement. And you are exactly what it requires to be perfect.”

  Her answering smile was sudden and quite genuine. He had not said what she had expected. “Thank you. It is a new and rather appealing thought: So little is perfect.”

  “I disagree,” he said lightly. “Everything here is perfect: the light, the music, the faint air of desperation, as if it would all slip away the moment we stop enjoying it. It is like sunshine in an English April. It’s so precious because we know that, in an hour or less, it will rain again. The light must go, and suddenly it will be even colder than before.”

  She looked at him with real interest now, searching his face.

  He kept the same charming smile. “If it were here all the time, we would take it for granted and cease even to see it anymore.”

  The band was about to begin again, fingering their instruments. “I would love to dance,” Margot accepted, taking a half step toward him.

  He held her very lightly. The music began in earnest, almost as if it were a literal tide sweeping them into its current. He was an accomplished dancer and, thank heaven, he had the good taste not to talk. Margot simply let herself move with the beat, enjoying it, following him exactly.

  The music changed, and the rhythm, but it did not matter. He moved as smoothly from one to the other as she did. That was part of the secret of success, not only in art, but in life—moving from one beat to the next without hesitation.

  Margot gave a little laugh of pleasure at his skill.

  He held her closer, just an inch or two.

  She leaned back and looked up at him. He had remarkable eyes. Did she see the pain of memory in them, or just imagine it mirroring her own? He held her closer again, more gently. Perhaps he had lost someone, too. Who hadn’t? They should hold each other more tightly, and dance more perfectly, drowned in the music.

  Elena was also dancing now, not even thinking about it, moving as easily with Ian as if she had always known him. Like Margot, she hated to talk while dancing. The conversation was in the movement, and the music was master of it all.

  Elena looked around the room. Mostly men: civilized, intelligent, and as dry as dust. Some of them had drunk a little too much, but they only looked sleepy. Good heavens, had they bored themselves to death?

  The music stopped and members of the band stood, signaling the end of their playing.

  Margot, Elena, and the two men went back to their table, where Ian wished them all good night. “May I walk you to your room?” he asked, offering Elena his arm.

  They passed through the large doors and climbed the stairs to the first landing. Elena turned and faced him. “Thank you for a lovely time,” she said. It was no mere politeness. It was the happiest evening she could remember in years.

  “It was fun,” he said quite lightly, but his eyes were totally serious. “I think I shall become a photographer’s assistant. It’s infinitely more satisfying than writing about economics.”

  “It’s very uncertain,” she said, playing at being serious.

  “Life is very uncertain,” he replied. All humor vanished for a moment. “Cling to the good bits.”

  Whatever he had been going to say next was interrupted by a shriek from the landing above them, shrill and edged with horror. For a moment they froze, then Ian swung around and began to run toward the screams as they came again and again.

  Elena followed, taking her camera out of its case. Someone was obviously in great trouble.

  Ian stopped abruptly. A young woman in a black maid’s dress and white apron was standing ashen-faced with one hand to her mouth. The linen cupboard was open and just outside was the crumpled body of a man. From the unnatural angle of his head and neck it was clear he could not be alive.

  Ian’s face had turned completely white. He gently put his arms around the sobbing maid, then held her tight, bu
t when he spoke his voice was half-strangled in his throat. “Come away. You can’t help him. Don’t look…” Firmly he guided her around the corner from sight.

  Elena was left staring at the dead body sprawled on the floor. The closed door must have been holding him up, and when the girl opened it he fell out. He was an unremarkable middle-aged man. Dark-skinned. Black hair receding a little. He was probably Italian, but he could have come from anywhere. Did Ian know him? Is that why he was so upset? He had looked totally shocked. Elena was shaking, yet she managed to shoot one picture before putting the camera away. She was a photographer, true, but it might seem intrusive, and perhaps it was illegal, to photograph a crime scene like this.

  “Signorina…Miss…please, come and sit down…” A man took her tentatively by the arm.

  She turned to face him. “I’m all right, thank you, but he’s…” she took a breath, “…clearly dead. Who is he?”

  “I have no idea.” The man was an assistant manager at the hotel. She knew him by sight from the last few days. “Please…I wish to call the authorities. It cannot be an accident. Where he is…”

  “No, of course not.” At least he had not tried to soothe her with lies. “I’ll go to my room.”

  “Are you all right? Do you need someone?”

  “No, thank you. I am with my sister.” She said goodbye and went back along the corridor to where Ian was speaking gently to the maid in fluent Italian, but he was still very pale, and the hand he had on the maid’s arm, where he was still supporting her, was white-knuckled, almost as if she were holding him up as much as he was holding her. An older maid appeared along the passageway and took control, thanking Ian and firmly dismissing him.

  Two uniformed police officers went past the woman and spoke to Ian in English.

  “Now, sir, if you will tell me what happened?” one of them began.

  Ian told them honestly.

  “And this young lady was with you?” The officer looked at Elena.

  “Yes,” Elena agreed.

  “And do you know this poor man?” He indicated the body lying on the floor.

  “No, sir,” Ian replied, his jaw muscles tight, his voice shaking a little.

  Elena was almost certain he was lying.

  CHAPTER

  3

  Lucas Standish sat in the armchair in his study and stared out of the windows into the garden. The pattern of leaves against the sky always pleased him. Even the bare winter branches had a unique delicacy. Now the trees were at the height of their spring perfection.

  The study looked like the room of an ordinary elderly man in pleasant retirement, except perhaps for the remarkable number of books that lined the walls. Lucas was a quiet man who read about life. That was what he was to others, even to his own family.

