Death in Focus Read online

  Toby was always happy to be talked to. This was a usual pattern and he pulled at his lead for interesting smells only once, then accepted that they were partners in something and had a job to do. It was enough for him just to be along.

  After Lucas left MI6, Peter Howard was the one man with whom he kept in touch. For Howard to send a message for an immediate meeting, it must be important.

  They arrived at a park gate. Lucas opened it, closed it carefully behind him, and let Toby off the lead. “Not far!” he warned. “Come on!”

  Toby wagged his tail and circled around, enjoying every scent in the damp earth.

  The beech trees towered above them. They had always been Lucas’s favorite. Their long, clean limbs reminded him of the legs of dancers, naturally beautiful, exulting in their strength, their infinite grace. The sky was dappled with cloud, alternately light and shadow, but the ground was so covered with bluebells that he had to stay on the narrow path to avoid standing on them. He hated to crush a living thing, especially one that offered such utter loveliness. They had only the faintest, cool scent, but he imagined he could smell it. The city was actually a short underground rail journey away to the east, but here he could forget it even existed.

  He found Peter Howard standing near the oak about twenty yards from the small stream, exactly where he had expected him to be. Howard was an ordinary-seeming man and could disappear in a crowd anytime he wished, and yet to Lucas he was unmistakable. He was a little above average height, with fair brown hair, blue eyes, and regular features. You could probably have said that of roughly half the men in England. As he stood there, it was his perfect stillness that was unusual, the angle at which he held his head. There was humor in his expression and, when he thought himself unobserved, a sensitivity.

  But all this knowledge was built on twenty years of working together, since that innocent, ignorant golden time just before the war. From here, 1913 seemed like another century.

  Howard straightened up and walked a few steps forward, meeting Lucas where the path turned and wound through the trees along the bank, then back into the woods again.

  They did not bother with “good morning,” comment on the weather, the usual “how are you?” All that would be taken as said. They were deep friends, too much already understood between them to bother with such things. Howard had called for this meeting, therefore he had something to say that he judged important. From the gravity in his eyes, it was not good.

  “What do you know about Roger Cordell?” Howard asked, his voice clipped and very English, yet still light, as if he spoke of some trivial acquaintance.

  “British Embassy in Berlin?” Lucas wanted to make certain he was thinking of the right man. “Oxford, I think. Good degree in classics and modern languages, if I remember rightly.”

  A brief smile crossed Howard’s face.

  “Modern history might have been of more use, if less ornamental,” Lucas added drily. “Why?”

  Howard looked straight ahead of them at the carpet of flowers. “Got a nasty feeling he might be playing both sides, or…”

  Lucas waited, and Howard continued walking slowly, watching where he trod to avoid the flowers.

  “Or what?” Lucas asked. There was too much uncertainty. The slow tide of fear was rising inside him, and he could feel it like the chill breath of a wind that heralded rain.

  Was Howard running from shadows? Military Intelligence was a war of ideas as much as of armaments or factory sabotage, explosions, and derailments. It was the fear of an enemy you could not see, of betrayal by those you had thought your friends.

  Toby, off the lead, ran around in happy circles, chasing the scent of something, startling birds far out of his reach. They sat high in the branches, calling out alarms to one another. It was so beautiful, so sane, Lucas looked at it with something close to pain. It should always be here, and he knew it would not be. The flowers would only last like this for a few weeks, then begin to fade, go back into the earth until next spring. Other flowers would come, and leaves, but not like this.

  Of course, there would soon be hawthorn blossoms thick in the hedges, almost like snow. It was already beginning. And in June the wild dog roses would tangle these paths with pink and red.

  Poetry crowded his mind, the love of the land from the minds of young men who would not see it again. Too many of them. They had called it “the Poets’ War” not without reason. He could understand people who would pay any price to never have another like it. He could not walk these woods without thinking of Mike. But then, he could not listen to good music, watch a decent game of cricket on a village green with all the young men in whites, or share a joke without memory intruding. There were times when he could allow Charles any latitude at all because he understood the grief he hardly ever spoke of. Some feelings were too intense to share in anything but a glance, and silence.

