Death of a Unicorn Read online

  ‘How’s the book going?’ I said as I sat again. ‘It must hold things up not being able to get out and see people.’

  ‘Doesn’t make any bloody difference. The book’s kaput.’

  ‘Oh, Ronnie!’

  ‘The editor I’d set it up with moved on to another publisher. The fellow who took over farted around for a bit looking for an excuse to cancel.’

  ‘They can be swine, can’t they? It happens again and again.’

  ‘Yes.’

  No wonder he was depressed. No wonder that the pit had opened for him, too. Even in the slight backwater of Night and Day Ronnie had given the impression of living in the rushing midstream, like one of those fish native to Alpine rivers. Events and people had been his element, much more so than we had at the time realised. I remembered his liveliness on his visit to Cheadle, his sense of excitement with the projected book, and realised now that that had been a chance—very likely a last chance—to get out not exactly into the main stream again, but at least into waters where some current flowed. Not this stagnant and decay-smelling mud-hole. Something about the dullness of his last reply—about his whole attitude to my visit—struck me.

  ‘Was I the excuse, Ronnie?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, yes.’

  ‘Oh, God!’

  ‘They took the line that the book wasn’t worth publishing unless it contained important new material on Brierley, and they weren’t prepared to risk that if you were likely to come down on them with a ton of writs.’

  ‘But you needn’t have mentioned me. I thought I’d made that clear.’

  ‘They wouldn’t see it. As a matter of fact there was a complication. Apparently the editor who’d taken me over had had a scrap with you in some previous firm. I gathered you’d given him a mauling. Name of Eric Martleby.’

  I remembered the specimen only too well. Handsome in a lanky, strawy, drawly way, but with the soul of a little blue-chinned thug. What they used to call a whizz-kid, which seemed to mean whizzing from one firm to the next, leaving a trail of mess and breakage.

  ‘Oh, Ronnie, I’m sorry. I suppose he wanted his pound of dirt, and if you couldn’t give him that he wasn’t taking anything.’

  ‘Maybe. You couldn’t have known. But they were looking for an excuse anyway. If it hadn’t been you it would probably have been something else. It’s not all loss. I got a third of the advance, and I can salvage two or three articles about the early days, Graham Greene and that gang. I could probably put together something on Brierley. Might even make a TV piece. Lots of shots of planes flying in and out of airports to pad it out. It’s just that I haven’t felt like starting.’

  And wouldn’t again, ever, if he didn’t do something soon. Suddenly his needs and mine seemed to coincide.

  ‘That’s what I came to ask you about,’ I said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I want to know more about Mr B for reasons of my own. Nothing to do with writing or journalism. When you came to Cheadle you told me you had a lead which you’d never followed up. I would very much like to know what it was. In exchange, provided you promise not to involve me or my family, I’ll tell you enough to get rid of your airport shots and replace them with something worthwhile.’

  ‘Oh, God!’ said Ronnie. The wickerwork squealed as he tried to slump even further. I seem to have spent a lot of my life coaxing or bullying men into doing what they don’t feel like, so I paid no attention.

  ‘I’ll start,’ I said.

  Before I came I had made careful mental inventories of what I was and was not prepared to tell Ronnie. I found it remarkably difficult to keep to them. I had rummaged out my old manuscript a few days ago and had read it through with less distress than I had expected. It had even struck me that I could use it to help Fiona to see what sort of decision I was asking her to make, and that I understood the difficulty of the choice. But that had been about all I did understand. I had read with growing bewilderment, not simply at the events but at my own relationship to them. The words ‘my own’ beg the question. The gulf between myself now and the girl who had experienced the events and then written about them seemed almost unbridgeable. My urge to tell Ronnie more than was sensible may be accounted for as an unconscious attempt to close the gulf, to assert the identity and value of my single life. Perhaps the squalid and imprisoning little room added to the impulse, with its sense of last chances almost lost. Certainly as I was speaking I discovered in myself a longing for the day when I would give Fiona the manuscript to read and then tell her as much as I knew of the rest of the story, uncensored.

  Even with Ronnie I was more expansive than I’d meant to be, so that time was beginning to run short before my luncheon appointment. He listened with little sign of interest to the details of our stay in Barbados, which I’d thought might stimulate him with its potential for television. I said B had been very nervy. I explained in general terms about my mother’s attempt to blackmail him, and how he’d taken it seriously although she didn’t appear to have any special knowledge to threaten him with. I said he’d managed to get hold of a very valuable piece of jewellery, which I’d been under the impression he’d sold in order to pay her off, but just after he’d left on his trip to Rio I found that he’d never sold it after all. I’d assumed he hadn’t paid her off either, but had recently discovered he had. Finally I told Ronnie about the men who had questioned me the Sunday morning when I’d first learnt that B was dead.

  ‘Interesting,’ said Ronnie when I’d finished, in something ghostily like his old voice. ‘A currency swindle of some kind, evidently.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve always thought.’

  ‘There was a lot of that going on. Remember the Dockers?’

  ‘Oh, he wasn’t like that at all. We once had a very stingy weekend in Paris. He hated not having money to spend, but he wouldn’t risk breaking the rules.’