  But he had been head of Military Intelligence—MI6, as it was known—for a good part of the war. In his thoughts, he would say “the last war” because he feared that there would be another. He was in his early seventies, and not officially part of the service anymore, but his interest had never slackened, and he knew a great deal of what was happening now. He had many sources, quite apart from piecing things together with his own intelligence: what was written in the newspapers and, at times, what was not written, the half-truths that concealed the greater lie.

  Winston Churchill was the only politician whose judgment he trusted. He knew and liked the man personally and thought his opinions sound. But Churchill had been out of power for some time, and, what mattered now, he was likely to be for the foreseeable future. No one in office listened to him because they did not want to believe that what he said was true.

  Lucas could understand that, dear heaven, too easily. He longed to be able to believe that the meteoric rise of Adolf Hitler was no danger to Europe, certainly not to England. But every sense in him, every instinct, told him that it was, and that the danger was increasing by the week. Only four months ago, at the end of January, Hitler had assumed complete power with the almost unanimous approval of his people.

  New ideologies were surging up all over Europe in the wake of the devastating losses of war. Since the assassination of the Tsar of Russia, fear of communism had shifted power to the right-wing ideologues everywhere else. In Italy, Benito Mussolini had created much change for the good, but his total control was already tightening, becoming oppressive, creating the bedrock for the madness of dictatorship. Some of the stories Lucas had heard bordered on the ludicrous, and yet he knew they were true, and the present laughter would be short-lived.

  In Spain, various political factions were vying for power. Who knew where that would lead?

  But it was still Germany that was the source of his deepest concern. The treaty after the war had been too harsh. Millions of people who were not to blame for any part of the Kaiser’s glory-seeking had suffered. Blame was pointless. Probably no one was free of it, even if it were for complacency; not for action, but for inaction.

  Lucas’s thoughts were interrupted by a light knock on the door. “Come in,” he said quickly. He knew it would be his wife, Josephine, to remind him that their son, Charles, and daughter-in-law, Katherine, were coming to dinner, and he should get himself ready—physically with a clean shirt, and emotionally for the differences of opinion that would inevitably arise. They always did, no matter how much he swore to himself not to be drawn in.

  Josephine entered the room. She was the same age as Lucas. They had been married for over half a century, and yet he still found pleasure in looking at her. More than pleasure, a warmth, and gratitude for all they had shared. Many men might not have found her beautiful, but he still did. It was in her eyes, and her quick smile, the vitality in her, even when she sat unmoving. He knew her candor frightened some people, but he liked it. He found it a touchstone of honesty, a cleanness of mind and soul. His granddaughter Elena had some of that quality. It had skipped a generation; there was nothing of it in Charles.

  “I know,” he said, before Josephine could speak. “They will be here in half an hour. He’s always on time.” He was not sure if that was praise or complaint. If he was honest, he was not looking forward to the visit. Recently he and his son always seemed to be disagreeing about politics. Of course, Charles did not know Lucas’s part in the secret services. One did not tell even family about such things. As far as they knew, he was a civil servant with a job too boring to discuss. The very existence of MI6 was not generally acknowledged.

  Charles had gone into the diplomatic service and excelled. He had held high posts in many of the European capitals and, briefly, in Washington. His charming and intelligent American wife had always been an asset. All that information was public. When Lucas had first entered the service, he had found it difficult to keep total silence about his work, but over time it had become habit. Apart from anything else, he did not want to burden any of his family with the nature and secrecy of what he did, the kind of decisions he had had to make. The higher he rose in the service, the more discreet he had to be. Everyone knew that “loose lips sink ships,” and no one talked about troop movements, what was done in which factories, or any such subjects.

  Josephine seemed to have grown tired of waiting for him. “Supper time, Toby!” she called cheerfully, and the dog sitting beside Lucas shot to his feet and pattered after her eagerly. He knew quite a large vocabulary of human words, and “supper” was prime among them. He followed so closely behind her that had she stopped, he would have bumped into her.

  Lucas smiled and rose to his feet as well. He walked out slowly, past the bookcase that held all his favorites, the books he had read and reread. There was plenty of poetry, especially the more recent ones like Housman, Sassoon, and Chesterton. The ones that stayed in your heart. There was a very worn volume of Shakespeare, which if left to itself fell open to either Hamlet or Julius Caesar, and a Dante similarly well used, particularly Inferno. It was so appropriate.
If a man could only learn that you are punished not for the sin, but by it, and you thus become less than you could have been, how much that would change you.

  What was also there—and he could not always bring himself to look—was a photograph of Mike, his only grandson. It was one Elena had taken, practicing her portraiture. He was nineteen, in army uniform, smiling out at the room. It was one of the last images taken of him, and it had caught his warmth and his optimism so well. It was hard to believe he would never come home.

  Lucas went out this time without looking at the photograph, although that made no difference—he could see it in his mind, even with his eyes closed. He could remember Mike’s last leave. How he had enjoyed it so much, made the most of every hour, almost as if he knew he would not come back. But all men in wartime feel that. Everyone had lost friends, people they had grown up with, as well as new friends made in the horror and loneliness of war. It was a comradeship like no other. Mike had always told wild, silly jokes. He had been so intensely alive that Lucas found it hard to believe when the telegram came.

  Did everybody feel this? The denial? The bewilderment? Then the long, slow pain of grief eating away at you? Eating away at the heart? The soul?

  Margot had lost her husband in the same week, on the same battlefront. He could remember her face as if it was yesterday. That look came back again sometimes, when she thought no one was looking. Poor Margot, she was still lost in so many ways. There was nothing Lucas, or anyone else, could do. Elena had tried, as had Josephine. Even Charles, who had been so close to her.

  Lucas reminded himself of these traumas as he went across the hall and up the stairs, because he needed to be patient with Charles, and with his son’s determination that there should never be another war like the last one. Other men should not mourn their children as he did. That was the only decent thing the war could give the next generation: the conviction that it should never happen again.