  “Are you sure about Cordell?” he asked.

  “No,” Howard replied quietly. “But I fear it. Usually by the time you’re sure, it’s too late. It’s only small things. The things not said, rather than the ones said.”

  Lucas knew exactly what he meant. He had felt it himself: a silence where he would have expected a response, a disagreement, a reaction other than the one he saw. Sometimes it was simply carefulness, or even an anger one did not express because one knew it would do no good, only hurt pointlessly.

  They walked in silence for another hundred yards or so. Toby returned, eager for attention. Lucas bent and picked up a stick. He threw it as far as he could, and Toby went charging after it, sending startled birds off in a sweep of movement through the branches.

  A small copse of silver birches stood in the sunlight, like a charcoal sketch on white paper, motionless in the lack of breeze. Both men stopped and gazed at it, perhaps moved by the same impulse.

  “I can’t afford to let it go,” Howard said at last. “I don’t expect you to do anything.” Was that an edge of disappointment? Several times he had said how much Lucas was missed. Sometimes it was direct, at others oblique. “I just let you know in case you trusted him,” he went on. “Every report I get from Berlin is worse than the one before. I knew the Weimar Republic couldn’t last. It was built on hope and dreams, and damn all else. But this new order scares the hell out of me. There’s a cruelty in it that’s growing like some fungus on a wet wall. If we rip the paper off I think we’re going to find the rot is all over the place.”

  “People are afraid,” Lucas replied, although he knew Howard was as aware of that as he was. “The peace treaty was much too hard. We sowed the seeds of another war then, we were just too blind, too deeply hurt to see it. God knows how many Germans have died since then of hunger or despair. Hitler’s giving them self-respect again, and most people will do almost anything for that.”

  Howard pushed his hands deeper into his pockets. “I know. And I suppose if they’d won and we had been subjected to humiliation and the slow death of who we used to be, I’d hate, too. None of that is solved by the sort of internal violence the Nazis are preaching, and I think you know that as well as I do. It isn’t the Germans who believe in it that scare me, Lucas, it’s the Englishmen! I worry about any support for appeasement.”

  “Yes, so do I. Peace at any price,” Lucas said. “A lot of us who’ve seen war, the real thing, the blood and the pain, the death, the utter drenching loss of it, think that nothing on earth could be worse. I understand them. Especially Charles’s generation, who were part of the reality of it. He thinks I don’t know what it’s like to send men who trust you to their deaths. They know what you are ordering them to do, and they do it anyway.”

  “And can anything be worse than that?” Howard looked at him, the bright sunlight showing every line and angle of his face. For that moment he looked infinitely vulnerable. Then a shred of cloud passed over the sun, softening the probing harshness, and it was gone. “We st
ill need the right men to give the orders, Lucas. You were one of the best. Come back. Help us to do it right.”

  “I can’t,” Lucas replied. “I’m too old. You’ve got new people—”

  “Who haven’t fought a real war,” Howard interrupted him. “They don’t know when to cling to the impossible, and when to let it go.”

  “And they certainly won’t ask me to tell them. They have new ideas,” Lucas said.

  “The basics are as old as mankind,” Howard said with a sideways glance at him. “Queen Elizabeth had master spies who could teach us a thing or two.”

  Lucas did not answer.

  They walked fifty yards or so, reached the cherry tree they often passed. Its blossoms were already overblown and beginning to drop, but it was still a glory. It always reminded Lucas of sadness, beauty that could not last, young love lost. Then he remembered why, in the lines of Housman:

  And since to look at things in bloom

  Fifty springs are little room…

  Composed by the speaker, with the imagination of a long life. Who, when twenty, believes they have only another year to live?