  ‘Very sensible if you’ve got something big on. The Dockers got caught because Lady D was always in the gossip-columns, splashing it out in Monte Carlo. I gather there was a lot of money to be made if you could get round the rules. What he’d have been doing on Barbados would be selling a supposedly run-down estate so that he could show a low figure in his accounts of the transaction. But if he had it in good order it might have fetched a fair sum, with the Commonwealth Sugar Agreement due to operate soon. The sale of the estate would also have provided cover for whatever he was getting out of the transaction over the hotel. All that could have gone through on the side, in dollars. He’d have had a very good chance of getting away with it, provided nobody tipped them the wink at the Treasury.’

  ‘If somebody happened to tell a Director of the Bank of England there was something fishy going on in Barbados, you mean?’

  ‘That would have done. They couldn’t stop the system leaking, they could only make things as risky as possible for the leakers. They operated largely on hunch and hearsay. Those chaps who came and asked you questions at the end sound like Treasury investigators to me. They went in for retired bobbies. Did you tell them about this piece of jewellery?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, no.’

  ‘Very handy, that might be. Small, easy to smuggle, not gone through the trade, and so on. Professional jewellers had to report all transactions over a certain value, so something like that . . . until anyone noticed it was missing, of course.’

  ‘There was a very good replica.’

  ‘Perfect.’

  ‘But he left it behind.’

  ‘Perhaps he wasn’t ready to use it yet. But it raises an interesting point. We’ve been assuming that the deal on Barbados was set up for the general purpose of making a quick buck, but, it sounds to me as though it was for something much more specific than that. He had a deadline to meet, and something extremely nasty was going to happen if he failed.’

  ‘It certainly felt like that.’

  ‘And the Barbados deal couldn’t go ahead if there was a threat of investigation. Then this gewgaw turns up and he can use
that instead, so he can make the Barbados deal legitimate, though I don’t see why, if he does that, he’s got any need to settle with his blackmailer.’

  (Because it would have been cheating me, of course. Curious how you can suddenly be perfectly certain of something as apparently unknowable as that.)

  ‘And as we are aware,’ said Ronnie, ‘a deadline was eventually met, in an unpleasantly literal sense.’

  ‘He was a terrible coward. I mean, he didn’t give a hoot what anyone said or thought, but the slightest scratch and he wanted trained nurses hovering over him with antiseptics. That’s still one of the worst things about it for me, though I tell myself it must have been over in an instant.’

  ‘Oh, I should think so,’ said Ronnie, casually. He had probably never, even at his liveliest, been much interested in questions of pain and blood, but the more theoretical side of what had happened seemed genuinely to have caught his imagination now.

  ‘One more point before I contribute my mite,’ he said. ‘These men who interviewed you in Brierley’s flat, they more or less told you they were expecting to hush the whole thing up?’

  ‘Oh no. All they said was they’d try and keep me out of it.’

  ‘Very altruistic.- Think of it the other way round. If they want to play it down, how enthusiastic do you think they’re going to be about the newspapers learning that a glamorous and titled young lady has been the dead man’s closest friend? I think I mentioned this when we met at Cheadle. Doesn’t it strike you as extremely odd that nobody from that day to this, in spite of intense journalistic speculation at the time and continued interest ever since, has asked you whether you have any light to throw on the matter?’

  ‘I’ve always taken it for granted. I shut that door, you see. It was all over. But I do see it’s a bit odd.’

  ‘More than a bit. Remember the fuss over the Dockers? In the papers for months on end. If there hadn’t from the very first been a decision to hush things up, you’d have been there too. A decision from somewhere quite high up, what’s more. Not because of the Barbados swindle, either. They’d have wanted all the publicity they could get for that, to discourage the others. One’s conclusion is that Brierley had been up to something which if it became generally known would thoroughly embarrass the British Government.’

  ‘But he wasn’t remotely interested in politics.’

  ‘One doesn’t have to be. We are now moving into what you might call my territory. If I may say so, Mabs, you yourself did not at the time give much impression of political awareness.’

  ‘Lord, no. I was totally self-absorbed. I’ve just been reading some stuff I wrote about it soon after. A mass of things must have been going on—Korea, the Cold War, the King dying, Eisenhower getting elected, all that business with Mossadeq in Persia—but you’d hardly know from what I wrote that it had been happening at all.’

  ‘The Cold War is the element that concerns us. You may have since gathered, Mabs, that I was not quite the dilettante Party member I made myself out to be at the time. I was, in fact, quite a hard-line Stalinist and was very well in with King Street. My function was that of an agent provocateur, really. I posed, I am sorry to say, as the kind of civilised chap to whom Party members with doubts might turn for advice, and I could then warn King Street—or in certain cases, Moscow—that they were no longer to be relied on. I tell you this to some extent to show good faith. You have put yourself in my hands and I am offering a reciprocal hostage. I have not so far admitted it to anyone else.’

  ‘You didn’t have to.’

  ‘Well, I’ve done it now. What are you up to?’

  ‘Eating a crumb of pie. Like your champagne. Sealed in blood.’

