House of the Hanged by Mark Mills

Author:Mark Mills
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Chapter Twelve

It was the first time since their arrival that Ilse and Klaus had entertained, and they outdid themselves, laying on an impressive feast for lunch, which was served at a long table in the shade of a towering holm oak near the foot of the garden.

Tom made his excuses the moment the main course plates were cleared, claiming that Benoît had a batch of papers requiring his urgent signature, legal documents relating to the upcoming purchase of the ‘art nouveau eyesore’.

‘As long as you’re back in time to mix the potions before supper,’ said Venetia.

It was good to hear her make a jest. She’d spent much of the meal fretting about Lucy and Walter, convinced that they must have drowned. ‘It’s just not like her to go off like that.’

‘Well, it’s just like Walter,’ Fanya had reassured her.

The house in Le Canadel where Klaus and Ilse were staying, the house belonging to the mysterious Swiss publisher whom no one had ever met, was a bland, brick-built affair embowered in tall pine trees and set on the rising ground between the beach and the coast road. The property gave almost nothing away about the owner. It was sparsely yet adequately furnished, and there were even some competent watercolours of Mediterranean coastal views on the walls. However, there was none of the usual telling clutter: no books, no photographs, no restaurant menus, no knick-knacks from foreign travels sprinkled about the place.

Tom might have been more suspicious had he not been so fixated on Yevgeny. And Fanya. Yevgeny made all the noise, but Fanya was the power behind the throne, the one who steered and regulated their lives. It was inconceivable that she wasn’t also involved.

It had been a bluff; Tom hadn’t spoken to the photographer, Baptiste Daumier. The operator had done a grand job of tracking down the number in Paris, but the telephone had gone unanswered. It didn’t matter. He knew in his bones that the talented and painfully shy young man he had met back in May was not part of the conspiracy. Baptiste had snapped a photograph of him in St Tropez and passed it on in all innocence by way of thanks to his Russian hosts. The real question was how that photograph had then found its way into the hands of an Italian assassin.

On that score, Yevgeny had confirmed his own guilt, unable to mask the slight tremor of alarm in his eyes at the mention of Baptiste’s name. In trying to recover, he had then over-compensated, adopting an exaggerated air of indifference to their conversation. Tom’s impulse had been to swim over and throttle a confession out of him right there and then. Had they been alone, he might have done just that. Fortunately, his head had mastered his heart.

He didn’t mind alerting Yevgeny to his suspicions; that had been his intention. He wanted Yevgeny to know that he was on to him. He wanted to turn the heat up under him. He remembered enough of his training to know that the enemy was more likely to stumble if coerced into action.

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