  He was aware that Howard was watching him. Did he have the same lines in mind: To see the cherry hung with snow? Or were his thoughts somewhere else entirely? He turned a little and met Howard’s eyes. He was certain his thoughts were the same.

  “Wishing doesn’t make it so,” Howard said. “I have to know about Cordell. Just don’t trust him in the meantime.” There was a gentleness in him, even a kind of pity, and Lucas realized that for all the ways he knew Peter, he did not know who he had lost in the last war. He was married. Lucas had met his wife, a cool, fair-haired woman whom Howard hardly ever mentioned. They were polite to each other, but there seemed to be no laughter between them. They had no children. Was that another wound?

  In Lucas’s mind, Peter was the son he wished Charles could be. Lucas understood him so much better. There was a kind of comfort, never intrusive, a sense of what mattered and did not need to be explained. And yet Lucas was aware that those silences also held some kind of pain.

  Lucas loved Charles—of course he did—but it was not a comfortable love. They had grown apart over the years. He had told himself it was a generational thing, but Charles was five years older than Howard, the same generation. He and Howard had experienced the same loneliness, the same guilt of failure, and the thrill of victory.

  And Elena, Lucas’s granddaughter, was twenty-eight, and yet except for Josephine, he loved her more deeply than anyone else. In a way, Elena was the most comfortable, the easiest to be with. He had never known what to do with babies, but as soon as she could talk they had become friends. She adored him. She asked questions incessantly, all of them beginning with “Why?” or “How?” Margot was less curious. She had experimented for herself, refusing his help.

  Now he watched Howard throwing sticks for Toby. Howard had told Lucas what he needed to. It was time they went home. Being absent long enough to need to explain was an error. When Howard turned toward him, he nodded, and they started walking back through the bluebells toward the oak tree, and the place where their paths divided.

  * * *

  —

  The following afternoon, Lucas headed to an appointment he had made on returning home from meeting Peter Howard, with Winston Churchill himself. He enjoyed driving. He had an old Armstrong Siddeley cabriolet, with long, sweeping lines and a top that took a bit of maneuvering to open. On a day like this it was a pure joy.

  As the crow flies, it would have been simpler to go through part of the city, but he never did that. The country routes were far quieter, and the extra miles flew by. He sang as he went, very often one of the patter songs from the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. It brought back memories of a holiday he had taken with Elena a few years ago. They had driven up to the Highlands of Scotland, just meandering around, going wherever they pleased. The trip had included Fountains Abbey and Rievaulx Abbey, in Yorkshire, on the way. Somehow the scarred and topless towers reaching up into the sky were more impressive, more emotionally moving, than if they had been complete. The imagination created more than reality could.

  They had bought fresh, crusty bread, local cheeses and fruit, and found picnic places in deep grasses by a river, or under trees, always hearing the whisper of the leaves. They had talked about hundreds of things, from the distance between the stars to what kind of apple was best. They had quoted Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll and told endless jokes and invented limericks with impossible rhymes.

  Lucas wondered if she had thought of it as often as he had since, and with as much pleasure.

  He had silently thanked God that she was a girl, not a boy, and too young for the war anyway. Her loss was a thought he could not bear even to imagine.

  Today was a sunny day. The countryside was richly green, some fields hazed over with sheets of buttercups, but he hardly noticed them. His thoughts were occupied with the political situation and the uncertain future.

  Although he liked Churchill, he was also afraid for him. The years out of meaningful office were taking a toll. Lucas dreaded finding him in a dark mood today. He felt helpless to offer anything to hope for, and platitudes were beneath either of them.

  He rounded the last curve on the road and saw the house ahead of him, surrounded by its garden, and even from here he could see the brick walls that Churchill found so soothing to build.

  Fifteen minutes later he was standing next to Churchill by a tub of mortar and a stack of bricks. He was a stocky man, several inches shorter than Lucas, and today he looked old and tired. If Churchill weakened and lost the fight he had pursued all his life, Lucas did not know to whom else he could turn.