  ‘Don’t tell Fred or he will smother you with Levi-Strauss. Yes, I was, you might say, the traitor’s traitor. But when Brierley took over at Night and Day I got a message from my control demanding an emergency meeting. He gave me instructions that I was to do all I could to find out the source of Brierley’s funds. I assumed at the time that he believed them to emanate from the CIA, and that the object was to use Night and Day for crypto-propaganda purposes, as with Encounter?’

  ‘Oh yes, that’s what they were doing, but no one had told Stephen Spender.’

  ‘Something like that. You may be amused to know that Dorothy Clarke is convinced that Brierley got his funds from the Kremlin, for the sole purpose of manoeuvring her out of her position and thus undermining the self-confidence of the British ruling caste.’

  ‘Mrs Clarke! It was her who told you about me and Mr B!’

  ‘Not exactly told. She’s stood the years pretty well, but she’s stone deaf now, almost. She misheard something I said and took it that I knew already. What do you think about her suggestion?’

  ‘It must be nonsense, surely.’

  ‘I think so. What about the CIA?’

  ‘I don’t think it was anything like that. I mean he wasn’t getting funds from anywhere. Not a steady flow. He’d made a bit of money somehow and started gambling with it in the City and done well enough to persuade other people to let him gamble with theirs. He told me once that he lived by surfing an ever-breaking wave. I don’t think there was ever money coming in that he could rely on.’

  ‘My view entirely, and I think also my masters’. When I reported Naylor’s appointment as editor as evidence of an incipient pro-Washington line, my control was not remotely interested. Again I think we can assume that my side thought that Brierley had been up to something that might embarrass the British Government.’

  ‘But he hadn’t anything to do with the Government.’

  ‘Not then, perhaps, but in an earlier stage he had been in their employment, like a great many other men of his age. He had been a soldier. He had been on the staff of the British Control Commission in Germany. The morsel I have to contribute is that he was in the department concerned with the confiscation of Nazi-owned property and its return, where possible, to its rightful owners.’

  ‘Was he stationed in Hamburg?’

  ‘Don’t know. Why?’

  ‘That’s where he used to go.’

  Was it, indeed? It would certainly fit in. There would have been excellent opportunities for corrupt officials to acquire property in Hamburg, and also to arrange for the owners to disappear and not come back.’

  ‘Oh, God. He got money from the Jews.’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘Something somebody said about Mr B.’

  Did they now? Can you tell me more?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘You see where this might lead us? The Cold War in full swing, West German democracy just staggering to its feet, to the accompaniment of bellows from the East that the Allies were deliberately reviving the menace of National Socialism in order to attack Mother Russia once more. Suppose it is now made public that a British official had, while still in Government employ, used his position to help Nazis to conceal their ownership of property, to realise their assets and to transmit funds after them. Look at the fuss there’s been about Klaus Barbie, thirty years later. From what I learnt from my control it appears that my side may already have had wind of this as an opportunity to embarrass the British Government, a view with which Whitehall apparently concurred, to judge by their treatment of you after the shooting. It also strikes me as significant that Brierley was killed in South America, admittedly in a country which had a fair record for not harbouring war criminals, but tolerably neutral ground for parties who may not have much trusted each other, one coming up from, say, the Argentine and the other down from Barbados. Does the theory distress you, Mabs?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t had time to get used to it, and I’m not going to this morning. I shall have to be off in ten minutes, Ronnie. I’ll tell you one thing, though. I simply don’t believe in Nazi art-hoards. People didn’t realise what that sort of thing was going to be worth. I know, because we have a phrase in my family about selling the Canalettos. We say it whenever some hideous expense crops up and we’ve
got to find money to meet it, so I know what that sort of thing used to fetch. Mr B sometimes brought little objects back from his trips to Germany, and I think he may have sold quite a few at Sotheby’s and places, but we’re talking about hundreds of pounds, or thousands, not hundreds of thousands.’

  ‘Oh, I quite agree. You’ve got to remember that until the last year or so those people didn’t think they were going to lose the war. They might have got hold of a few bearer bonds, by way of insurance, but a corrupt middle-rank official, say, would be much more concerned to conceal what he was doing from the German authorities. He would cover his tracks by bureaucratic means. His loot would be shops and factories and houses and so on, absolutely valueless in 1946, but beginning to be worth something by the Fifties. Do you know, I think one might be able to construct quite a reasonable documentary out of all this. I wonder whether I have the energy.’

  ‘Of course you have. It would be terribly interesting.’

  ‘It would be particularly interesting, my dear Mabs, if you were to appear on it and tell the world in the discreetest of possible ways some of what you have just told me.’

  ‘Ronnie!’

  ‘Brood on it, my dear. As one who has some experience of public soul-baring, I can tell you that it can be a therapeutic experience. But we have drunk from the same cup and eaten from the same cold pie and I will keep faith. Kipling, in spite of everything, is still the only British writer fit to stand in the same room as Shakespeare. Oh, my dear Mabs, I am glad you came. I did my best to fight you off, you know. I should have known Fred was not much use as a Maginot Line against the Millett blitzkrieg.’