  “Looks good,” he said, regarding the wall.

  “I can build a hell of a good wall,” Churchill replied without pleasure. “But what am I keeping in? Or out? I have no idea. I do it because I don’t have anything else to do.”

  “You will have,” Lucas said instantly, then wondered if he meant it, or, more important at the moment, what Churchill would make of his remark. He already had the familiar “black dog” on his shoulder. Could one die from lack of hope? Perhaps.

  Churchill turned and gave him a dark look. “Did you hear Mosley the day before yesterday?”

  “Yes,” Lucas answered, recalling the sharp and ugly memory. Mosley was an admirer of Hitler and all that he stood for. Some people said Hitler’s Brownshirts had modeled their uniforms on Mosley’s black-shirted army. There had been too many eager faces at the rally in the West End, bright with conviction. They believed what they wanted to, what they needed to, as an alternative to the horror behind them.

  Churchill waited for him to go on.

  What could Lucas say that was honest? “I’m afraid of him,” Lucas admitted. “But with just a little more rope, I believe Mosley will hang himself.”

  “Do you!” Churchill glared at him. It was a challenge, not a question.

  “We’ve got to make damn sure it happens,” Lucas said firmly, as if he had no doubt. “I’m still getting news from Germany,” he added.

  Churchill was now listening, curiosity piqued.

  “The facts are very bad. Opposition is being got rid of; Hitler is either assuming more power himself or appointing bloody awful men to do it for him. Himmler, for example. Used to be a chicken farmer, now he’s strutting around in uniform like the only rooster on the dung heap, and exercising all the power he has.”

  “I suppose every culture has them: men in bondage to their own inadequacies, who will never be satisfied because the emptiness is inside them.”

  “Yes,” Lucas replied. “They’re always there, the misfits. It’s the measure of a leader, which men he picks for the next tier of command…With Hitler it’s the men who were failures in their own eyes before and have a chance to take their revenge on society now.”

&n
bsp; “Bitter…” Churchill responded.

  Lucas half turned, looking around him, then back at Churchill. “Where does it stop, this tide of…violence? How long do we wait before we start doing something? When it’s only Germany? When it’s only Germany and Belgium, or Austria, or part of Poland? When it gets into France as well? A bit late by the time it gets to the cliffs of Dover.”

  “Think it’ll come to that?” Churchill’s voice was quiet, almost expressionless, his face like that of a benign bulldog.

  “What’s to stop it?” Lucas asked.

  “The damn British Navy!” Churchill snarled. “If we get the government to start building ships again. Dear God, I’ve tried!”

  “But not as it is,” Lucas agreed.

  “You’ve still got people of your own in Germany?” Churchill asked. “Ones you can trust?” He looked skeptical. He knew exactly what part Lucas had played in the war, and how long he had been out of any office in MI6. Lucas had not told him how many people still passed him information; what Churchill wanted to know was the weight of it. “What’s happening, Lucas? What’s really happening?”

  “Hitler’s gaining more power all the time. He’s riding a wave of popularity, and it will get worse.”

  Churchill grunted.

  Lucas hesitated only a moment. “It’s going to be the hardest battle we’ve ever fought, and only God knows if we’ll win.”

  Churchill glared at him. “Are you trying to manipulate me, Lucas?”

  Lucas smiled at him. “Yes. Is it working? So help me God, I think it’s the truth.”

  Churchill grunted again. He looked Lucas up and down, regarding his old shoes, well-worn and comfortable, the rather rumpled corduroy trousers, faded to no particular color at all, then lastly his leather-elbow-patched jacket, sagging a little at the pockets.

  “Like to help me build my wall?” he offered.

  “Delighted,” Lucas accepted, finding himself surprisingly emotional.

  “Well, get on with it, then!” Churchill snapped. “There’s the brick and there’s the mortar.”